The Seba library treats Vacuum in 9 passages, across 4 authors (including Singh, Jaideva, Hillman, James, McGilchrist, Iain).
in that vacuum, then he becomes worthy of entering in that supreme vacuum of God consciousness.
This passage establishes vacuum as a graded meditative threshold: the practitioner’s mind first dissolves into an interior vacuum, which then opens onto the supreme vacuum identified with divine consciousness in Śāmbhavopāya.
, Vijnana Bhairava: The Manual for Self-Realization, 1979thesis
Because our Western culture declared ‘Nature abhors a vacuum,’ we abhor emptiness… In Buddhism, the void is less a vacuum than a positive force.
Hillman diagnoses the Western cultural aversion to vacuum as a pathological exteriorization, contrasting it with the Buddhist understanding of the void as the active shaping force within every vessel.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis
find out the vacuum of the armpits and concentrate on that vacuum. You will enter in your own nature (tat layāt) when the concentration on the armpits has taken the appeased state.
The passage presents bodily vacuum — specifically the hollow of the armpit — as a precise meditative locus whose contemplation dissolves individual consciousness back into its natural, undifferentiated ground.
, Vijnana Bhairava: The Manual for Self-Realization, 1979thesis
Just look on that pot [and] imagine it is only a vacuum, [that] there is nothing, no covering of that mud or earth.
Through the dhāraṇā of perceiving a vessel as pure form without material substrate, the practitioner trains perception to rest in vacuum itself, dissolving the habitual reification of substance.
, Vijnana Bhairava: The Manual for Self-Realization, 1979supporting
vacuum 60, 80–82, 110–112, 155, 158–159, 177–178, 186, 213
The index entry confirms that vacuum is a structurally recurrent technical term throughout the Vijnana Bhairava commentary, distributed across numerous distinct dhāraṇā practices rather than confined to any single locus.
, Vijnana Bhairava: The Manual for Self-Realization, 1979supporting
A particle exists in space and around it is empty space. A field, on the other hand, is something that exists everywhere as a property of space. Its intensity may be small, but it is never zero.
McGilchrist deploys contemporary field physics to argue that apparent vacuum is never truly empty, aligning scientific ontology with wisdom-tradition accounts of an all-pervasive, form-generating plenum.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
A particle exists in space and around it is empty space. A field, on the other hand, is something that exists everywhere as a property of space. Its intensity may be small, but it is never zero.
This parallel passage reinforces McGilchrist’s argument that the classical concept of empty space is a left-hemisphere artifact, dismantled by field theory in favor of an omnipresent energetic substrate.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
The Heavenly Gate is nonbeing. The ten thousand things come forth from nonbeing. Being cannot create being out of being; inevitably it must come forth from nonbeing.
Zhuangzi’s doctrine of the Heavenly Gate as absolute nonbeing offers a Daoist cognate to the Shaivite vacuum: the generative void from which all phenomena emerge rather than a mere privation of existence.
, The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, 2013aside
śūnyoccārād bhavet śivaḥ — When you recite ‘auṃ’-kāra, you recite ‘auṃ’-kāra in its grossness, and that grossness ends in ‘ma’-kāra.
The mantra’s progressive refinement from gross to subtle culminates in śūnya (vacuum), invoked here as the terminal state of sonic dissolution through which the practitioner becomes Śiva.
, Vijnana Bhairava: The Manual for Self-Realization, 1979aside