As we continue the world detox we begun yesterday, emptiness still awaits as a place of infinite potential and it seems that some of it will forever have to stay in a realm that cannot be expressed by words.

Words are a tool of the cognitive. You need the notions they express to be able to form thoughts and speak of the past, present and future, to learn, think and analyze. But emptiness is nameless. Even the word we use for it doesn’t describe it but serves only as a pointer (to not even a feeling but a state of mindfully observing things from a higher intelligence that trumps getting caught up in the mundane explanations offered by the brain to justify poorly controlled emotional landscape). In the endless empty things have no name, they are neither good nor bad, they exist but have no form, there is no owning of anything, no possession, no judgement and needs and wants are mostly tied to the senses and the body’s biochemistry or the identities and mental patterns we’re so used to that we call them “I”.

Yet when you practice release you can get a glimpse of the non-verbal, non-cognitive endless opened plain. This place is restful, it demands nothing of you, no explanations or justifications, no structures, forms or pattern matching, no planning forward or regretting or reveling in the past. Most of the times you were restless, worried, anxious, afraid… it came from the cognitive apparatus trying to justify something, trying to pin a tail on the donkey of what you’re seeing, but just as a rule of the game goes – you’re spun around and blindfolded – and only vaguely aware of the location of the donkey’s bottom. You’ll pin the tail wrong, which will result in a need for more cognitive self-explanatory machinery and post-action rationalization and so it goes on until you deplete the energy.

Did you know you need to dream to feel rested? Not only sleep but actually go into REM and dream, into a state where consciousness has no more words but works in symbolic representations to process and peel off the layers of rational cognitive edifices you’ve built around all that surrounds you. Without dreams you’d literally go mad. The dream state doesn’t care for the polite trinkets you polished over a bad situation, it will tear it down and expose just what is. You’re standing naked on a stage and feeling vulnerable and exposed? – Well good, maybe you’ve been acting strong and impenetrable to long. You’re falling down and there is no ground in site? – well good, maybe it was time to take a risk and see where you land instead of playing it safe and telling yourself this is what you wanted. For the untrained the dream state is the closest they’ll get to the pure consciousness and truth. The brain is by no means inactive at that point, but has shut down all of the parts that effectively allow you to lie to yourself. A form of this can be retained even in your waking hours, and it will at first feel like a giant void that might frighten you because you’re so used to mind chattering away. There is rest for the restless, and it is not fearing the emptiness, but leaning into it.