What is mental emptiness – shunyata – in yoga (emptiness, vacuity)?

It is an interesting nondualist concept that refers to the fact that when the state of yoga is reached, there are no more thoughts, defending the so-called mental void of nondual happiness. The “Yoga Sutras” by Patanjali states from the very beginning “Yoga citta vritti nirodhah” which means “Yoga is the cessation of all mental fluctuations”. That is, there are no more thoughts, but not only thoughts as we expect… but any mental fluctuations.

What finer fluctuations than known thoughts could there be?

Emotions, symbols, concepts, but even finer than these can even be the simple mental vibrations that are coarser than spanda – the primordial vibration of the universe. In fact, the mental vacuum of nondual happiness means that there is no differentiation in consciousness, that is, there is apparently nothing, although, paradoxically, it contains everything. It is a “full emptiness”, not a desert, which is why there are two words that designate the same thing but with apparently opposite words: “emptiness” and “mindfulness” or “heartfullness”.
The first refers to the fact that there is no thought, no differentiation, no matter how small (abheda) and the second and third refer to this mysterious fullness of the state of mental emptiness, the nature of which is, in fact, sat-cit-ananda, i.e. pure existence (sat) – pure consciousness (cit) – pure nondual bliss (ananda). That is, the Absolute, the Infinite or… even to be one with God. In this state, it’s true, so we have no thought, but most people would think that they then lose the most important human faculty — that of thinking. Well, everything is wrong in this statement because thinking is not the most important human faculty and we don’t lose anything, because, if we want, we can think. But we will find that when we reach this state in meditation, that we do not want to think, because it is not worth leaving such a sublime state to think something – maybe only if it is an emergency – fire, explosion, etc. Otherwise, it really is not worth leaving this state easily, although we can do it at any time. In Buddhism “emptyness” or “shunyata” takes, in explanations, the form of spiritual realization, of the terminus, and this is also true because the mental void is associated with the ultimate spiritual realization. We can distinguish here, four main understandings of the shunyata “void”: (1) all sentient beings are empty of a personalized Self or ego; (2) all things, no matter what happens, are empty of their own inherent or intrinsic existence, since they are all relative to causes and conditions, a view associated especially with Nagarjuna and the Madhyamika Buddhist school; (3) the stream of nondual consciousness is empty of subject-object duality, the Yogachara view; (4) the Buddha-nature, which lies within all sentient beings, is intrinsically and primordially devoid of all impurities, a much-debated notion in Tibetan Buddhism. Through the fundamental meditations in Abheda we can directly know the mental emptiness of nondual happiness but we can also more than that: to be in the village-chit-ananda but to be able to think at the same time. Leo Radutz