You Need a Hole in Your Head
Mine’s in the back. Yours may show up elsewhere. Everyone is different.
We can conceive of ultimate consciousness by using the metaphor of being in a room, knowing that the entire universe lies outside of the room. The only way to perceive the universe is through a window in a wall of the room.
Consciousness is the window. It is essential to all perception and knowledge.
This metaphor suggests an entity, you, in the room looking out through the window. But the Buddha tells us that our sense of ourselves is a profound misrecognition. There’s no there there.
Using my personal theory that, after the Buddha died, his body decayed as bodies will do, and that his consciousness, or whatever else you want to call it, the characteristic that made him who he was, apart from his body, dissipated entirely into space, we can infer that we are really just space.
Buddhists use the term, “emptiness,” in two ways. It can mean the absence of a persistent selfhood in all conditioned phenomena, meaning us and everything else. Nothing has an essence that defines it and gives it an enduring identity.
Emptiness is also a characteristic of ultimate conciousness, insofar as we can posit any characteristicd of what defies description.
