Enraptured by Nothing

When people become very concentrated, they can often find themselves fascinated by just being still and focusing upon absolutely nothing at all. When you discover the empty ground of all being, which is not an object, you can find yourself in a state of rapture. It's like there's something you can't take your eyes off of, but that something is actually nothing at all. What is it that's so compelling about nothing at all? It's very mysterious. Why is it that when you discover this empty ground, there's a sense that "I could stay here forever"?

When the sense or awareness of time disappears, there's an expansion of consciousness. The quality of reality itself seems to deepen. Most of us live within the confines of our emotional and psychological world. So when we transcend the experience of time, the experience of reality deepens because our attention is no longer trapped or distracted by time, thought, and feeling. So when time, thought, and feeling are no longer objects of our attention, but the infinite empty ground of our own being becomes the object of our attention, what's so compelling is that because the doors of perception have opened, new dimensions in every direction seem to appear.

~Andrew Cohen