For two years the master taught me that what I feel as emptiness is space. I would say: it is empty. It is black. It is cold. He would say: that is not emptiness. That is space. Go into it. Stay. It will teach you. And I wept, and I suffered, and I could not breathe — and I was told this was space I had to learn to accept.
Now I know that this was the one thing about which the master was wrong in both directions at once. He was wrong about the diagnosis: it was not space to learn from. It was black despair. Clinical. With a name, a mechanism
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