There are many spiritual teachings and ethical systems which offer many ways of perfection. But the deepest truth is that, there is no needing to go anywhere to find oneself. The man, who is loaded like a camel with all sorts of “spiritual knowledge”, only bears a heavy, strange load through the desert and nothing more. In this sense, there is no the straight and narrow. During long sea voyages, the ship’s bottom is overgrown with algae, seashells, various marine animals and the speed of the ship slows down. The ship has to be cleaned from all the alien vegetation and living creatures, sometimes it has to do on the run. The same is with the human. Everyone, who is born, is gifted with a perception of positive voidness. That voidness is a true center of human heart. But the wrong upbringing and wrong way of life force human to forget this gift. And so, ultimately, a human forgets himself. It is only necessary to purify him from all the superficial, excess, and needless.
On cognition.
Since olden times the philosophers have been racking their brains over the question - whether a person is able to cognize things as they are, or all our knowledge about the world are illusive to some extent?
The French philosopher Rene Descartes was the first who expressed the idea that there’s a single undeniable trustworthiness in our cognition. And this trustworthiness is the self-consciousness. “Cogito, ergo sum” (”I am thinking, therefore I exist”, but cogito should not be interpret here as a purely rational thinking, because it is the totality of conscious experiences. “It is quite clear- Descartes wrote - that extension, or form, or movement, does not belong to our nature, but only thinking. Due to this fact the thinking is cognized in the first place and more exactly than any real objects because we already know it, but still in doubt in everything else”.
However, the philosophy of Descartes tore the spirit from matter, consciousness from nature and put it in contraposition. The “I” was understood primarily as a subject, who thinking rationally. So, conquest reality, which is different from “I”, becomes the primary aim of the subject. The mastering of infinitely varied world of objectivity, knowledge of material things in accordance with the criteria of rational clarity and intelligibility - all this were put above all. The problem of mutual connection, interaction between the Nature and consciousness was relegated to the background. Moreover, the human was surrounded by “the new thingness” from every quarter (”the new thingness” means here the socio-technological order which is out of Nature and determines human life directly). At the times of Descartes, natural phenomena - drought, crop failures, floods, epidemics, etc., had a huge impact on people’s lives. Now their influence, despite the increase in natural disasters (related with the global climate change, etc.) is almost imperceptible compared with the effect of changes in technology for the vast majority of the population at least in developed countries. The most telling danger is that people are less and less able to control this “new thingness”, the product of their own hands - the socio-technological order.
But this should not be interpreted in so manner that the aim at the knowledge of the external world must yield to the aim at “know thyself”. The issue is not so simple. If we oppose these guidelines to one another we do not overstep the limits of dualism of subject and object.
The question is whether it is possible to have any knowledge beyond subject-object opposition in general? After all, one of the fundamental characteristics of human consciousness is the ability to be aimed at a specific object (an external phenomenon of Nature or an inner phenomenon of existence. This general characteristic is designated as “intentionality” in philosophy).
To answer this question, we have to find such a modus of consciousness that has no subject-object relationship, distinction between cognizing “I” and cognized “not-self”, distinction between entity that is contemplating and entity that contemplated. And this modus is the voidness.
The voidness of consciousness does not imply that other cognitive abilities of human - rational, logical thinking, sensory perception, intuition - should lose their luster in some extent. There is just the opposite. The man who opened voidness in himself, being in spontaneity of existence, applies all his cognitive abilities in the best possible way. It is hard to find a logical explanation for this. We can only point out that the Whole is., and the voidness of consciousness is a manifestation of the Whole in a human mind.
