It was emptiness, aridity, hopelessness, the antithesis of creation, imagination.
And now, it's pain, it's emptiness and it's actually searching now – at a certain point you even search yourself, who I am now after this experience.
SP28: It's emptiness, it's a black hole that pulls me in.
(However it should not be understood as substantial in the western philosophical sense because it is "empty" — more on "emptiness" below).
But all around it now there is emptiness.
As the often chanted lines of the Heart Sutra put it: "[phenomenal] form is emptiness; emptiness is also [phenomenal] form; emptiness is no other than form; form is no other than emptiness" (see Bercholz/Kohn 1993, 155).
On the other hand, then, emptiness is truly emptiness "only when it empties itself even of the standpoint that represents it as some 'thing' that is emptiness.
In his 1699 "Crouching Cat," for example, the animal's tensed back resembles the curve of the rock above it (in between, of course, is emptiness).
