Emptiness Is Beautiful – In Gita Verse 18.51-53 Being purified by his intelligence and controlling the mind with determination, giving up the objects of sense gratification, being freed from attachment and hatred, one who lives in a secluded place, who eats little, who controls his body, mind and power of speech, who is always in trance and who is detached, free from false ego, false strength, false pride, lust, anger, and acceptance of material things, free from false proprietorship, and peaceful – such a person is certainly elevated to the position of self-realisation.
Krishna is describing the person who lives in his emptiness. What he means by living in a secluded place is your emptiness. He is not telling you to renounce the home. He says that who lives in his emptiness.
For centuries emptiness has been condemned.
Emptiness is beautiful.
And the foolish people have been telling you. “The empty mind is the devil’s workshop.” The empty mind is God’s workshop! The occupied mind is the devil’s workshop.
But one has to be truly empty. Just being lazy does not mean that you are empty; not doing anything does not mean that you are empty. Thousands of thoughts are clamouring inside. You may be lazy on the outside, but inside much work is going on. Many walls are being created, new prisons are being prepared, so that when you get fed up with the old you can enter into the new. Old chains may break any time so you are creating new chains in case the old chains break; then you will feel very empty.
Once in a while it happens naturally – because it is your very nature to be free. So once in a while, in spite of you… seeing a sunset, suddenly you forget all your desires. You forget all lust, all hankering for pleasure. The sunset is so beautiful, so overwhelming, that you forget the past and the future; only the present remains. You are so one with the moment, there is no observer and no observed. The observer becomes the observed. You are not separate from the sunset.
You are bridged; in such a communion you come into a clearing, and because of the clearing you feel joyous. But again you are back into the black hole for the simple reason that coming out into the clearing you need courage to remain in the empty sky.
That’s what Krishna calls sannyas.
This courage Krishna calls sannyas – not escaping but coming into the clearing, seeing the sky unclouded, listening to the songs of the birds without distorting. And then again and again you are becoming more and more attuned with the emptiness and the joy of being empty. Slowly slowly, you see that emptiness is not just emptiness; it is fullness, but a fullness of which you have never been aware, a fullness of which you have never tasted.
So in the beginning it looks empty; in the end it is full, totally full, over flowingly full. It is full of peace, it is full of silence, it is full of light.
Once you know it, you move as a nonbeing. Nobody can make you angry, nobody can make you happy, unhappy, miserable. No! In that emptiness all dualities dissolve: happy, unhappy, miserable, blissful – all dissolve. This is buddhahood. This is what happened under the bodhi tree to Gautam Siddhartha. He reached emptiness. Then everything is silent. You have gone beyond opposites. A master is to help you to go to your inner emptiness, the inner silence, the inner temple.
Krishna says there are only two types of people in the world: those who try to stuff their inner emptiness, and those very rare precious beings who try to see the inner emptiness. Those who try to stuff it remain empty, frustrated. They go on collecting garbage, their whole life is futile and fruitless. Only the other kind, the very precious people who try to look into their inner emptiness without any desire to stuff it, become meditators. Meditation is looking into your emptiness, welcoming it, enjoying it, being one with it, with no desire to fill it – there is no need, because it is already full. It looks empty because you don’t have the right way of seeing it. You see it through the mind; that is the wrong way. If you put the mind aside and look into your emptiness, it has tremendous beauty, it is divine, it is overflowing with joy. Nothing else is needed.
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