by Greg Goode
This means that there is always more that could be explored. This, in turn, is related to the huge variety of bodies of conventional truth. We will talk about some of those in this chapter.
A Surprising Freedom in Emptiness
In the “How Not To Misunderstand Emptiness” chapter, we discussed the idea of the “two truths.” Even though it is a Buddhist idea, it is also compatible with how our Western emptiness teachings proceed. The two truths contain an unexpected freedom. That freedom is in realizing that there can be more than one approach to conventional truth. There is room for choice among approaches, and the two truths do not privilege one approach over others.
Conventional truth can be thought of as a set of guiding ways of life, views and procedures that help us get around the world. Indeed, the emptiness teachings themselves are a body of conventional truth. Conventional truth is how we talk about our goals and values and lives. While there are vast areas of overlap, there are also many flavors or styles to conventional truth. One person’s body of conventional truth could be religiously inspired, with words like Buddha, sutra, jnana. Another person’s body of conventional truth could be inspired by psychology, with words like self-esteem, subconscious and shadow work. Another person’s conventional truth could be characterized by cognitive science, with words like cognitive bias, knowledge-based systems or neural networks.
And then there is a way of looking at things which Buddhism calls ultimate truth. Ultimate truth is how we see things as they are – empty. Ultimate truth doesn’t discard conventional truth, but liberates it, while liberating us, too. Even words, signs and symbols become light, playful and magical, as though you can juggle them or swim in them. There is great spaciousness and joy in this.
Ways of Life
But these two truths don’t tell us which way of life to adopt. This is another way of saying that you don’t need to be Buddhist. As long as your body of conventional truth has enough richness and normative force to encourage compassion and community, and to give the emptiness teachings the radical bite needed by the reasonings, then you have a huge field to choose from.
We recommend, if you are interested, that you explore different ways of life, final vocabularies, bodies of conventional truth and more. Spiritual paths, psychologies, philosophies, esthetic gestalts, artistic endeavors, scientific pursuits – enact them! Try them on for size like jumping into a new pool or trying on a new suit of clothes. Move around in them. How do you like it? You may find a perspective that you really resonate with.
Looking at and through different perspectives is something that we have done for decades. Each of us is enthusiastic about several of the powerful Western approaches covered in this book. Tomas and Greg both like the ways of inquiry suggested by Nagarjuna and Tsongkhapa. In addition, Tomas loves Wittgenstein and Heidegger’s approach. Greg loves Derrida and Sextus’ approach. Tomas resonates with the perspective of positive psychology. Greg resonates with a sort of a post-postmodern take on rhetorical and cultural studies. And new affinities may be discovered later. All of these various approaches to conventional truth place a very high value on compassion, communication, community and liberating insight.
The very process of exploration can itself be a powerful teaching on the emptiness of views. To see your current favorite perspective as one among many actually helps you see its emptiness. Seeing its emptiness, you become free from it. You can hold it lightly while allowing it to work for you. You effortlessly maintain a heart-filled openness and perhaps curiosity about alternatives held by other people. And this process, though not strictly necessary, is also helpful in today’s world, where we confront more and more diversity each day.
Joyful Irony and the Emptiness Journey
Lightheartedness or joyful irony can be thought of as shorthand for your experience as the emptiness teachings take hold. This term was inspired by Richard Rorty, one of our favorite teachers of emptiness in the Western sense. Rorty wrote approvingly of the liberal ironist – the person who sees how no world view, even their own, can be objectively grounded without some kind of illogical circular reasoning.35 This makes the liberal ironist more humble about their own views, and open-minded, friendly and hospitable to other views.
This is a pretty good explanation in non-Buddhist terms of what it is to realize the emptiness of the emptiness teachings. You become open and ironic towards even your own teachings, not expecting them to connect to objective reality. Seeing views like this is what Nagarjuna means in verse 29 of the Vigrahavyavartani (Westerhoff, 2010), when he says that he has no propositions. In our modern, diverse world where we confront lots of different views, Rorty’s liberal ironist feels open towards other views, perhaps even curious about them.
Irony
The “irony” in joyful irony comes from realizing that even emptiness and its teachings are empty. It entails the freedom from taking thought and expression as literally pointing to independent objects. As a joyful ironist, you see even your most cherished stories as empty of absolute truth. Irony is a special flavor of the play of emptiness.
Irony is traditionally part of Western rhetorical and communication studies. It is a trope or turn of phrase like “metaphor” and “simile.” Irony is sometimes considered to be the master trope for the modern era, because it suggests the general ability of language to depart from literal meaning. Sometimes words can take on a meaning quite the opposite from the literal, as when you say that it would be “horrible” if you won the lottery.
Sometimes “ironic” is used to mean “cynical,” “sarcastic,” or “superior” in relation to other people. But we are not talking about being ironic in a narrow or insulting way about someone else’s story. We have even seen the emptiness teachings themselves being used as a weapon to belittle others. We are drawing on the broad global sense, in which irony is a clue to how all meaning, even the meaning of my own story, is equally empty of inherent existence and fixed reference.
