The Book of Yourself Newsletter
Issue 48: November 2025
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I am really behind with these newsletters. I am still resettling back in my native patch of Spain and that has taken a lot of my time and energy. I have also taken on some extra projects and that has involved diverting my energy and attention to them. So my apologies for the long break in writing and publishing these newsletters. Since, properly speaking, they are not newsletters, i.e. periodic informative reports, but short reflections on central themes in K’s teachings, I hope you won’t mind my keeping the monthly sequence going, even though that will obviously not correspond to the time when such reflections are actually written.
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One of the themes at the core of K’s teachings is the significance of nothingness, emptiness and the inner void. K draws our attention continuously to this underlying issue in our existence. He traces the whole movement of psychological becoming to our fear of emptiness, from which we frantically seek to escape through attachment, possession and domination, all of which is an everlasting source of conflict and sorrow. The significance of this inward emptiness, he states, changes when we don’t escape from it. Such an escape is not only futile but dangerous, as it entraps us in a destructive vicious circle. For K, however, emptiness, with its vast space and silence, is the domain of beauty, goodness and truth. So our escape from this nothingness is a tragic mistake. If K is correct, then it is essential that we face, embrace and embody this inner emptiness, as it is the ground of wholeness and being.
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“Being nothing, being a desert in oneself, one hopes through another to find water. Being empty, poor, wretched, insufficient, devoid of interest or importance, one hopes through another to be enriched. Through the love of another one hopes to forget oneself. Through the beauty of another one hopes to acquire beauty. Through the family, through the nation, through the lover, through some fantastic belief, one hopes to cover this desert with flowers. And God is the ultimate lover. So one puts hooks into all these things. In this there is pain and uncertainty, and the desert seems more arid than ever before. Of course it is neither more nor less arid. It is what it was, only one has avoided looking at it while escaping through some form of attachment with its pain, and then escaping from that pain into detachment. But one remains arid and empty as before. So instead of trying to escape, either through attachment or through detachment, can we not become aware of this fact, of this deep inward poverty and inadequacy, this dull, hollow isolation? That is the only thing that matters, not attachment or detachment. Can you look at it without any sense of condemnation or evaluation? When you do, are you looking at it as an observer who looks at the observed, or without the observer?”
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The Urgency of Change, pp. 122-123
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K uses the metaphor of the desert as a fitting symbol for our sense of inner emptiness, insufficiency, wretchedness and poverty, which we try to counter and enrich through the love and beauty of another, through the family, the nation, a system of belief, and both carnal and divine lovers. We hope through these things, as he puts it, to make the desert bloom and with in mind we become attached to them. But in that attachment there is dependence, uncertainty and pain, so we are caught in the same struggles and the land remains as arid as before. We then try to escape from this pain through detachment which, being a reaction, is more of the same. Detachment is an escape from attachment which is an escape from the fact of our deep inward emptiness and isolation. So the point is to stay with this and not to escape, which means looking at it directly, not as a separate observer for, as it happens, the nothingness within is turned into a fearful abyss by the self with its comparative judgements.
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“Any movement away from this emptiness is an escape. And this flight away from something, away from ‘what is,’ is fear. Fear is flight away from something. ‘What is’ is not the fear; it is the flight which is the fear, and this will drive you mad, not the emptiness itself. So what is this emptiness, this loneliness? How does it come about? Surely it comes through comparison and measurement, doesn’t it? I compare myself with the saint, the master, the great musician, the man who knows, the man who has arrived. In this comparison I find myself wanting and insufficient: I have no talent, I am inferior, I have not ‘realised’; I am not, and that man is. So out of measurement and comparison comes the enormous cavity of emptiness and nothingness. And the flight from this cavity is fear. And the fear stops us from understanding this bottomless pit. It is a neurosis which feeds upon itself.”
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The Urgency of Change, pp. 24-25
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Here K defines fear as the flight away from something, from what is, in this case from emptiness. It is this fear that drives us insane, not the emptiness. As it turns out, this inner quality of emptiness results from measuring ourselves against those who are better, greater, who know more, have more or have arrived. It is through this comparison that we feel inferior, lacking in talent, in achievement, empty of value and meaning, which is, undoubtedly, depressing. (See Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 for a beautiful rendering of this.) It is out of this comparative measurement that we end up thinking that we are nothing and feeling sorry for ourselves. Sensing this self-created abyss in our being – the others are and we are not – we run away from it, which is fear. And this fear itself prevents us from looking and understanding the emptiness that we ourselves have created. This movement, unless seen through, entraps us in a neurotic vicious circle whereby we escape from the fearful reality we ourselves create with our measurements regarding the superior assets and qualities of others as compared with our own.
