When I was a teenager and searching for knowledge of religion and spirituality, I found three books on my mother’s bookshelf: D. T. Suzuki’s Studies in Zen, Arthur Waley’s Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China, and Witter Bynner’s The Way of Life According to Lao Tzu. I noticed that they all had one word in common: Dao.
That’s why I was excited when I met my master. I had always heard that martial arts in general and Taijiquan in particular could lead to meditative states. I had read that Taijiquan was called a moving meditation. But up until that point, I had never met anyone who could show me how to enter such a path. I was impressed with his qigong and his martial arts. And I was overjoyed that I had met an actual Daoist adept.
For my master, purification was the first objective for a beginner. Could a person clear away the obstacles to bad health, give up self-destructive habits, turn from distractions, have a good diet, and be of service to others? Once that was established, could one develop strong concentration?
It was exactly that concentration that opened the way to meditation.
For the Daoists, meditation is a matter of energy. It isn’t a mere idea or intellectual endeavor. It requires the channeling of energy. That’s why I learned of jing (physical essence), qi (breath energy), and shen (mental and spiritual). I discovered how to build and channel that energy along routes such as the Throughfare Channel, the Microcosmic Orbit, and the Macrocosmic Orbit. I learned to focus on the three Dantian. And I experienced the results of such practice: warmth, vibration, inner light, knowledge, and serenity.
Recently, people have discussed psychedelics as a means of spiritual access. It’s possible. But slower and natural methods allow for adjustments and discussions with a teacher. Visions and surges of energy are good, but spiritual occurrences won’t matter unless they can be integrated into one’s entire life.
Meditation can lead one into a state of emptiness. However, emptiness is an endlessly confusing subject. The shorthand answer is that you can think of emptiness in three ways.
When people say that the mind and worldly life are empty, it stands for this: there is no objective reality. Everyone views reality slightly differently, reality needs to be interpreted and narrated to ourselves, and meaning is not inherent in any object itself. Nothing comes labeled. We mentally provide labels and no one has the exactly the same labels. Hence, everything is considered empty of objective meaning. Note this does NOT mean that we should reject our experiences. It only means that we should accept them provisionally, that we should allow our views to change, and that we cannot expect others to see things exactly as we do.
Emptiness has a role in daily life. Think of the rests in music. Or the inside of a piano. Or the inside of nearly any instrument—oboe, violin, drum. Without emptiness, they could not function. Think of art: without a blank surface, we could not draw. Without negative space, we could not have figure-ground. Think of plumbing or the open rooms in a house. Unless they were open they wouldn’t be functional. The masters are asking us to consider what is not there on par with what is.
Emptiness has to be the state that preceded the world because emptiness is undefinable and immaterial. Any explanation of the world’s origins, including God, begs the question of where it in turn originated. Only emptiness, or in this case also called nothingness, has no antecedent and therefore only it can satisfy the question of an irreducible origin.
Meditation requires withdrawing into solitude. But we mustn’t assume that applies to everything. Meditation is a temporary withdrawal. After that, there must be returning. Embedding meditation into one’s complete life is really the proper way. After all, you are using your entire range of energy and so meditation must also belong to the entire range of life.