Reading Highlight

Often when we are suffering, some emptiness view or other is quite capable of dissolving or substantially reducing that suffering. Sometimes just dissolving it thus is fine. Sometimes though, that suffering may be felt to be an integral part of one’s humanity, so that it might seem necessary to allow and to feel that particular pain and that sense of humanness more fully before viewing it as empty. Yet it is also true that on occasion an ordering opposite to this last is viable and actually more helpful. We may choose to see the emptiness of something first, so dissolving it or at least loosening it up, and then – either allowing it to reconstitute, or taking advantage of this loosening – we can draw near to it again to be with it and hold it in a different way.