Fear of Emptiness

Emptiness = Voidness = Nothingness = Shunyata

Fear of Emptiness = horror vacui

Quotes of gurus relating to the fear of emptiness:

Osho:

Meditation for the fear of emptiness. Make it a point every night before you go to sleep to close your eyes and for twenty minutes go into your emptiness. Accept it, let it be there. Fear arises – let that be there too. Tremble with fear but don’t reject this space that is being born there. Within two to three weeks you will be able to feel its beauty, you will be able to feel its benediction. Once you have touched that benediction, fear will disappear on its own accord. You are not to fight with it.

Swami Chaitanya Niyam:

The fear of emptiness. This is humanity's most dark, and most dangerous, secret. Buried into everybody's collective subconscious, it is this fear that goads civilisations to run, to achieve, to desire, to declare war, in fact, to do
anything but sit still and watch the clouds float in the sky.

Mooji:

This emptiness is not a trivial thing. It's the most supreme state. But in the consciousness there is this itching, and I use this term: the athlete's foot mind. In the mind the thought is coming, there is this itching, and it feels it needs a scratch, you know. Like a question arising, something more to be solved, or resolved. But I say: only stay as this, and that itchiness will subside. When this itchiness is there, there is the temptation to start to scratch it, but it just makes it more bloody and awful. So just take note of that for the moment. But stay as you are. Because you cannot improve this emptiness. So many of the beings are longing to be this emptiness, to return to this emptiness, you see, consciously. When you go to sleep, you leave all your cares and your concerns about yourself and your life. And you love to be without these concerns. How much money we spend on the bed, on the bedroom, to get the best sleep so you can forget everything ! And when the waking arises there is refreshment in the being, you see, because it puts away all these concerns. This emptiness that you speak of now seemed eclipsed by your concerns and where you put your attention, and while you're attending to your concerns and activities and affairs of life, then you're being disturbed actually. So a little bit of meditation or self-enquiry returns you to this affirmation in yourself, this recognition: all there is is just a sort of emptiness, beyond the concept of empty even.

Riktam Kantu:

Merely all your doings, being and identities are driven by your mind's addiction to content or more precisely, your mind's terrible fear of emptiness which is the direct cause of this addiction.

For the mind, emptiness means non existence. The mind does not exist as a separate independent entity of its own. It is just the collection of mental activities, of thoughts and emotions. And if there is emptiness of them, i.e. they are not, the mind also is not.

Krishnamurti:

Now, if you consider, you will see that one of the reasons for the desire to accept a belief, is fear. Because, if we had no belief, what would happen to us? Wouldn't we be very frightened of what might happen? If we had no pattern of action, based on a belief - either in God, or in Communism, or in Socialism, or in Imperialism, or in some kind of religious formula, some dogma in which we are conditioned - we would feel utterly lost, wouldn't we? And is not this acceptance of a belief, the covering up of that fear - the fear of being really nothing, of being empty? After all, a cup is useful only when it is empty; and a mind that is filled with beliefs, with dogmas, with assertions, with quotations, is really an uncreative mind, it is merely a repetitive mind. And, to escape from that fear - that fear of emptiness, that fear of loneliness, that fear of stagnation, of not arriving, not succeeding, not achieving, not being something, not becoming something - is surely one of the reasons, is it not?

Krishnamurti:

An addiction to knowledge (1) is like any other addiction; it offers an escape from the fear of emptiness, of loneliness, of frustration, the fear of being nothing. The light of knowledge is a delicate covering under which lies a darkness that the mind cannot penetrate. The mind is frightened of this unknown, and so it escapes into knowledge, into theories, hopes, imagination; and this very knowledge is a hindrance to the understanding of the unknown.

Vimala Thakar:

Nothingness, nobodyness, emptiness—even the intellectual understanding of this frightens women. It frightens women! At the depth of our being there is fear because of our physical vulnerability, because of our secondary role in human civilization. It is in the subconscious, not in the consciousness. On a subconscious level there is fear. If I get converted into or if I mature into nonduality, into nothingness, into nobodyness, what will happen to my physical existence? Will it be more vulnerable? Will I be able to defend myself in case of difficulty, in case of some attack against me? That is a basic fear among women.

So women very rarely take to meditation. They take to devotion, to bhakti yoga. They can take to service, seva yoga or karma yoga. But not meditation, dhyana, samadhi. Consciously, intellectually they understand everything, because regarding the brilliance of the brain there is no distinction such as male and female. But psychologically, at the core of their being is this fear. And that fear has to be dispelled. Woman has to understand that nobodyness or nothingness, the emptiness of consciousness in samadhi or meditation, generates a different kind of energy and awareness which is more protective than self-conscious defensiveness. When woman appreciates that, when she understands that, then this fear will be dispelled. Otherwise it is very natural for a woman to feel frightened even by the idea of nothingness.

Mary Grigolia:

The spiritual challenge is to step out of our cultural assumption that preconditions us to run away from emptiness at any cost. Emptiness is neither inherently bad or inherently redemptive. It is a way of checking in with yourself. It’s like a tuning device. When I am living in tune with myself, to rest in the great emptiness in meditation is a pleasant experience. When I’m not in tune with myself, it’s uncomfortable to be present to the lack of fit between how I’ve constructed my life, what I’m doing and what life calls me to do or be.

It’s not easy to step out of our cultural assumptions that emptiness is bad and must be medicated or filled with more and more stuff. Although we experience the emptiness individually, this way of thinking, responding, and consuming is part of a global sickness tied in with the extraordinary growth of international capitalism. As capitalism expands, it destabilizes traditional religious and philosophical systems that guide individuals through emptiness to meaning and action. The battle we fight now with emptiness and lack of meaning affects the whole world family.

Rahasya:

Meditation and working out of emptiness -
Meditation has often been misunderstood in the West and confused with contemplation or observation. In his training Rahasya introduces different meditation techniques and guided meditations that help the participant to come in touch with their "Inner emptiness". In the West this may be a not very desirable state, and the fear of meditation may very well be the fear of this inner emptiness. Nevertheless as we get a little more familiar with this space, it can give rise to beautiful spontaneous and original responses to the moment during a session and saves the client from the preconceived ideas of the Counsellors own psyche. The capacity of the counsellor to wait and to rest in himself/herself, even if there is a gap of emptiness, can bring session to a much deeper level.

Geshe Rabten:

For someone who has preceded his meditation on voidness with much study and training and has thus developed a strong predisposition towards this view, the actual realization that the self is devoid of inherent existence will come as a very joyful experience, like a poor man’s discovery of a lot of money. But for those of us who have not acquired such a disposition through previous inquiry, the realization that the I is merely imputed can be a very frightening experience. When we talk of “fear of voidness,” it is precisely this experience we are referring to.