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This comparative thinking is the source of both the poison of envy and the ambition of emulation, the one considered noble and the other ignoble, whereas they are the two sides of the same coin. The resulting emptiness, therefore, is entirely manufactured by us and not something existing independently as an objective reality. This nothingness is artificial and, as such, it is not what we are. It is created by the observer, by the entity making the comparison, which then reacts to the measurement with fear and seeks to make up for it through various forms of reactive fulfillment or denial. So if we see this and stop comparing, this false emptiness subsides and disappears, perhaps revealing the real nothingness, if one can say that, that it has been escaping from through this pointless chasing of its own tail.
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“You are nothing. You may have your name and title, your property and bank account, you may have power and be famous; but in spite of all these safeguards, you are as nothing. You may be totally unaware of this emptiness, this nothingness, or you may simply not want to be aware of it; but it is there, do what you will to avoid it. You may try to escape from it in devious ways, through personal or collective violence, through individual or collective worship, through knowledge and amusement; but whether you are asleep or awake, it is always there. You can come upon your relationship to this nothingness and its fear only by being choicelessly aware of the escapes. You are not related to it as a separate, individual entity; you are not the observer watching it; without you, the thinker, the observer, it is not. You and nothingness are one; you and nothingness are a joint phenomenon, not two separate processes. If you, the thinker, are afraid of it and approach it as something contrary and opposed to you, then any action you may take towards it must inevitably lead to illusion and so to further conflict and misery. When there is the discovery, the experiencing of that nothingness as you, then fear – which exists only when the thinker is separate from his thoughts and so tries to establish a relationship with them – completely drops away. Only then is it possible for the mind to be still; and in this tranquillity, truth comes into being.”
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Commentaries on Living, First Series, pg. 92
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While many of us might readily say ‘We are nothing’ when faced with some adversity, meaning our being ultimately at the mercy of circumstances and the powers that be, we do not extend this statement to our psychological world. It is an outer truth but not an inner one. K takes it inwardly, asserts it without the least hesitation and proceeds to explicate its meaning. Whether we are unaware of it, suppress such awareness or, being aware, escape from it, the bally thing is still there. The fact that we escape from it implies that we are aware of it and we escape because we are afraid. K places this fear of emptiness at the root of the whole movement of becoming. In this instance he mentions individual and collective violence, worship, knowledge and amusement; in other places he would add such things as greed, ambition, possessiveness, attachment and the pursuit of wealth, fame and power as additional attempts to fill the inner void. This whole movement of escape is the drive of fulfillment, which is rather an apt word, as it means to fill the inner void to the full. From this perspective, a great deal of our human endeavour and achievement would seem to stem from this fear of not being anything or anyone. But if we are that, escaping from it is like trying to outrun one’s shadow and the emptiness, as we can see, remains with us through wakefulness and sleep. K proposes that being choicelessly aware of these escapes brings us into contact with the nothingness, not as a separate entity, but without the observer, so that we are one with it. But before that, what being aware of the escapes brings us in touch with is fear, for that is the essence of the escapes. Fear, of course, is generated by the observer, not by the emptiness. The observer is afraid of the emptiness because it interprets it as threatening its own inherent drive to become something. The self is becoming and nothingness denies it. So there is no real encounter with nothingness unless there is a perception through and past the dark cloud of fear that obscures it. When such an insight takes place, there is no fear, for fear is not of emptiness but of the self that has projected its fulfillment or becoming in time. K adds that when fear completely drops away, this whole movement of escape comes to an end, the mind is still and in that tranquility truth can come into being.
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So we would seem to have two cycles of the psychological movement of escape from our inner emptiness to which K traces the fundamental tragic mistake of the universal psychology of mankind. The first involves the generation of an artificial sense of emptiness through measuring ourselves against others. This is created by us, by thought, which reacts to it as though it were something actual. This movement generates a vicious circle in which we continually escape from the depressing feeling we create with our negative measurements. (One might suppose that positive measurements would produce feelings of elation and superiority, but since they are comparative in nature, they are invariably uncertain and unstable, therefore imbued, however subtly, with the same quality of fearful apprehension.) If we perceive this self-deceptive feed-back loop of consciousness and stop comparing, then this false emptiness dissolves into nothingness. The second involves the encounter with actual emptiness, which provokes exactly the same fearful reaction of escape because, like the comparative emptiness, it is interpreted as a negation of the psychological movement of becoming inherent to the nature of the self. Here, again, the answer lies in seeing through the smokescreen of fear that hides the direct perception of emptiness, which far from being fearful is the very truth and ground of our being.
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Be well, amigos, and let’s face and see through the false emptiness so we can meet the real one,
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Photos by J. Gómez Rodríguez: 1. View of Rianxo from the harbour, Rianxo, A Coruña, Spain. 2. View of the marina, Pobra do Caramiñal, A Coruña, Spain.
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