by Greg Goode
Rationality meant preferring more of something desired, over less. I believed that this was an essential component of rationality. I was still pretty essentialist (we will be looking at essentialism in more detail later) while I was in graduate school. Blanshard’s analysis had helped me with physical objects. But with persons, concepts and abstract objects, I still believed that they had a true nature, an inner essence that was somehow hidden deep within them. The essence was non-physical, I thought, but it still seemed to make persons and abstract things what they truly are. Rationality seemed like this too. I thought that we were able to discover the essence of rationality if we looked hard enough in the right way.
So this definition (R) seemed pretty solid. I truly believed it. In the language of emptiness teachings, one could say that I thought that rationality was inherently existent, and that (R) truly described it. In my work, I never sought to defend or justify (R). I merely assumed it because it seemed so obviously true. My advisors in the philosophy department never questioned it either, since it’s a common assumption in discussions of rational choice theory, and maybe they believed it too.
Was I in for a big surprise! One day I was consulting with a professor in the economics department about some equations I was writing. He was a young, intelligent, charmingly eccentric specialist in the theory of interest. He wrote mathematically sophisticated papers on how various time intervals affect human choice.
He looked at (R). “What makes this rational?” he asked. “We can create a theory where it’s actually rational to prefer less rather than more. Rationality is not something you assume; it is something you define. And we can define it in different ways.”
I was shocked! I was speechless for a moment. I got that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, where my world seemed to be slipping away. I’m glad this kindly professor had patience with me. But I had no answer for him. I couldn’t tell him what made (R) rational. I actually saw his point. He was saying that the kind of choice patterns I had regarded as inherent in the nature of choice could be accounted for by agreement – in my case, unreflective agreement. I saw that how one characterizes choice patterns is open to alternatives. Rationality did not need to be something pre-existent and independent of definitions. In other words, it was ... empty.
I saw that most of my dissertation was now invalid as it stood, being based on the assumption that (R) was really true. I gradually recovered from the feeling of being destabilized, and went on to spend the next several months rewriting! This was a transformational insight into the emptiness of something that I had held dear. I was uneasy partly because I suspected that this same insight might apply to other things as well. It might even apply across the board, wherever I looked.
But I didn’t seek to generalize the insight as someone would if they were involved in a path of self-inquiry. I had a sense that I’d return to this subject sometime later, but at the time I was intent upon finishing graduate school.
Even so, something was still happening. Something was rumbling. I seemed to be becoming more open. It began with intellectual issues. Without trying to, I began noticing more pointers to the same “it’s not inherent” insight.
I no longer regarded ideas as wrong or incorrect or irrational. I warmed up to them instead. I began to open up emotionally and esthetically as well. I became interested in music, art and culture that I had previously ignored or disliked. I had been raised as an atheist, and after attending a gospel concert one evening, I even found myself warming up to Pentecostal Christianity. After a kundalini-like epiphany experience during one particular song, I joined a local church, attended several times a week, experienced some fulfillment of the heart, and even became a deacon. Before that discombobulating talk with the economics professor about rationality, I wouldn’t have been able to imagine such a thing.
These are just a few tastes of emptiness. There are many more small stories, and some big ones. You most likely have had encounters with emptiness as well. And the more global the realization, the deeper the joy, the more open the heart. Instead of feeling insecure because of losing your certainties, you feel like you’ve escaped from jail into an open new world of possibilities.
Realizing Emptiness Globally
One way to describe the freedom that comes from realizing emptiness globally is “joyful irony.” This isn’t irony in the traditional literary or psychological sense, which is usually a purposeful stance imbued with negativity, frustration or cynicism. It is the liberating realization that your most cherished views and values are as empty as everything else. You realize that your thoughts, words, views and values still obtain, but in a conventional sense only.
The irony, as we’re calling it, is the recognition that this is all there is to it, and that it is quite good enough! The old claims of inherency and objectivity have been realized as incoherent, and the yearning for these things has fallen away. This sense of irony is inspired by Richard Rorty’s positive sense in his book, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. This kind of irony is an open, spontaneous and creative attitude one takes towards cognition, language, meaning and communication.
The joy is the enthusiasm and openness of heart that accompany this recognition. The joy comes from the same heart-opening compassion and openness that assist you in realizing emptiness. In this openness lies the enthusiasm to recreate yourself, and if you wish, to recreate the world. Sure, you may discover limitations, but no inherent ones.
Irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom.
Anatole France, The Literary Life
Your recognition also applies to your own spiritual path. It is as though the very ladder you ascended has fallen away. As a joyful ironist, you stop thinking that some paths (including the “pathless paths”) get you closer to reality as it is. The various assumptions connected to “as it is” melt away. You feel joy, no longer being captivated by the idea that there’s a doctrine, style or model of spiritual enlightenment that is a true descriptor of the way things are in themselves. This is not because you discover that all paths are equal, but because the notion of “things in themselves” has stopped making sense. Things in themselves would be non-empty things. You have looked for non-empty things in your meditations, but never found them. This leaves you free to pursue any path, activity or goal of life based on your passions and enthusiasms, and the appeal these things have for you. At the same time, the heart opens. Your love for others, and your sensitivity to their love for you, begin to flourish as never before.
