What we think of as agency might actually just be deeper insight into emptiness and its pragmatic application.
Every situation we find ourselves in is empty. The situation at hand depends on individual perception. Each person in the situation has a different perspective, informed by many changing conditions such as our past conditioning, our current mood, how much sleep we got that night, our current energy level, and the associations we have in our mind with said situation.
This is important because these many changing conditions reveal that it is empty, not containing an independent ground for it to exist upon. The situation at hand is fluid in its nature.
This is what highly agentic people truly see. They see that the things in front of them possess no hard boundaries or rules, and thus can be manipulated or fabricated in their own way. Why should that person’s perception of said situation be more important than my own? There is no true answer to this question, which leaves room for individuals to fabricate beautiful experiences without anyone’s permission.
This insight is also one key to unlocking nervous system mastery that is so important for agency. Many things that were causing our nervous system to freak out, such as other’s opinions of us, is also empty. Why should that person’s perception take precedent over my own desires and Will To Be? Or, why should I take the rules of this thing I find myself in literal, when the rules are dependent on individual mind?
When you realize these perceived threats lack independent existence, they lose their power to trigger you. Once you truly see that these perceived threats have no inherent ground to exist upon and are fluid, your nervous system has permission to settle.
Eventually, we find ourselves when looking through this lens of emptiness acting in ways that release the hard boundaries of what we’ve been conditioned to be, and instead shape our behavior into beautiful fabrications that we want to see.
The next time you find yourself saying how things “should be,” ask where exactly are those “shoulds” and do they truly exist outside of individual perception? If not, you have permission to choose differently.