Where to start with emptiness? What is the middle of emptiness? The Buddhist concept of sunyata refers to the lack of a self or identity at the core of experience. In contemporary life, I often hear people talking about authenticity as a reflection of the true self. In these contexts, the true self might be contrasted with inauthentic, oppressive, or conformist ways of being. I can only speak for myself and say that while there are certainly contexts in which I have felt the need to go against the grain, such as in my religious upbringing, it was more because I felt the wrongness or injustice of the social world than because I felt like I knew exactly who I was.

Mark Epstein’s Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart starts with an anecdote that when he was troubled by a sense of inner emptiness or insufficiency, he polled all the members of his class and found that all but one of them experienced a similar feeling. (The exception was the captain of the football team.) There is something cute about the attempt to try and validate the notion that one’s existential uneasiness is universal, or at least universal in one’s own corner of the world.

Each of us only knows our own experience and yet sometimes we have an intuition that some aspect of our subjectivity goes beyond ourselves – can we speak for everyone? How do I know which elements of my psychological world are individual and which elements are common to all (or at least most) people?

One way to explain sunyata is to emphasize that our minds are not metaphysically autonomous units, they are composed of parts and interrelations. I like this explanation. I know myself to have multitudes, to contain many parts, to lack unity. This does not quite seem the same as emptiness but it does speak to the feeling that the self is not necessarily a coherent entity.

When I went to see Ruth Ozeki talk at Seattle Arts and Lectures, she spoke to some of these themes. I wish I could remember more of what she said, but we can see the concepts playing out to some extent in The Book of Form and Emptiness , where Benny Oh struggles with hearing voices coming from objects around him.

Today, it is Tuesday. I am full of small concerns with work and writing and housekeeping and parenting and planning. But of course, the emptiness is always there.