It is a common and apparently quite natural habit with us to regard the material given through the senses as being something actual….So the larger portion of the human search for Reality is in the field of the things given to consciousness through the senses. But in my reflecting upon the idea that this universe of things is derived from and dependent upon a primordial plenum, it suddenly struck me that in the midst of the bare and original fullness there could be nothing to arouse discrete or concrete consciousness …

Now, applying this principle in an ontological sense, it follows that the Consciousness of the original Fullness can only be aroused by first passing through the experience of ’emptiness’ or ‘absence’ in some degree. Thus, the active, concrete, and perceptual consciousness is to be viewed as an arousal of specific awareness through a partial blanking out of the full and perfectly balanced consciousness of the Primordial State. As a result, the world of things apparently given through the senses is actually a domain of relative emptiness.

Franklin Merrell-Wolff, The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object, pp. 33-34

Merrell-Wolff has offered a cogent and incisive analysis of the philosophic thinking behind the usual concept of emptiness, or alternatively, space. But what this analysis fails to address is the experience of emptiness in spiritual pursuit – a first-person view versus a third-person, detached analysis. Many accounts of awakening are notable for the experiencer’s sense of being emptied out in advance of major spiritual movements. Buddhism even has a word for this spiritual experience – sunyata.

Śūnyatā (Sanskrit: शून्यता, romanized: śūnyatā; Pali: suññatā; English: /ʃuːnˈjɑː.tɑː/shoon-YAH-tah), translated most often as emptiness,^[1]vacuity, and sometimes voidness,^[2] is an Indian philosophical and mathematical construct. Within Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism and other philosophical strands, the concept has multiple meanings depending on its doctrinal context. It is either an ontological feature of reality, a meditative state, or a phenomenological analysis of experience.

Wikipedia – Sunyata

I’ve found meditation on emptiness, particularly inner emptiness, and identification with it to be a very potent catalyst in spiritual movement. As long as one subconsciously wrestles with the notion of achieving “something” in spiritual growth, attaining a state of supposed fullness and substantiality as the mind tends to conceive of it, and is oriented towards that end, it appears that one is facing 180 degrees away from the the desired goal. No wonder progress can be so elusive! The enlightenment process spoken of by sages down through the centuries is not an additive process, one of grasping after and perhaps attaining ever more “stuff”, i.e. objects of sense, whether that stuff is material or intangible. Rather it is, as Zen Buddhists like to assert, a subtractive process, one of releasing or letting go of more and more, closer and closer to the core until the very perceptions and preconceptions of the core itself are surrendered. Thus arises the sense of emptiness, whether consciously pursued and invoked, or as a natural “sloughing off” of the constructs of the ego at a certain stage of development.

The sense of emptiness complements the notions of surrender and surrendered action very well. Christian theology emphasizes the idea of surrender to God’s will and submission to/acceptance of Jesus Christ as one’s savior. I suspect their conventional conception of surrender differs from the understanding presented here, as the surrender for most Christians is occurring to an “object of sense,” a concrete Somebody, though that object is in fact a conception or an image of a theological “reality.” But the intuition behind the emphasis is rooted in truth, though perhaps it may be misapprehended. After all, as Christ proclaimed in the Sermon on the Mount,

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Matthew 5:3, NIV

And “poor in spirit” is another phrase for spiritual emptiness.

Likewise, karma yoga in the Hindu tradition emphasizes the notion of doing one’s work in a surrendered state and dedicating the fruits of it to Brahman – a similar orientation to the Christian one, with perhaps a more mystically appropriate intuition at the base, as Hinduism tends to be a more meditatively-oriented religion. Again, this state of surrender in both Christianity and Hinduism, reflects a deep, if not always conscious, intuition that The Way lies in the direction of less substantiality, not more. And when this Way is felt interiorly, as a sort of magnetic attraction to an inner void, one is then on the cusp of potentially significant spiritual breakthroughs. For the cup must be emptied before the Spirit can fill it anew with the “Fullness masquerading as Emptiness.”

This is a deep subject, with many aspects; we’ve only scratched the surface of this topic: a fruitful topic for revisiting.