by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, September 2025
Published in German by AdvaitaJournal and the Oneness Center
Auf Deutsch: Unermessliche Leere
Half a century ago I was awakened by a Zen koan, “The wild geese do not intend to cast any reflection, the water has no mind to retain their image.” I practiced empty mind meditation and found myself inwardly present in a dynamic emptiness radically different to the world of my boarding school. Fifty years later this emptiness is again present, though now it is no longer experienced only inwardly, in meditation, but also infuses my waking consciousness. I am living in a vast emptiness, which surrounds me. In this space there is no longer any awakening, because there is no one present to awaken.
Spiritual life is an uncovering of what was always present. In Buddhism it is called one’s original nature. In Sufism it is a state of union with the Divine, with the love that is the Source of all that exists. In this primal state there is pure awareness (original mind) or pure love, when lover and Beloved are one. When I was nineteen, I met my teacher, a white-haired Russian woman who had just come back from India where she had been trained by a Sufi master. Looking into her eyes I knew that she knew; that Truth was present. For many years I strived towards Truth, the light in my teacher’s eyes. But when Truth arrived the room was empty. No one was present. There was no realization, no awakening. It is as it was.
For more than fifty years I have been sitting in silence. Now my knees hurt from sitting. Sometimes love is present, sometimes bliss, most often emptiness. Everything comes and goes, the seasons change—Spring comes, buds breaking open, and later Autumn, leaves falling. I watch the tide rise and fall in the bay outside my window. In the vastness beyond the mind and its thoughts everything is both present and absent. There is no journey, no realization, just a deepening immersion in That which cannot be named.
I used to speak of a spiritual journey, of states and stages along the path. But here there is no journey, even the dharma is lost in the vast emptiness. Is this my original self, the same emptiness I experienced when I first sat in silence, turning inward and emptying the mind? Is this what always was, my unborn and undying self?
A bird alights on a branch outside my window. I can hear the noise of traffic passing at the bottom of the hill. Is the real nature of existence the vast emptiness, rather than these ten-thousand things appearing moment by moment?1
Between my first schoolboy experience of Zen emptiness and the vast emptiness that now surrounds me I have had many life experiences. I fell in love, raised a family, laughter and tears. For thirty years I was a Sufi teacher, guiding wayfarers along the ancient path of the mystic, deep within the chambers of the heart, into love and oneness. Sitting together, hearing the stories of people’s lives, their dreams, problems, and aspirations, watching over their hearts and souls. Aligning them with the deeper love that comes from the beyond.
And then there came the time to close that chapter of my life and retire into seclusion. To walk the trails and beaches near to my home, nourished by the simplicity and beauty of the world around, walking in the early morning, Winter’s frost turning the grass silver, dawn a golden red line on the horizon. No need for thoughts, because this landscape is complete in itself. The egrets brilliant white in the wetlands, the otters swimming in the lagoon, noses breaking the surface of the water. Here is a return to what is simple and natural, so different to our broken, toxic world.
But then the emptiness again came calling, speaking a language for which there are no words. Here there is neither time nor timelessness, nor even the present moment. There is no moment-by-moment awakening. It is too empty, too primal, too vast. Is this an origin or a destination? I do not call it the void, because it is all around, not just found in meditation. It is a placeless place, a stateless state that is neither life nor death. It is not just the mind that is empty, but the whole vast horizonless landscape.
Just before he died, my Indian guru’s final words to my teacher were, “There is nothing but nothingness.” After a lifetime’s journey this is where I find myself. Here there is neither self nor journey, and the emptiness is too vast for any image of a spiritual path or the drama of awakening. When I was sixteen those initial months of awakening to emptiness were so intense and wonderful. I was alive in ways I had never expected, not believed possible. Coming out of meditation there was a light in the air I had never seen, the colors sang. I was full of laughter and joy. It was like falling in love but far more complete. But this feels different, more total, in many ways more impersonal.
We each have our own destiny, what is written in the book of life. It takes us into the many textures of existence—its senses, wildness and beauty, love and heartache. And if spiritual life is part of this destiny, there comes the time when we pick up this thread, when we begin to walk a path. Spiritual life usually flows across lifetimes. When I first awoke to spiritual life when I was sixteen, I felt I was back in a monastery, practicing Zen meditation. And since I was seven, I had been in a boarding school only too similar to a Zen monastery, governed by the ringing of bells. Last lifetime I was a Zen monk, this life a Sufi teacher. Both times the central practice was silent meditation, stilling the mind, going beyond its chatter into deeper dimensions of our being, into silent emptiness.
Our first glimpse, our first deep experience, often prefigures the journey, “the end is present at the beginning.” Now, in the final years of this life, the emptiness is my companion, even as its silence washes away so much of my existence, leaving just a deep unknowing that is so often the reality of the mystic.
I can still glimpse the beauty of the outer world, fragile, numinous, or feel its sorrows. The Sufi path of love has opened my heart in the most unexpected ways. But now even most of my life-experiences have faded away, been lost in the silence. This is not a silence that is opposite to sound, just as the emptiness is not opposite to form. It is a landscape steeped in what is Other, what has no name and can only be hinted at, not described. But it reaches across lifetimes, ancient memories of sitting in monastery halls, the rain on the roof, the courtyard swept clear. Bells sound across the hills, sometimes a hermit in a hut beside a stream, still sitting, knowing only silence. Lifetimes like this. Was anything found or uncovered? Birth, death, and the ten-thousand things are lost in the vast emptiness.
- The Buddhist Heart Sutra says “Form is emptiness and emptiness is form.” However, the vast emptiness I am referring to here is more similar to the Ch’an Buddhist “Absence,” described as our “original nature … that generative emptiness at the heart of the Cosmos,” from which “the ever-changing realm of Presence [the ten thousand things] perpetually arises.” (David Hinton, China Root, p. 55, and The Way of Ch’an, p. 323).