running on empty

You can't empty yourself enough to cause another to 'come empty'. The storm is her storm and not yours. You can't take on that responsibility. It will exhaust itself as you weather it.

Yep, that's a very important observation.
One of the most difficult things to "control/influence" is someone else's focus.

Yeah, that's what most are trying to figure out, be it friends, mates, parents, children, media or government.

OTOH, it's true that 'everybody is where they need to be', as relationships are formed by our own focus of attention. It also means that one who cannot come empty cannot remain for long (or remain full) in the presence of your emptiness.

Being free from the belief in separation sounds nice.  Seemingly, there's two types of beliefs that we can forumlate, conscious and unconscious.  The religious fanatic will likely tell you about some firmly established beliefs, and if you were to tell that fanatic that freedom is the absence of those beliefs, they just might chop your head off.  These are beliefs which the identity are tied up in, and the reason they exist relatively is because their presence is desirable even if limiting.

The question is, how and why do such beliefs formulate.  Obviously similar structures are erected in the spiritual game, as the idea that everything is one and that the individual is that one cascade out beyond the already existing belief structures to provide the emotional body with some distance from an experience which can only be interpreted as conditions separate from a conditioned self.  The last thing the mind identification wants is the loss of identity, such that moving the belief line outward into some transcendent conceptual framework actually serves to prevent coming empty than not.  When you factor in experiential glimpses of oneness and the like you have an ongoing experience which can confirm the relative truth of a belief structure which is often erected under the guise of not believing in anything or the idea that nothing is ultimately true.

There is an energetic movement which leads to the creation of conscious belief structures, as much present in the religious fanatic as the latest pop de jour spiritual guru, and that is the conditioned mechanical tendency to break off from one's own line of thinking, leading to an unconscious mind and a conscious one.  That break in thinking leads to an energetic barrier, as thoughts and feelings mechanically oriented to happen are denied the chance to do so.  The rebound effect from that break leads to conscious belief structures and the unconscious energy which keeps them in place.  Meaning, the religious fanatic might tell you about all sorts of beliefs, but in actuality he has no idea why he believes what he does.  Becoming conscious of how and why would be the end of the belief, which isn't the inability to entertain an idea, just the absence of the limitation experienced through that entertainment.

If we're going to use the word guise then sure, the idea that nothing is believed on the conscious level can be (as opposed to must be) proof that something is believed unconsciously. This doesn't implicitly mean that the idea of not believing in anything to describe a mind state or dynamic mode of thought means the same thing. I would say the former guise is far more common than the latter description, however.

Right I said guise because I was talking about the deceptive non believers so when you asked the question I lumped it in with that group.  

The only way to walk I don't have any beliefs is to realize those feet thingamajiggers don't actually belong to you.  It's a nonsense idea to begin with.  It's like the water in the cup asking how to empty the cup.  Then life turns the cup upside down, and all the other waters want to know what it feels like to be empty.  The empty cup doesn't translate into water terms except in the sense there's no more water.  



Seeing that nothing is ultimately true helps in bringing down beliefs when they're already on the table.  It can also put the beliefs beneath the table under the protection of the table cloth with the marking 'nothing is ultimately true' reflecting off the chandelier hanging from Grandma's fancy 19th century Miss Havishamesque 30 foot ceiling. 

So we come back to the question of whether or not liberation is freedom from belief?  At that point a helpful caveat to acknowledge is whether belief is lined up with desire.  That line marks the suffering, because that's where the head-banging takes place.