Epic irony is rather an irony of the heart, a loving irony; it is greatness filled with tenderness for little things.
Thomas Mann, The Art of the Novel
Times Square Is Empty
– Tomas Sander
I was studying with Greg as one of my spiritual teachers and wanted to understand the meaning of concepts such as non-duality, oneness and emptiness. I had an impression that it was from these that so much of the Eastern spiritual magic stems. So I needed to know. I had tried some Eastern emptiness and non-duality sources. I was fascinated and intrigued by them, but I just didn’t get emptiness
So being at a loss, I asked Greg if one could study emptiness teachings with the Western philosophical sources, hoping that they would be easier to grasp. Greg said, “Sure,” and suggested that I begin with the easier guys. He recommended Richard Rorty. That turned out to be a great choice. Rorty is an anti-dualist (as he calls it) on fire. I can also attest that he’s a pleasure to read, even if one doesn’t fully understand him. After a few weeks of reading Rorty I was hooked on Western philosophy as a tool for spiritual inquiry.
Rorty throws lots of names around. That made me curious to tackle the guys he said are the most radically deconstructive – the philosophical heavyweights like Derrida, Quine, Sellars, Davidson, Wittgenstein and Heidegger. All the while I received invaluable guidance from Greg as to how to use these texts towards the goal of understanding emptiness: you use their arguments to deconstruct something that you bel
ieve truly exists – and I believed that many things truly existed.
Over time, I added constructionism, physics, psychology, neuroscience and logical foundations of mathematics to my reading menu. It still amazes me how helpful these areas can be in understanding emptiness, and how fun they can be to engage with, if looked at with an eye to their pragmatic benefits!
Here is one example that blew my mind: I wrote my doctoral thesis in mathematics. If anything, I thought that the laws of logic were inherently and universally true. These are laws such as: “Every sentence is true or false,” or “A sentence can’t be simultaneously true and false.” At first, I was shaken when, after reading some of Wittgenstein’s work, I realized that even the laws of logic are subject to conventional agreement, rather than being absolutely true. Agreeing with them becomes an option and is no longer a command. This was beautifully freeing for Tomas, the mathematician.
I believe that insights into emptiness have made me more effective as an employee in the corporate environment where I work. A major benefit that emptiness studies offer is an unparalleled mental flexibility. Once I realized that there is no objective, indisputable referent in reality for the things we as humans talk about, contra dictions are no longer a fundamental problem, but to be expected. They simply need to be worked through on a practical level.
Clothed in facts Truth
Feels oppressed;
In the garb of poetry
It moves easy and free.
Rabindranath Tagore
Finding Ease
Through the immersion in these teachings, the rigidness and solidity of seemingly inherently existing phenomena give way to a precious lightness of life and the world. The famous Buddhist writer Shantideva expresses beautifully how our mind comes finally to rest:
When neither something nor nothing
Remains to be known,
There is no alternative left
But complete non-referential ease.
I feel that, as a person who had been seeking truth and ultimate reality, I found a satisfying answer in the realization of the emptiness of all phenomena. This realization comes with a great sense of ease.
Freedom from Rigid Ideas
For spiritual practitioners like me, the rigid attitude of knowing what’s right for everyone is an easy temptation. Spiritual teachings tend to have notions of absolutes, which by their very nature seem to trump everything else, but emptiness meditation demonstrates spiritual grand narratives to be as empty as everything else. None of them can claim to have absolute, transcendent truth on their side, so all of them need to prove themselves on the level of conventional, ordinary reality. Thus any view is put to the test of conventional reality with practical questions like: “Whom does the view serve and who is being marginalized?” or, “Is the view helpful, compassionate or humane?”
There is also a highly personal dimension to this freedom. After all, many of the beliefs that matter to us are about our self and about our life. How does emptiness apply to them? Things I say about myself, such as “I’m smart,” I’m stupid,” “I’m handsome,” “I’m plain,” “It is horrible that I lost that opportunity” or “My life has been a good one,” are all empty of any inherent truth.
Seeing the emptiness of rigid, personal beliefs like these also makes space for more positive beliefs.
It’s OK To Be Western
Seeing the emptiness of belief in general allowed me to kick the habit of believing that any one way of life is intrinsically superior. For example, I worried at times that I needed to be like a Tibetan realized practitioner. If I didn’t become like my revered masters, I feared I would miss out on reality as it truly is. And in that case, my life would be ultimately wasted. It was a wonderfully freeing moment to recognize that there simply is no one way that reality “really” is, and therefore no way to miss out on it.
