I was stuck for a bit with Emptiness, but a great text exchange with my beloved sibling, Kris H., got me on track from where I was trapped in my noggin. 🙏

Decluttering Awareness: Nagarjuna and Emptiness {PREVIOUS]

I had been contemplating how best to revisit the notion of “presence.” After trying on several articulations, I exchanged “to be present” for “to show-up.” The shift is slight in speech, but immense in meaning. To show-up carries a quiet force: unassuming, but spacious. It signals not mere being-there, but arriving with intention and readiness—with body, breath, and uncertainty intact. It is how the self who stands-out and the life-world that expands-out arise together, mutually dependent. There is no substantial ego arriving to meet a substantial world—only the luminous weave of co-emergence, here and now.

I find this shift fruitful for layering experience. “Showing-up” is existential, yet avoids becoming esoteric:

• Showing-up to the world — as witness, participant, co-creator.
• Showing-up for others — in solidarity, support, or service.
• Showing-up for oneself — in honesty, care, and renewal.

It implies timing (being ready when needed), intention (drifting-into, not off), and embodiment (not just mind but body-in-action). I show-up to drift within the currents of lived experience. Instead of trying to decode causal patterns to explain how I got here from nowhere (?), I trace the gestures that detangle the knot—gestures that illuminate how to-be now/here.

A new current emerges between the poles of apathy and obsession. I begin to dissolve the assumptions that calcify experience into fixed extremes. Neither is a thing in itself; both are modes of being-toward—obsession as clinging fixation, apathy as withdrawn negation. Both arise through patterns, empty of essence, structured by circumstance.

In exploring this in-between—this valley of too much and not enough—I consider three lenses: appetite, emotion, and intellect. These, too, have no inherent being; they arise co-dependently, reflecting the world and shaping it in return. They form a cipher—a triune channel through which awareness may move, dwell, and discern.

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To long is the mode of appetite. I long for what I need. This longing can be tempered or veer into imbalance. Nāgārjuna calls this tṛṣṇā—craving. Longing feels real until its interdependent conditions are seen: subject, object, and grasping itself. Remove any, and the appearance dissolves.

This marks the difference between asceticism (restrained longing) and askēsis (constrained longing). The former tries to eliminate desire as enemy; the latter reshapes it as practice. When longing is trained, it attunes to sufficiency and lets go. When it runs untrained, it curdles into gluttony, greed, or lust… basic forms of compulsion. Yet when it is rigidly denied, it turns cruel—toward self and world alike.

Co-resonant askēsis—Socrates’ temperance and Nāgārjuna’s insight—meets desire as hollow form. It touches without clinging. It trains the gesture of letting-go not as rejection, but as release.

Resolute Temperance excels at longing without losing center: a practiced ease between the vicious banks of obsession and apathy.

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To affect is the mode of emotion. I affect the world through how I react. Reactions, too, can be trained or left wild. Emotion emerges from the flux between self, world, and moment—a play of appearances with no fixed core.

This is the difference between asceticism (discouraged affection) and askēsis (encouraged affection). Untrained affect breeds envy or rage; suppressed affect calcifies into hatred and indifference. Asceticism sees emotion as an obstacle. Askēsis sees it as signal—empty, but meaningful.

A co-valent askēsis—Socrates’ courage and Nāgārjuna’s compassion—honors emotion’s conditionality. It recognizes that reacting is never about control, but about coherence. What arises does so with care, not clutching.

Compassionate Courage excels at affecting without losing center: a warm clarity between the confining banks of obsession and apathy.

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To reason is the mode of the intellect. I reason to understand. Reason, too, can be refined or distorted. Understanding arises through the relations of knower, known, and knowing—pramāṇa—which Nāgārjuna shows to be without intrinsic ground.

This is the difference between asceticism (derailed reason) and askēsis (deepened reason). Untrained reason succumbs to pride or paralysis. Denied reason alienates from life itself. Asceticism aims to weaponize intellect for domination. Askēsis opens it as question—as Socrates’ unknowing and Nāgārjuna’s emptiness.

Empty Wisdom excels at reasoning without losing center: discerning stillness between the muddy banks of obsession and apathy.

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I drift between Nāgārjuna and Socrates. I find that both emptiness and ignorance lead to the same clearing: freedom from false necessity. The Examined Life and the Middle Way both loosen the reified bonds that trap us in reactive loops.

Thus, I show-up—not just as a physical body, but as a porous center of imagination and discernment. Showing-up cannot be rehearsed. It cannot be borrowed. It unfolds in real time. It is neither passive nor aggressive, but a third gesture: exposed responsiveness—a readiness to meet what arises without needing to possess it.

This is what Nāgārjuna names the cessation of grasping (upādāna). Not disappearance, but availability. Not detachment from life, but ungrasping participation.

When I show-up with that tempered clarity, I begin to see through the patterned necessities that drove my suffering. I see the reaction itself—flinch, retreat, bite—not as fate but as formation (saṃskāra). Once seen, it becomes workable. Once illuminated, it loses its tyranny.

The excellence of Emptiness is that it frees—not by escape, but by transformation. It unbinds the obsessive clench and melts the apathy of resignation. It gives me back my aliveness.

Liberation does not float above the world. It arrives by entering the world—awake to its shimmering contingency. Freedom is not from, but for: for compassion, for life, for realization.

To show-up is to move by wisdom’s gravity, guided not by maps but by practiced readiness. This is what Socrates and Nāgārjuna offer: not doctrines, but a shared gesture across two truths. To act with care in the world, while knowing the world is empty. To drift—steady, open, undeterred—between obsession and apathy.

TENTATIVE SERIES OUTLINE

• Whispering New Directions
• A Fourfold for the Current Empire
• Decluttering Awareness: Nagarjuna and Emptiness {PREVIOUS]
• Showing-Up for Emptiness: Excellence Between Obsession and Apathy [CURRENT]
• Responsive to Skillful Attention [NEXT]
• Care-Free Wandering (Zhuangzi)
• Traversing not Avoiding Nihilism (Nishitani)