Emptiness as jargon or doctrine is not appealing to me. Yet behind jargon and doctrine there's some very tasty fruit.
The experience of emptiness in mindful practice is very close to the experience of spaciousness. As we become more and more aware of the way our habits of thought and feeling seep (or flood) into the present moment and color our experience, as we notice how in one way and another all our life we’ve been ticking off categories--been there, seen this, done that--as we start paying more careful attention, we discover we haven’t summed things up accurately or completely at all. Integrity may well pick up the pencil again, turn it around, and erase those check marks. The boxes we once ticked are now empty. There’s room to reconsider. When the old patterns and their certainties are not ‘here’ something else can be. -MH
