The eye sees, but it sees not the eye. Fire burns, but does not burn fire. The subject objectifies the world, but the subject cannot objectify the subject.
The absence of self-essence, the relative nature of appearance, the ‘emptiness’ of all phenomena which comes with the understanding that anything that can be identified is dependent on everything else for its existence– including such abstracts and dualities as “the whole” and “the part”, “internal” and “external”- is most directly (and meaningfully) encountered in the self of awareness.
The self, that primal ‘fact’ which we mostly take for granted at the centre of our entire world, the vista that makes ordinary experience and all subsequent objectivity possible, is not- is never – objectifiable. The objective processes, forms, the materiality of the body, brain, environment etc can be mapped, explored and objectively explained. But the subject cannot know itself objectively. In fact, to know the self, is to not-know. This “not knowing’, or “not self” is at the ground of the knowing self. It is a ground of the self of awareness that is not self-aware and yet makes self-awareness possible. It is inseparable from the self of awareness.’ It is the Self of Emptiness.
This all may sound like so much needless wordplay and obscure semantics. So much bibble-babble. But it’s about as immediate a fact as anything else. It’s just we generally don’t turn our attention that way. Which is not surprising. The objectified world is necessarily the direction which preoccupies the attention of a living sentient being. But the root, the radical root is still here. To put it in less extravagant terms; the base of consciousness (including unconsciousness which is after all a continuity of waking consciousness) is not-consiousness, and yet not separate from consciousness.
In the same way that objectivity does not exist apart from subjectivity and yet is not identical to subjectivity, and the objects of consciousness do not exist (as objects) apart from consciousness, that which subjectifies consciousness into the knowing subject (the ‘i know’)– the ‘self’ is not-self and not-knowing. The ground of the knowing self, the ground of the subject which objectifies, the ‘subject in itself’ is the Emptiness that makes all things possible.
All things can be as they are because they have their ground in Emptiness. In this Emptiness, all things appear gathered together as the world. This is called Wondrous Void. The Emptiness which is inseparable from all the wonderful phenomena of the universe, the processes and experiences, stories of life, changing, of all things in this flux of existence, is the very ground of our experience, the true selfhood. In negating our ordinary notions of our own self and it’s world, in cutting down to this ground, we can (it is said) awaken as the Self of Emptiness which is the ground of all things.