WORLDSHAMAN.ORG
Ellen Winner
TAKE #4 - NOTHINGNESS, PURE AWARENESS
Many of the world’s creation myths involve creation ex nihilo (out of nothing), in which a supreme deity existing alone in a pre-creation void creates the world on his own. Such tales are found in all parts of the world including ancient Egypt, India and present-day animistic cultures of Africa, Asia, Oceania and North America. Greek mythology tells us the world began from “khainein,” a word that meant “wide open mouth yawning and revealing an endless, bottomless and empty space of darkness.”
Australian Aborigines call this state of deep inner listening and quiet, still awareness “dadirri.” They have a number of traditional ways to cultivate it. “Dadirri recognizes the deep spring that is inside us,” explains Aboriginal teacher and writer Miriam Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann. “We call on it and it calls to us … When I experience dadirri, I am made whole again.” It’s a state cultivated by hunters out in the bush waiting for game, a way to connect with nature by appreciating and watching the sky and the rivers and fields. Importantly, it’s also a way of appreciating and relating to each other. The essence of dadirri is being still and feeling how things naturally want to go — instead of labeling, judging, or trying to control them.
The Nothingness manifests in us as a state of passive, alert receptiveness. When I teach my students the shamanic journey, I explain that we need to use our active imagination to take us to the nonordinary realms where we meet spirits, but once we encounter a spirit and initiate an interaction by asking it for information or help, it’s time to stop the active imagining and become receptive, take a step back and watch carefully to see what the spirit says or does — just as when we have a conversation with another person, after we ask a question we usually stop talking and wait for the answer. We don’t wrack our brains trying to imagine what the answer is going to be.
The space and the stuff that make up the Universe only exist relative to each other. They define each other because you can’t have one without the other. To the extent space is present, stuff is absent and vice versa. If there’s more stuff, there’s less space. If there’s more space there’s less stuff. But Nothingness is different. It’s not relative to anything else. That’s why it’s often called “Absolute Nothingness.” It is the eternal and unchanging background of All-That-Is, untouched by anything that happens in the material world.
In our quest for Enlightenment, we seek ways to merge with the Consciousness of All-That-Is, the Awareness of the entire Universe. If we are unable to merge with this Awareness of the Universe, spiritual teacher Nisargadatta (1897-1981) says it’s because we still identify only with our bodies. Once we’re able to give up thinking that we are our bodies, he teaches, we will automatically become one with the Awareness of All-That-Is.
In his excellent book, A Brief History of Everything, contemporary philosopher Ken Wilbur describes a way this can happen: You bring your awareness into the “now” and rest in that state as an expansive witnessing awareness, and then look at a physical object, such as a mountain, he explains. Then you may begin to notice that the sensation of being the “witness” of the mountain and the sensation of the mountain are the same sensation. He calls this “One Taste.” Instead of the separate being of the mountain outside triggering your brain to perceive an image of the mountain inside your being, as our analytical brains would have it, there’s really only one sensation, one taste, to the experience. This is how we drop our identification with our body-mind — by noticing that what we’re actually experiencing is not two separate things, but rather only a single sensation. Our body-mind that perceives is inseparable from what we perceive. There is only one Awareness, and the mountain shares it with me.
I am this Awareness. Everything I perceive participates in this awareness. We are all aware subjects. Which means we all participate in the same awareness. We only fantasize that other things and people are without awareness.
There are many skillful means we can use to experience Nothingness. One is the Hindu practice of neti-neti (not this, not that).
THE NETI-NETI (I AM NOT THAT) PRACTICE
Enlightened Master Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950) recommended as the way to realize Enlightenment a practice of constantly asking ourselves, “Who am I?” realizing that we are not any thing or concept we can think of. We are much more than that. Any answer we come up feels wrong and incomplete. Ultimately there’s nothing left to say about ourselves except that we are aware of existing. We become aware that whatever we are, we exist. Since we know we didn’t create ourselves or the material world around us, we know the awareness we’re experiencing must be more than the personal Awareness confined to our body. We know that others who are asking “Who am I?” are coming to the same conclusion, that there’s a “we” and that we all participate in it. We are Awareness itself.
Another way to answer Ramana’s question, “Who am I?” is called “neti-neti” in Hindi, which translates as “not this, not that.” For example, we can assert, “I am not my body,” “I am not the bird on the wing,” “I am not my mind,” “I am not my thoughts,” etc. When we clear our sense of identity of all these “things” what do we have left? Nothing.
To practice neti-neti, you’ll need to use your imagination to try to get a sense of what it would feel like if you were really Nothingness. Sit with another person and take turns naming all the things you may fully or partially identify with, and assert that you are not those things, for example: “I am not my body,” “I am not my thoughts,” “I am not my country,” “I am not my possessions,” “I am not my money,” “I am not my children,” “I am not the wind,” “I am not the boss of everyone,” “I am not a star,” etc. As things occur to you, assert that you are not those things and try to feel the truth of it.
PRACTICE TO IDENTIFY WITH NOTHINGNESS
Another way to get a taste of what it feels like to be Nothingness is to imagine being the space between and behind things in the material universe, to imagine being the background of everything, out of which everything arises, and which accepts and allows it to be as it is.
Then you can ask, “What are these energy waves waving in? What’s the background of it all, and sink into the emptiness.
GUIDED MEDITATION FOR NOTHINGNESS EXPERIENCE
Take some deep breaths, feeling the breath going into you heart area to activate it. . . .
Take some deep breaths, imagining the breath going into the area of pain or tension or heart area.
It’s your imagination. You can bring in anything you want in order to meet your goal of experiencing the empty spaces inside your body. An easy way to imagine shrinking down is to imagine your surroundings getting bigger. Once you’re inside, surrounded on all sides by the substance of your body, keep shrinking down until you’re the size of a single cell.
Go inside the cell and become aware of the various structures inside.
Keep shrinking until you’re the size of a molecule floating inside the cell.
What’s it like? How do you feel? If you like, take a minute or two to write down what happened.
Kinslow, Frank, When Nothing Works Try Doing Nothing, Lucid Ocean, 2010.
Watts, Alan, God (His The essence of Alan Watts, book 1), Celestial Arts, 1974.
Wilber, Ken, A Brief History of Everything,” Shambala Publications, Inc., 1996.
Harvard University, “The Inner Life of a Cell”
Click here to view animation
Copyright © 2004-2023, Ellen Winner, Healing in Consciousness
All Rights Reserved