FRANKLYN SILLS ARTICLES

Emptiness

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Although the Dynamic Stillness is implicit in all form, it is in turn, an explicate expression of an even deeper mystery. In many Eastern spiritual traditions, such as Buddhism and Taoism, this mystery is called Emptiness, and is understood to be the unfathomable ground of life.

Buddhism stresses that all forms are inherently empty and that emptiness is the essential truth of existence. This emptiness is not a vacuum, but is the essence of all form. In the Christian tradition, this understanding was beautifully expressed in The Cloud of Unknowing, a medieval spiritual text. Its writer maintains that one can only know God through unknowing all things in love. In this unknowing, the profound Emptiness that is God is known in darkness, a state of total balance within which all created things subside.

In medieval times, Meister Eckhart, a Dominican friar, beautifully described the godhead as the Unknowable Emptiness. This understanding is not based on beliefs or religious forms, but on direct contemplative and meditative experience. (Fox 1983) One of the best descriptions of the ground of emptiness, comes from another early Chan Master, Hung Zhi,

The field of boundless emptiness is what exists from the very beginning …Vast and far reaching without boundary, secluded and pure, manifesting light, this spirit (essence) is without obstruction. Its brightness does not shine out but can be called empty and inherently radiant. Its brightness, inherently purifying, transcends casual conditions beyond subject and object. Subtly but preserved, illuminated and vast, also it cannot be spoken of as being or non-being…
(Leighton, D and Yi Wu, 2000 p. 4, Cultivating the Empty Field: The Silent Illumination of Zen Master Hongzhi, Tuttle Library of Enlightenment.)

Here we see that emptiness lies at the foundation of our conditioned reality and is not separate from everyday experience. In craniosacral biodynamics this truth is echoed in the belief that health is also “neither produced nor destroyed” and cannot be increased or decreased. Health is never lost and is ever present and available. It is a constant.

This understanding of health runs against our cultural and medical conditioning, yet is so important to us all. Health is ever present, is never diseased and does not die. The Tide of life is greater than the concept of “myself” and the passing of the body is not to be feared. As Laozi says in the Dao De Jing, “Dao endures, your body dies, there is no danger.”