In fact, irony itself can be a fascinating emptiness teaching. The possibility of irony is always deeply embedded in thought and expression. It is present even in the very situations that seek to outlaw it and guarantee that we have accurate, literal meaning!
Even logic is powerless to expel irony. Logic itself, supposedly the purest and most exact form of thinking, cannot guarantee literal meaning, as this story shows: during a lecture at Columbia University in the 1950’s, the Oxford linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin was talking about double negatives such as “not uncommon.” He made the claim that although in English a double negative implies a positive meaning, there is no language in which a double positive implies a negative. Another philosopher, Sidney Morgenbesser, was sitting in the audience and responded in a dismissive tone, “Yeah, yeah.”
Before we realize emptiness at least a little bit, we think that thoughts and words point to objects. It’s as though we picture objects on the one side and thought and linguistic expression on the other side as totally independent of each other, separated by serious dualistic gaps such as inner/outer or language/reality. We nevertheless somehow trust that thoughts and expressions hit their objective targets like accurate arrows released by expert archers.
But when we realize the emptiness of emptiness, we realize that objectivity and independent objects cannot be found anywhere. The result is that language becomes ironic, light and non-referentially joyful. It is deeply experienced as an open web of conventional relations, activities and linguistic practices. There is no more gestalt of thought and language reaching out and grasping an independent world.
A wonderful irony is that even “pointing” the very word used to explain literal, objective meaning, is itself a metaphor and not literal!
Joy
The “joy” in joyful irony comes from the freedom, lightness and openness of heart in realizing emptiness. We see our self, the world, thoughts and language as equally empty. When we see our own stories as empty, we cannot see the stories of others as objectively false. There is
great fellow feeling in this. In our own experience, this joy has created an enthusiastic curiosity about other people, teachings, ways of life, vocabularies, and models of conventional truth. It brings us closer to other people and their concerns. This outward pouring of joy relates to compassion in a mutually dependent way. The joy intensifies compassion while at the same time being assisted by compassion.
The irony and heart-filled joy affect each other in a richly beautiful dance, where each partners the other. They move together in a music of brilliance, in which nothing is truly existent, and yet nothing is missing.
Ironic Engagement
After we had come up with the idea of “joyful irony” as a term for a kind of fruition of the emptiness teachings, we discovered Mark Siderits’ notion of ironic engagement. It’s an amazingly similar idea. In his wonderful book entitled Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy: Empty Persons (Siderits 2003), he suggests ironic engagement as a “middle path in ethics.” It is a way of relating to things in the world once we know they are empty.
When we realize that things are empty, we realize that things don’t exist in the way that they had appeared to exist. But we can still avoid nihilism. As Siderits puts it, we can avoid “alienation from our projects and important emotions.” He characterizes ironic engagement like this:
...[T]he name is meant to suggest that we are able to enter into certain sorts of engaged attitudes despite a knowledge that would seem distancing (in the way irony is usually thought to be), and thus alienating.
Siderits (2003)
Siderits gives the analogy of civic pride.36 I can be proud of the various virtues of my city even though I know that there is no such thing as a city apart from people, buildings and an infrastructure. Does this knowledge mean that I have no basis for civic pride? On the contrary, I can be proud of my city and enthusiastic about it if I engage it ironically. Siderits writes,
So as I wax poetic in singing the city’s praises to the visitor, I shall also comment wryly on the somewhat hyperbolic character of my account. Still I do wax poetic; I want to share my love of the city with others. I am ironically engaged.
Ibid
The wry comments supplied by the host in this description are something the joyful ironist would delight in communicating in many subtle ways. As a joyful ironist, you experience a tangible joy in the freedom from even your favorite notions.
It’s in the Details
What else can we say about the empty life? Can we be specific? To some degree, yes. But the quality of life has no single cause. So the particular qualities of your experience depend not only on emptiness meditations, but also on what else you do. For example, let’s talk about some of the approaches covered in this book.
The Buddhist practitioner may spend lots of time meditating on compassion, or on making a heavenly pure land out of phenomenality. The social constructionist (see the chapter entitled “Lightening up Your Social World”) may spend lots of time tracing out the specific dependencies between psychological characteristics and social dynamics, which increases the sense of relatedness to others. The radical holist (see “Challenging a Common Notion Of Truth” and “Loosening up Fixed Meaning in Language”) may spend time tracing the relationships between our statements and our practices, which reduces the felt heaviness in both. The deconstructionist (see “Deconstructing Presence”) might look at lots of thoughts and messages in our lives, seeking to discover how things that seem self-sufficient and foundational actually contain traces of the very things they reject. This discovery allows a sort of compassionate liberation in the “return of the repressed.” The Pyrrhonist (see “Liberating Yourself from Rigid Beliefs”) might examine the claims made by science, politics, religion and everyday life, opposing one claim to another, resulting in freedom from belief in any of them.
