Empty Thyself and I shall fill thee

This single sentence is an important message for people on the Spiritual path. The Spirit is not a quantity and it is other than being quantitative. Spirit cannot be defined by the mind. It is beyond mind.

'Blessed are the poor in spirit,' is a statement of Jesus the Christ, but it does not imply lacking something, it means being humble.

For us, to be poor implies not to have money. That would be economic poverty. Likewise, the idea of emptying oneself, as far as our minds can understand, is a physical displacement of content.

Far from this is the idea of the Spirit, which is implied in the above single-sentence message. It is Consciousness what is to be taken into account here in our understanding of this statement.

When referring to the New Testament we should be aware that there is a difference between the name Christ and Christ-Consciousness. This fact was repeatedly emphasized by Jesus himself in many of His declarations as recorded in the New Testament. He never regarded Himself as a person, nor did He ever indicate that a person was speaking when He spoke. He always referred to 'Him that sent me'. John 9:4 (KJV).The Spirit that spoke through Him was not one that was of time.

Here is a most significant statement of Jesus. "Before Abraham was, I am,” John 8:58 (KJV).   Grammatically the statement makes no sense. But in John 8:58, that is the real Christ that spoke. The present precedes the past. How could it be? And that is what is implied in saying, "Before Abraham was, I am." The Spirit is a present and not an event or content or a creature in the passage of time which is usually dissected into the past, present and future. The Spirit has no past, no present and no future. And this is the Christ-Consciousness.

Jesus was perpetually in unison with the Spirit, drew sustenance from the Spirit and operated upon the Law of the Spirit in the world or the realm of matter. Anything that we speak of in regard to the Spirit has to be empirical (based on experience) and we have to shed the prejudice of earthly ways of thinking even before we take the first step in the practice of the way of the Spirit. All prejudices have to be shed. This is one of the conditions of emptying ourselves.

In society much is based on certain prejudices (preconceived opinions). But the Spirit does not care for societal structures. Spirit is superior in its value and content. To be spiritual is hard to conceive for people who are fully engrossed in the matter realm.

Jesus never came to rule the world of Caesar, as he put it. "Give unto Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's."The Christ-Consciousness stands far above this common way of give-and-take thinking. It is from this superior and sublime point of view that we have to understand what it is to empty oneself and to be filled by the Spirit. When we ponder “empty thyself and you shall be filled, we cannot think of a material substance that fills us, but Spirit”. It is Spirit that can fill the emptied vessel of human personality.

Know that Spirit cannot be thought of, because the Spirit is what underlies thought. Even before we start thinking, Spirit is there behind thought impelling us to think. So there is no such thing as thinking the Spirit.

This wonderful statement 'Empty thyself and I shall fill thee' is complemented by another equally wonder-statement of His, 'The kingdom of heaven is within you'.

 How can the heaven be within us? We are such a small frail personality, a little body? Yet, it is said by the Christ. It is something like saying that the ocean is in a drop, which is unthinkable. All these inscrutable statements of Jesus appear to be inscrutable, because we cannot understand what the Spirit is, from the point of view of which he always spoke.

The way in which we are thinking is different from the way that we have to conceive spiritually, or at least non-materially. It is from this stand point that the kingdom of heaven can be within us. The Kingdom of heaven is not a physical empire. It is Spirit, and the Spirit can be contained everywhere. It does not require space to exist. Therefore, it can be wholly present even in the smallest of atoms.

All these phrases are not explained in the Bible. Great spiritual masters like Christ, Krishna or the Buddha do not comment on their statements. They make suggestive statements which have to be expounded by lesser minds later on, for the sake of being understood by the ordinary mind.

So, from the point of view of the Spirit, what would it mean to empty one-self and to be filled by it? The accumulations, mental impressions that have amassed on our mind have to be gradually shed. We can do this by observing our mind and let go of thoughts that are not useful. The objective accumulations over the Spirit have to be cast asunder in order that the Spirit may blossom forth in its fullness. 'To empty one-self', therefore, cannot mean anything else. It means to stand by the Spirit and not to be dominated by any material value.

Here is another statement. We believe that by giving we lose. But, the Spirit says that by giving we gain. Luke 6:38, Give, and it shall be given unto you. So, everywhere we find that the law of the Spirit is different from the law of matter. The law of the Christ is different from the law of Caesar. The law of God is different from the law of man. This is wonderful!

Now, to empty oneself would be the tendency to stand by the Spirit, and this tendency to stand by the Spirit is to recognize the character of the Spirit in the world of matter.

We have lost consciousness of the Spirit. We are conscious primarily of matter. To be aware of the Spirit is to be aware of its characteristics simultaneously. We cannot think of fire without thinking of light and heat. The idea of fire is automatically associated with the idea of heat and light. Likewise, the idea of the Spirit is automatically associated with Omnipresence and a capacity to permeate and penetrate through everything.

When God thinks through man, we may call that person a superman. Such was Christ, Buddha and Krishna. But all the great wonderful masters of humankind were thoroughly misunderstood; their teachings were never understood, but misrepresented, misapplied and abused to the doom of man, towards which we seem to be unfortunately heading.

But God is great, and everything shall be well in the realm of God whose Omniscient eyes see everything. The recognition of the Spirit is therefore, the recognition of God's omnipresent existence. And to be filled with God, is the same as to be filled with the Spirit. For that, we have to empty ourselves of all the externalized prejudice of objective thinking. Above all we need to still our mind.

We should not hang on objects, for our sustenance. “Man does not live on bread alone”, Matthew 4:4, which means to say we do not live merely by the stuff of the world. We have something in us which is superior to even the entire quantity of the cosmos. The Spirit is larger than the universe itself. The universe is after all a quantity. The entire Universe is floating in Spirit.

With this background of spiritual refreshment of our thoughts we have to contemplate daily the mystery of creation, the majesty of God, the greatness of spiritual life, the stupendousness of yoga or oneness with God and the glorious consummation that lies ahead of us which is supreme Liberation, Christ-Consciousness, God-realization or God union.