Emptiness means simply that all the experiences of the six areas - whatever is seen, heard, smelt, tasted, touched, thought - are without an abiding, independent nature, that phenomena are not something that one can identify with, call a self. It is not some sort of transcendent experience or realm, and such an interpretation is a mistake. Therefore ideas about God are just ideas, and there is no place for it in Buddhism. Enlightenment is awakening to the lack of any substance in appearances and of any substratum beyond them. When there is no essence imagined, then there is no basis for grasping at or abiding in anything, and without grasping or abiding there is no dissatisfaction and delusion. To conceive emptiness, the absence of substance, as a distinct reality, is just another form of self-identity.
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