That low level, often suppressed feeling of emptiness is especially intense if one compares oneself with others and their seemingly fulfilled lives. One observes their activity, their exclamation of how great everything is for them. Beyond their words, however true, one starts to compare and one becomes envious and bitter.
Watch for yourself, see what happens.
Perhaps behind their affirmative rhetoric of how great life is for them there is still the nagging emptiness that they are trying to drown out will all manner of mental tricks and tactics. They may no more understand that sense of isolation, of emptiness, than anyone else feels whatever they may say.
Emptiness is not to be confused with negativity or depression.
The envy, bitterness, isolation and the sense that everyone is having a better life than you, is instilled early in all of us and whilst we are telling everyone what a great time we are having we all still have this nagging feeling that gives us a sorrow we are at the moment calling emptiness.
The bitterness that emanates from envy when one compares ones life with others so called more successful lives devours compassion, drains energy and fills ones life with conflict as you try to become more like the people to envy by copying their ways. There is no solution in this action and the conflict within one grows, festers, leaving one with little energy for life as it actually happens, moment to moment.
So far, in summary, most of us feel empty. We look at other peoples lives and they say they are fulfilled and we usually say or lives are great when people ask us. Feeling empty, as if something is missing, we become envious of other peoples seemingly successful lives and from this envy arises bitterness from the sense that we are somehow 'missing out' on the 'good life' that, if others, are able to achieve, why not ourselves despite our outward attempts to make everything look at if it is going well.
So we deny or run from this vague feeling of emptiness. We never stop to look at it, to understand it because we have labeled it as unwanted, bad, to be got rid of somehow. We fill our lives with all manner of activity to kill off the unwanted feeling, the uncomfortable that we do not want to experience. So instead of spending energy to understand with scurry away in the opposite direction always making sure we are too busy to give this feeling of loneliness or emptiness as we have called it here any attention.
If we stopped to look at this feeling of emptiness instead of being in fear of it, what would we find? Is it so terrible that we need to deny and run away from it or is there a quality about emptiness that we have never taken the time to understand? Why have we given the feeling, the word “empty“ with its the fearful label and its negative connotations?
In emptiness, or rather the feeling we have labeled with the word, there is beauty, freedom, silence and peace. This feeling allows action that is not conditioned because the mind does not and cannot work with emptiness. It flows naturally with life; it facilitates awareness because there is no chattering mind to distract it. In emptiness there is nothing to stop truth arriving.
When we are feeling non-empty, when we are being busy, noisy, becoming, achieving, endlessly thinking and all the rest of our current lives are we completely unable to perceive the truth.
Because we have not stopped to observe our unease about this empty feeling we experience, we are still anxious, lonely, neurotic even depressed though we have worked hard at trying to stop the nagging feeling by having such busy lives. Our sorrow and conflict is increased as we try harder to escape the feeling we have labeled as unpleasant.
In emptiness there is no bitterness because there is no envy. Where there is no comparison there cannot be any envy and there is no comparison in emptiness. Only in denial, the running away from emptiness is there the angst of feeling hollow and let down by a meaningless life.
Emptiness is life and in that truth can freely flow because there is no motive, no effort. Action is pure and is love.
