A Visit to the Void
Though only written a year ago, if I were writing Dissolving Kleshas in the Void right now, I’d flip the kleshas associated with parakasha and mahakasha. Not that it makes a huge difference, but it points to something important:
Being a helix path, our Yoga will bring us around to the same scenery again and again, but each time with a slightly “higher” vantage point which lets us see a bit further out than we could before. I’ve heard it also put that meditation is like drilling a well for water. If you keep moving your auger to a new spot after only drilling a foot down, you’ll never hit the underground spring. You need to drill deeply in one spot to reach your goal.
With that in mind, let’s revisit the five-in-one Void.
Last time, I wrote in terms of the five pain-bearing obstructions, or Kleshas, and their dissolution by contemplation of the five voids discussed in the classic literature of Yoga. When we discuss the Kleshas, we are essentially discussing the root-conditions of individual consciousness, those deep habits which cast fearsome shadows in the light of Awareness. By “dissolving” them, we gradually stop reifying them, undermining them in the most literal sense of removing the ground from beneath them. The five voids are ultimately one Void, and this Void is nothing other than the unconditioned Awareness which we experience in our deepest meditation and our highest moments of clarity. We contemplate them as five in order to give ourselves a ladder to climb, not because there’s any real separation. The voids thus also map onto different exercises and experiences of our Yoga.
In Mahayana Buddhist Yoga, much emphasis is placed on the emptiness of appearances, and this corresponds to the illusory nature of phenomena in Shankara’s Mayavada. When we see into this emptiness, we experience the void of akasha, the transparent darkness of Maya. It is useful to have this insight — and to have reminders of it — but we can easily get stuck here. When that happens, we ourselves may feel empty, life devoid of meaning or purpose, and the lives of others devalued. The detachment we gain is of immeasurable value, but if we stop at the recognition of empty appearances, we lose the color and light of beatitude and spontaneity. In Chan, this is “falling into the dead void”. If we stop here during meditation, we lose ourselves in trance and halt our progress. The whole of Yoga is to be found in remaining steadfastly awake.
When we see again the beauty of the illusion, or experience the “emptiness of emptiness”, we come to realize that “illusion” is just a way of saying “ever-changing”. It isn’t that the world of appearances is non-existent, but that it is not self-existent; it is eternally subject to change, to dissolution. This is the experience of parakasha, the fiery void of time. Emptiness which eternally gives rise to shifting and changing phenomena is the pregnant belly of Shakti.
Through open meditation, we eventually come to experience the base of appearances which is none other than the mind. Whether or not the world exists independently of us, its existence or nonexistence doesn’t matter if it goes unobserved, and only a mind can observe. When the mind faces outward, it populates the world by observation; when the mind faces inward, it rests in its own soft luminosity. Seeing the activity of mind in the flux of appearances, and vice versa, we call this mahakasha.
The “I-sense”, or ego, may also turn inward or outward. When the mind rests in its own luminosity, that luminosity will be found to intensify as it is explored. When the ego is outward-facing, it is identified with the infinitely mutating appearances in the mind. When turned in, the mind observed in its purity, the ego becomes “pure I-sense”. The ego thus resting is sometimes called “awakeness” (buddhi) or “the Great” (Mahat). This awakened openness is the void suryakasha.
With suryakasha, we have already gone beyond the capacity of language to precisely describe an experience. Tattvakasha is most simply described with a direct translation: the Space of Reality. The four preceding voids are only more or less obscured experiences of this final one which is nothing but the open, unobstructed Reality. If we can say anything meaningful about it at all, we can say that it is simply Self-Aware.
In Siddha Siddhanta Paddhati, Sri Siddha Gorakhnath instructs the yogi to know the voids both within and without the body. Apart from active contemplation of the voids in Zonule work, the experiences they embody may be carried out into daily life. The yogi may rest their mind in the void, experiencing it directly as the inner nature of the body, mind, and outer world; so doing, we may undergo the awareness of emptiness, then of ever-shifting energy, and so on through the subtle gradients of Void, and do so as we go about our activities.
The International Nath Order teaches that, “The Nath initiation is conducted inside a formal ceremony in which some portion of the awareness and spiritual energy (Shakti) of the Initiator is transmitted to the Neophyte.” This form of initiation, called shaktipat, grants the new initiate a glimpse into the experience of the Guru — the experience of the living Cosmos inseparable from the Pure Light of Awareness, temporarily overwhelming the karmas and konditioning which keep us from seeing things as they are. Shaktipat initiation from a competent teacher within an authentic lineage is a leap into the Void. But it takes our continued exploration to find for good our home there.