Consequently, there can be no one absolutely best way of living your life. At that moment, it became completely OK to be my Western self again, rather than trying to emulate what I took to be the Eastern blueprint of an enlightened practitioner’s way of life. This was a turning point that gave me freedom and confidence. There were a few weeks of grief as my relationships to my teachers adjusted. I am still devotional, but in a new way. I realized that I can love and admire my Eastern teachers and learn many valuable things from them. But there’s no need to discount my Western culture and lifestyle in order to adopt a projected fantasy of Eastern perfection.
The Eastern view of a good life is just as empty as the Western view, so there is no metaphysical reason to privilege one over the other. Are there conventional, practical differences? Yes. Most people would agree that there are different advantages you can attribute to the Eastern and Western models of the good life, but neither model has it all. Even though I started out feeling that the Eastern model was superior, I came to realize that in the end, it is OK to be Western again.
On a practical level, being Western can include things that do not often receive praise in Buddhism, and this is not a problem. For example, it is OK to go with preferences I see as Western: self-expression rather than harmony and conformity, or activity and striving over inactivity and quietude, or high-energy emotions such as excitement and enthusiasm over low-arousal emotions like serenity and contentment.
Even so-called “unspiritual” activities can be part of life’s beauty and richness. For example, I don’t have to restrict my interests to Sufi poetry. I can also enjoy fashion, interior decoration, and the trance music of Cosmic Gate or Paul van Dyk.
I now feel free to enjoy these Western alternatives!
Even Self-Creation Is OK
Some spiritual practitioners believe the self needs to be denied altogether. Consequently, they hold that deliberate acts of self-creation, which transform and work with the self (rather than outright denying it), are counterproductive. Those acts purportedly just strengthen the ego.
For the record, this is not the common Buddhist position. Although Buddhism is known for saying that the self doesn’t ultimately exist, it grants the self a conventional existence.
By realizing that the inherently existent self does not exist, one is freed up to work with the empty self. This is where the West’s abundant resources for creative self-expression can come in handy. You can celebrate and transform the (empty) self, creatively expressing it in ever new ways. The self can even be treated as a work of art.
What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects, and not to individuals, or to life.
Foucault (1984)
Joyful Irony
Joyful irony is our Western way to describe the fruition of the emptiness teachings. You no longer think that your own values and goals are underwritten by the nature of reality. This insight enables a flexible, unattached attitude towards your own views and vocabularies, and fosters respect for the views of others.
For me, Ludwig Wittgenstein has been one of the strongest influences along these lines. His work on the dependence of self upon language and conventional practices has been very important to me. I can even say that these insights have occasionally given me a beautiful, mystical sense of oneness – of being “spoken” by language. Through language I am interwoven with human culture, history, the world at large, and even the future. How unexpected that these insights come about through language, logic and analysis!
Experiencing everything as interrelated through language was not only a mystical experience for me, but it also reduced my tendency to privilege a particular view or vocabulary. This was a great step towards what we are calling joyful irony.
Wittgenstein also helped me when I was in a phase of negating too much, and landing on negations as if they were truths. For a period of a few months, I was in a heavy deconstructive phase with the Western philosophies and teachings. I was trying to come to the “Truth,” thinking that this is what an emptiness student is supposed to do. But all the negating I was doing was kind of
an extreme – it certainly didn’t feel like the complete non-referential ease that Shantideva talks about.
I had an “Aha” moment when reading Stephen Mulhall’s Wittgenstein’s Private Language, which put this excessive deconstructive habit to rest. Mulhall discusses Wittgenstein’s famous treatment of the idea of a private language – a language expressing one’s inner experiences and known only to a single person, not shared with anyone else. Wittgenstein shows that there are problems with the very notion of a private language (let’s call it “X”).
In my efforts to negate things, I was interpreting Wittgenstein’s insight as saying “There is no X.” I was doing this with all my other negations as well.
Mulhall helped me realize a subtle difference. He pointed out that Wittgenstein wasn’t saying “There is no X,” but that there is a problem with X. This is a subtle but significant difference. Wittgenstein was saying that there is a private language that can’t be given a coherent or satisfactory meaning.
Aha! Wittgenstein and Mulhall nudged me to the next insight. If one side of an assertion is incoherent, then so is the other side. If “There is an X” is incoherent, then so is “There is no X.” I had been landing on “There is no X” as if it were true. In my urge to negate everything, I had been negating something that was incoherent in the first place, and making a truth out of it. Wittgenstein and Mulhall helped heal my compulsion to do this. I had a good laugh. This insight brought me closer to the ease about which the emptiness teachings talk. Mountains were finally mountains again.4
Not landing on negations as true helped me open up to a wide variety of interests and passions. I no longer felt as though I had to forcefully separate myself from the affairs of life. That had not felt free or joyful; it was a guarded, closed posture. Without having to negate things in life and regard the negations as true, I felt free to enjoy my passionate pursuits.