The heart of Emptiness is in the absence of anything with form and the inability to have knowledge thereof
This is the most profound but by far shortest chapter of the Book of Five Rings. It’s the least literal and the most philosophical. There are paradoxes in the martial arts. You must be highly skilled, practiced, and trained. Yet, you must not think about your training in deciding what to do consciously in every moment. You must know the fundamentals of fire and be practiced in all, but, upon launching rounds you must forget these details and only think of striking. Let yourself do what you know, be what you are. Once you are heavily practiced and trained you let it all go, stop thinking about everything in such detail, and be. You release yourself to do what you know. Only in this do you become a true warrior and become yourself.
Void/Emptiness is a few pages. I will write more here than Musashi wrote on the topic himself.
‘The inability to have knowledge thereof’ in the opening quote Musashi means form. A major theme of Musashi’s work is to retain your flexibility. Do not become rigid, do not become cemented in a style, “proper action”, mold, “supposed to”, or a way. Your knowledge of the details becomes so great that they become somewhat abstract. They become simple truths rather than mechanical actions to think about. At this stage teaching others in the Martial Arts can become difficult as it is easy to forget where you came from. How do you teach trigger control to someone with a poor grip? But how can improvements to the grip be seen when there is poor trigger control? What if they cannot use the sights properly? It is impossible to teach all these at once, yet they all must be in place at once for success. Our student cannot understand as we do as they do not know the details. If we try to get them to fire a round accurately as we do they will absolutely fail, as they are not yet to the void stage. Something we advanced gunfighters take for granted… especially those of us that see the target, where we want a round, choose to fire, and a hole appears in that very place. This is Emptiness manifested.
Consider the effect of Emptiness on the OODA loop. Observe: You see what you need to see, you truly observe it because you know you must but you are not purposefully scanning the scene as that is too slow. You use your senses as you have trained them. You use parts of your brain as Nature has evolved them for their purpose. Orient: upon observation your body orients itself to what it must do automatically because of the observation, it is unnecessary you think about it and provide explicit command. Certainly not how to move your feet, position your body, draw your weapon, etc. Decide: the decision was made when you observed. This step was performed simultaneously to Orient. Act: The action was inevitable once the observation was made, thus it is immediate. Your purposeful action was in your training and practice. You programmed the subroutines so you don’t need to figure it out on the fly. You programmed your senses to respond appropriately to threat or things in the environment that you need to act against, you’ve programmed your body to react effectively and powerfully without thinking about your technique or form. You have more of a brain than your pre-frontal cortex. Form without form is in effect learning how to use the rest of your brain such everything must not be executive decision making. Do not micromanage yourself. Executive action on big things. Executive action in learning. Not on details when time matters. This is what is meant in the cliche “trust in your training.”
To be in the world and see things poorly, to be unable to distinguish one matter from another and to regard this as Emptiness – this is not the true Emptiness. All that is just the mind of confusion.
Do not take Emptiness to mean that you can or should be an NPC. This is more akin to typing than autopilot. When I type I think the words I wish to appear on the screen as if I am speaking to you. My fingers do this. I do not need to know where the keys are, I do not need to watch my fingers and command their actions. I think and words appear.
Dedicated purposeful training and study in the Way is necessary to make it a very core of your being. Here’s the paradox again. In doing this your actions become more automatic, yet they are rational. When you have time you are thoughtful and deliberate. Yet too when your responses are automatic, they are thoughtful and deliberate because you thought about them in the past. There are many things in this world that we can prepare for as there “is nothing new under the Sun.” We see events and problems repeat again and again. Our enemies respond and use the same tactics in the same ways. We can prepare for this such it is unnecessary we take the time to think about exactly what to do in the moment. We did that prior in training. We did that prior in playing the “what-if game”. We do not think exactly how to point our rifle, use our sights, dot on target, where to hold, tighten the shoulder, pull the trigger. We just do it. Sometimes all this feels like becoming an NPC. What you’ve actually done is reduced your anxiety of the world because you’ve become more comfortable with yourself. You’ve reduced friction between your mind, yourself, and your world. It is unnecessary to fight internally with everything. Trust your preparations and training have made you as you wish, thus becoming your true self. Anxiousness hinders us. Anxiousness means train more and sharpen our abilities more. Outside of training we must trust in ourselves such we can find tranquility.
Musashi is not saying to embrace ignorance, to be unaware and unable to see. Quite the opposite. Being unaware, blank, soulless is the default state. We on the Path seek to move away from this state as much as possible. Maybe this is the symbolism of the Path in its very essence. This blank animalistic default state is the origin point, and we journey away from it.
One must remove friction from who and what you are. You make yourself such that you behave and act appropriately without having to fight yourself in each day and moment to act correctly. The first opponent you defeat is yourself. You know how to conduct yourself as a warrior, set yourself up in this way, and you simply do without further consideration or deliberation. If you’re asking “How do I present myself as a warrior”, you’re doing it wrong. You make your instincts as you want them, you make your emotions respond as you want and need. You think rationally when you have time. You write the functions for yourself to call on so when you don’t have time you still behave in a rational and effective way.
While you are yet ignorant of true Emptiness, you may think through your own certain Way, relying on neither Buddhism nor the laws of society, and think this is good. But when you see things from the straight Way of the mind, taking in the world at large, you will see that each person will have the preferences of his own heart, and each eye will have its own distortions. This is turning your back on the True Way. In Emptiness exists Good, but no Evil.
I copy the above paragraph directly because in these few lines are many threads of wisdom. There are more than I present below.
From feudal Japan Muasahi warns us about relativism. There is objective truth in the Universe and the True Way is coherent with it. Emptiness is not this relativism. While in your natural state you find truth and wisdom springing forth from Emptiness itself. Substance from nothingness. Thus, there is only Good from the Void as there is only truth and reality. To find evil it is necessary to distort truth, rationalize and twist thought into justifications for that which is not real and not good. To distort, adjectives and judgments must be added onto things and situations that just are. One must learn to see the Universe and that within it for what it truly is without overlaying our biases, preferences, and distortions on it.
The modern practice of second guessing, chiming in your own hot take, and arm chair quarterbacking is not of the Void. You were not there. You do not know the totality of the situation as observed by the person on the field. You get to replay it and are in no danger and with no time pressure. You get the benefit of knowing how events turned out. This will color your thinking and make pulling from the Void impossible. It is not possible to know how your actions would have turned out differently so belief is in the certainty of correctness, though this cannot actually be known. One sees something they do not like or do not agree with and instead of seeking to understand, they dismiss and ridicule. Often ad hominem rather than the issue at hand, as there is no valid criticism of the issue at hand so the attack lands on the messenger… because an attack must be made for one’s ego, insecurities, and anxieties. Accepting information, understanding it, integrating or disregarding it for its own sake does not draw attention and fame. Constant criticism of others is a symptom of your own preferences, distortions, and anxieties manifesting. And yet… one seems to convince themselves in doing this they are on the True Path, teaching its wisdom to others, but they are well away from it and tempting others away.
Your Wisdom of the Martial Arts turns the Universe itself into a font of knowledge and success as you learn the True Way and walk the Path.
You should investigate all of this thoroughly.