Continuity...

It may be that concerns over "emptiness of self" and "continuity" are linked. We seem to be missing an anchor.

I'm drawn to the former as I believe it dispels the notion that we are somehow already there and then have these experiences. Often expressed as the Cartesian duality. That the material self and the mind are something else.

I am attempting to probe the depths of the notion that awareness (consciousness) and presence (being) are poles of a complementarity. Think of the Chinese Yin/Yang. That perhaps the “I” we relate to is a single quantum within physics. That when this quantum is an awareness experiencing, it is not a concrete presence in space and time. It is not a being, simply because it is a becoming. Once it has experienced, once it has become, the pole swings the other way, and it is no longer conscious, it simply exists as an instance in space and time.

Taken another way...I am speculating upon a serial process in which when “I” am conscious, no one else is, for others exist in that moment as objects of my awareness. That when another is conscious, the rest of us are not, and so on, and so-forth. Until finally we come full circle and the cycle repeats, with fresh content for each succeeding awareness to contemplate.

So the "emptiness of self" to me relates to what I see as a lack of something concrete. Perhaps the only thing fixed is history. The process itself, of experiencing and being experienced, is the true anchor. "Continuity" lies within this enduring process.

"No Thinker Thinks Twice" - Alfred North Whitehead