Psychological and Philosophical Theorizing of Cool

Emptiness is neither a hole in specific shapes that can be filled up with anything, nor is it a stomach that accepts chewed up substances that drops into it; it is not a lock with only one key. In fact, I think emptiness is a hole that can never be filled, or a stomach that is never satisfied with anything that drops down into it. Common themes of existentialism is the idea of alienation and the encounter with nothingness. God is a stranger to huamns, nature is a stranger to humans, humans are strangers to other humans, and one is a stranger to oneself. If one is alienated to all these things including oneself, then how does one know how to fill that emptiness inside. What external values or internal values does one seek if one cannot even understand the world or oneself. Even when people seem to have everything, "they still feel empty, uneasy, and discontended." One may feel fulfilled for a short period of time, but one will grow accustomed to these physical things and feel empty once again.

Data suggested that wealth only gives a temporary feeling of happiness. I think this can also be applied to emptiness; wealth (or whatever one seeks) only allows one to feel happy for a while. Psychologists call the idea of getting used to something in life, the Adaption-Level Phenomenon. A Columbian graduate described life as "a cycle of wanting, fulfilling, and wanting again" (Smith). Basically, we want something to fulfill the emptiness inside us but then after a while, we adapt to that "something" and we go back to wanting something else to fulfill the hole. She also said that "[if] you’re happy being unhappy, then congratulations, you’ve found a way to break, or at least cope with, the cycle." Does is apply to emptiness? If you are happy with the emptiness, or at least learn to accept it, you have found a way to cope with the adaption-level phenomenon cycle.

Now Louis Dupre, a philosophy professor at Yale University, argues that we find things to repress our feelings of emptiness. He says that we are too busy with life (family or work) to notice the absence and once family or work is gone, we feel the absence, the emptiness in our lives. But how do we know whether or not we are trying to fill the emptiness or we are repressing the feeling of emptiness? If John C. Thomas thinks that young adults are aggressive and violent because it is their way of coping with their emptiness, are they really trying to fill that emptiness or are they averting their attention away from their feeling of emptiness?

Buddhists believe that if we are in the state of emptiness, then we have reached a "state of conciousness." When we have reached that state, we are free from all sufferings (Wikipedia). Lama Zopa Rinpoche believes that realizing emptiness means knowing that our perception is merely an illusion (Chodron). Whatever we see, is only labeled by our minds and exists only through name or the label. Once we realize our emptiness, we reach the stage of enlightenment. Taoists believe that being in the state of emptiness is equivalent to having a "pure mind."