Hollow Bone

Your purpose in life and death is to become a hollow bone, empty to the point of nothingness.  It is the greatest and ultimate challenge of the human experience.

Hollow bone is a shamanic concept, used by shamans for thousands of years to raise consciousness in order to enable healing and spiritual connection and communication.  The shaman becomes hollowed out, an empty vessel where all thought and all self are removed:  the body is there like an empty husk, but all reminders of humanity otherwise are gone.  Even the soul is an onlooker.

The encouragement of emptiness is an important part of Buddhist teachings too, and you yourself may slip into becoming a hollow bone as you write or paint or speak, doing your service, working with a quiet mind and the knowledge that the love of Spirit is flowing through you in that moment.

The sense of being a hollow bone can come in meditation too, when the mind is gone and you are at perfect peace, aware only of the message of your senses. 

There can be misunderstanding and potential dangers in working towards being a hollow bone.  The principle is an easy one to grasp but it can be used glibly or wrongly.  In meditation, for example, you may be pleased to achieve an emptiness of mind as you find yourself in a floating, dream-like state where you are in a state almost of unconsciousness:  there is nothing wrong with this, but to be the hollow bone your emptiness of mind is accompanied by an intense awareness of your senses – you are fully in the present moment, a silent witness to what you see or hear even as you experience the depth and height of  consciousness.

You may think with satisfaction that you have become the hollow bone as you seek to deepen your spiritual experience and hasten the path to ascension, but ensure you are not listening to your mind and being lured by ego.  If you try to judge your progress, there may be more work to do.  It is an unconscious state of constant being, and while it is wonderful if you are able to be the empty husk from time to time, the aim on the path to enlightenment is for it to be your natural state, all the time.  This is hard to do, but if you reach this level of being you are ready to leave the wheel of reincarnation.

True mindfulness is the practice that leads to becoming a hollow bone.  Mindfulness is widely practised as a wellness tool, and while it is helpful the teaching often omits more profound and spiritual aspects of it.  A short course can only give the basics: it can take many, many years of rigorous dedication to achieve the level of an experienced shaman elder or insight teacher, which is why some spiritual students find it too difficult or they are not ready.

You achieve nothing without effort, and if you are interested in exploring the concept of the hollow bone it will serve you well.  The more you do, it will change your life.  You may wish to try for an hour a day initially to be totally focused with great concentration on whatever you are doing in the moment without thought or analysis, aware only of what your senses are showing you in terms of colours and shapes and sounds, smells and textures.  You are grounded, alert deliberate and careful but above all with an empty mind.  You are an empty vessel, a hollow bone, watching nothingness from a place of nothingness and stillness.  This is the path to peace.