These different approaches are different activities in life. They take time. They have effects. They all agree that notions of inherent existence make no sense. But they go about things differently enough that it is hard to be too specific about what they have in common. The Buddhist might feel love for all sentient beings. The deconstructionist might experience the joy of discovery, along with a rush of enthusiasm for the everyday matters of life, and a heart-opening love for others. The Pyrrhonist might enjoy freedom from ever feeling anxious about which factual claim should be believed or about what is really the case. And we suspect that students of Western emptiness are very likely to mix and match several of these approaches (which we recommend). This leads to even greater variety in the activities and their experiential results. Even though the details differ, we will try in the next section to talk about some benefits that might apply to all the approaches we cover.
Common Benefits of Studying Emptiness
Some of the most common effects of studying emptiness are:
Freedom
Ease
Reduction of suffering
Love and compassion
A deep sense of connection with the world
Hope
Let’s look at these in turn.
Freedom
Seeing facts and truths as empty of any inherency rids them of the sense of heaviness and oppressive authority they can have. Seeing facts and truths as objective can make us feel inherently limited. Of course, realizing emptiness doesn’t mean that we can actually walk through walls. But our inability to do so needn’t feel heavy or somehow wrong.
Seeing through inherency and objectivity feels like a release from prison. We feel as though we have entered an infinite space of openness and possibility.
Let’s look at a few examples. We might have bought into oppressive labels, such as “unlovable”, that seemed to dictate our essence. But now they no longer make any sense. We are freed up to enjoy more nourishing perspectives and pursuits. Beliefs often advertise themselves as objective or written into the nature of reality. But seeing them as contingent and socially constructed makes them seem a lot less evident, a lot less limiting. This realization gives us the freedom to question and to look for alternatives.
Norms Not Rejected, but Liberated
We also become free from the oppressiveness of norms and “shoulds.” For example, the norm that says,
“To be of value in society, I should be a high performer, and financially successful.”
Hearing authoritative sentences containing “should” can feel like we are being handed an edict from God or the core of the universe (well, it has had that effect on me, Greg!). We can feel enslaved to this norm if we unquestioningly take it as objective. But seeing it as dependent on ideology or propaganda or financial interests can remove the sting of cosmic importance from the norm and open us up to new goals.
It’s not that rational and ethical norms disappear. Rather, they become free by becoming contextual and more intimately related to life. You stop treating them as if they emerged from the structure of the universe. They stop feeling so burdensome and artificial.
Even spiritual norms may have weighed heavily upon you before you realized their emptiness. You may have felt that they were objectively true, and you may have struggled to shape your spiritual life around them. Examples of spiritual norms that you now see as empty may include:
“I should work to make the world a better place.”
“I should be compassionate.”
“I need to drop my ego.”
“I must become unconditionally loving.”
“I need to become fully enlightened.”
The Effects in Everyday Life
The effects of this newly gained freedom are quite practical in everyday life. If management asks you to fulfill your duty to the corporation and work extra-long hours, you may smile. You may still choose to work hard enough to keep your job, but you’ll be free from the guilt that can come with these kinds of demands. If a well-meaning meditation teacher drops a favorite cliché on the students such as
“You must be more in the now, because the present is the only thing that’s r
eal,”
You don’t have to take the reality of the now as objectively true. You have the freedom to see through the injunction while at the same time meditating in accord with what’s being recommended.
If you are watching TV and a religious leader or psychologist proclaims a best way to live that people should follow, you will have realized that a notion like the best life simply can’t be given any coherent meaning. You’ll feel the freedom to continue watching, or change the channel.
What sets you free in all of these cases, what lets you smile, is the deep knowing that all these ideas are empty of the objective truth they claim to have.
It Gets Deeper
The types of freedom described above are already quite helpful! They actually deal with a lot of the burden that ensnares us in our everyday life. But of course, these examples are still fairly tame. You may wonder,
“Is this all the freedom that spiritual teachings can offer? Or is there more to be had? Could this be enough to justify the far-reaching promises that spiritual teachings tend to make about liberation?”
Good question!
Indeed, there are much deeper freedoms to be had and we explore this further in this chapter. As a second step, emptiness can help you to become free from views, even though at first they may not even be visible to you as a view.
A powerful example, inspired by Martin Heidegger, is the mechanistic, calculative, technological world view in which we view the earth, people, and things we encounter. They are all unthinkingly taken as objects to be consumed or used to some end. This view is so pervasive and unquestioned that it might not even be detectable as a view at all. It therefore won’t occur to us that life can be experienced differently.
If I am entranced by the calculative mode of thinking of this view, it is easy to experience myself as a machine that needs tuning up. I might then feel the need to tune up by obsessively pursuing the newest self-help programs. The domineering world view of science feeds these technological attitudes through its focus on linear cause and effect relationships and measurements.