Hi Peter,

I think I understand what you’re saying about the fear of emptiness as we rest in the space of self-emptying (through meditation). I have experienced this I think, but I believe only within the first 5 minutes or so when I’m still waiting for my overactive thoughts to settle the hell down. The purpose of meditation for me is to calm myself, escape my anxiety, and it works, but I don’t experience joy through it. This brings me back to an earlier thread where we discussed happiness and the “flow of life”. My words will fall short, I know, but as I tried to express in that thread, things seem to only make some sense when I feel a strong connection with and trust in that “flow”, no matter how good my life is. When I was younger I thought differently. Back then obtaining the things that the world values brought me happiness, or so I thought. But I am middle-aged now and my feelings have changed. I wonder if this happens to a lot of people, if as we age we become less satisfied with those things that once satisfied us, so we seek answers to the bigger questions we’ve had all along but were too busy (or too satisfied) to bother with. And it’s not only our increasing age that pushes us to find answers, but also challenging times as we’ve all experienced over the past few years with the pandemic and everything else…I think there are a lot of us out here who just want to rest in truth and goodness…but where does one find truth and goodness? That’s where our searching leads us, I believe. And if we move in the right direction, I think things start to feel less wrong and more right, less emptiness, more joy, less meditation, more contemplation…because we’re now in the flow.

B