Jewish Meditation by Aryeh Kaplan

Author:Aryeh Kaplan [Kaplan, Aryeh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76111-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-01-11T05:00:00+00:00

*In my book Meditation and Kabbalah, a number of important yichudim are presented in their entirety.

9

NOTHINGNESS

Meditation on nothingness is a topic upon which I have touched briefly in an earlier chapter. Actually, this is a very advanced type of meditation and not for beginners. It is not recommended for practice without the guidance of a spiritual master and should never be practiced alone. I shall discuss it here because this technique is closely related to visualization methods and is important for understanding a number of other areas in Jewish meditation and mysticism.

Once proficiency has been achieved in visualization techniques, it is possible to attempt to visualize pure nothingness. Nothingness has no counterpart in the real world, so one must be able to create a perception of it in the mind. It is a useful technique to attain closeness to God and to achieve a realization of the self.

As in the case of other advanced techniques, this can be extremely dangerous. The reason why it should never be practiced alone is that one can get “swallowed up” in the nothingness of the meditation and not be able to return. Therefore, one should always have a partner or a spiritual master available to bring one back to objective reality.

Before we can begin to discuss this type of meditation, we must have an idea of what nothingness looks like. When one first thinks of nothingness, one may image it as being like the blackness of empty space. The interplanetary void may seem as close to nothingness as a person can imagine. If one is expert in visualization, it is fairly easy to visualize empty space and pure empty blackness. This indeed may be a first step toward visualizing nothingness, but it is not nothingness. Space is space, and blackness is blackness—neither is nothingness.

A next step in attempting to visualize nothingness would be to attempt to visualize pure, transparent, empty space, without any background color. One can imagine oneself looking into a pure, colorless, transparent crystal, with the transparency extending to infinity. According to some commentaries, this is the connotation of the “brickwork of sapphire” that the Israelites saw under God’s feet (Exod. 24:10). These commentaries translate the Hebrew expression livenath ha-sappir as “transparency of crystal” rather than “brickwork of sapphire.” They say that it is related to the meditation in which one images pure transparence without any color. One images first the transparency of crystal and then the transparency of pure colorless empty space.

One way to do this is to image the air in front of you. It is, of course, perfectly transparent, and therefore you cannot see it. Instead you see what is at the other end of the room. Using the “hewing” technique described in the previous chapter, you should be able to rid yourself of the image of the other end of the room; then you will have a pure image of the transparent air around you. It will be pure transparence, with no form or color.

Years ago, I found this to be a very helpful technique for experiencing the presence of God.

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