by Greg Goode
Is it possible to perceive the world differently? Fortunately, yes. Spiritual teachings are a treasure trove for that.
For example, you may be inspired by the Hindu notion of lila or play. You may be moved to see the universe as play, a lucid phantasmagoria, free of personal striving and goal-orientation. The lila world is relational and playful, which feels very different from the dead-seriousness that comes with living as a machine where so much energy goes into pressing the correct button for the next seemingly important outcome. Rather, you can enjoy the play as such – its wondrous nature and delightful beauty.
The concept of dependent arising in the emptiness teachings has some poetic kinship with the idea of a dance.
You may wonder how you can enter these world views? A good entrance strategy is to read up on them, Google them, visit places where they are put into play, and see how they resonate.
Jacques Derrida (one of Greg’s favorites) also wrote a lot about play. He was playfully serious and seriously playful about it:
Play is always play of absence and presence, but if it is to be thought radically, play must be conceived of before the alternative of presence and absence. Being must be conceived as presence or absence on the basis of the possibility of play and not the other way around.
Derrida (1978)
After some familiarization, you may intuit that it actually is possible for you to experience the world without the incessant need for explanation, reason, and cause and effect relationships, or to personally advance. The world will then appear to you quite differently.
Investigating the emptiness of your current world view provides the basic freedom and flexibility to venture out. Your life will be immeasurably enriched through these journeys.
To experience this deep and broad freedom, you won’t want to stop your emptiness inquiry too early, but have it cut deeper and deeper. Without question, new openings become available which were missed on earlier, coarser levels of inquiry. More and more fundamental truths are experienced as empty, and you become freer and freer.
Another surprising realization that you may eventually make is that logic and rationality themselves are empty of objective, unquestionable truth. This is surprising because the emptiness meditations themselves often proceed by logical inference! But it is indeed a possibility. At that point, contradictions in the world, or a lack of coherence in your own identity, feel entirely rich and wonderful rather than disturbing.
Freedom from Extreme Views
Freeing yourself from a world view doesn’t mean to adopt its negation. That would just be more of the same, another compulsion. Instead, you can simply hold these views lightly, and apply them where they seem appropriate. For example, you can enjoy a good career without being too serious about it. You may construct a bridge using the latest science, but don’t need to view science as a blueprint for the universe. You don’t need to be coherent or logical in your choices, but a bit of logic where needed is not verboten – it’s simply how we get around.
Ease
A mind that has realized emptiness is naturally at ease. According to Buddhist teacher Karl Brunnhölzl, emptiness is the deepest state of relaxation a human being can experience. Ease is the felt sense flowing out of this realization. This ease is not just available when explicitly meditating on emptiness, but also in your everyday life. Experiences seen as empty are no longer so threatening.
A self which is realized as empty doesn’t need to defend itself against insults from others or even the negative labels you might habitually try to pin on yourself. This is a point where emptiness teachings surpass what psychology and psychotherapy ordinarily accomplish. These forms of therapy might see the labels as inconsistent with your optimal functioning, as not intrinsically true or deserved. They usually replace them with more positive self-descriptions. But the emptiness teachings go further, helping you discover your freedom from any intrinsic feature or label whatsoever. This sense of ease is much broader and more lasting.
Having realized emptiness, you hold whatever occurs in openness. Everything is diffused by the sweet ambiguity and lack of fixity that accompany all phenomena. This includes your personal hang-ups, your must-have goals, the ups and downs of your personal relationships, and even the asphalt of the street you walk on.
All phenomena have this “one taste” of emptiness. A beautiful German word for deep ease is Gelassenheit, sometimes translated as “releasement”. Emptiness comes with a deep and natural acceptance of how the world is and how we are. There is no ground from which arguments with reality can get started.
Not being able to argue with reality pacifies and preempts many of our struggles. You can, of course, still rebel, for example, against unjust social conditions. But even this rebellion occurs within this all-pervading lightness of being, not outside of it. Ease becomes the background against which your life, however turbulent, expresses itself. It is not just that you as a limited individual are at ease. Your whole world becomes infused with ease. This world is far from being dull and uninteresting. Emptiness lets the world shine with superb luminous beauty and depth.
Love and Compassion
The emptiness teachings can be seen as an abstract philosophical theory about how things exist. That can be pretty dry! But in a practical, soteriological context, which is our context, there are two reasons that realizing emptiness increases love and compassion.
One reason is sort of a reverse effect of how emptiness gets realized in the first place. Emptiness is much easier to realize if you already value a caring attitude and loving kindness. You are already more open towards others and interrelated with them. On the other hand, emptiness is much harder to realize if you are rigidly self-centered, egotistical, or oblivious to the needs and concerns of others. You feel shut off, not connected with others. This is why Buddhism and most other spiritual paths begin by opening the heart, and only later introduce students to abstract philosophical theories.
The result will be that when you realize emptiness, you will already be more loving and compassionate! And of course, realizing emptiness opens the heart much more, which brings us to the second reason.
The second reason that love and compassion are a fruit of emptiness is this: in realizing emptiness, you realize that you don’t exist as your own independent thing, but that you consist of elements that are not you. You, as an isolated entity, get out of the way. Your love and concern go out in every direction, without limit.
Realizing emptiness undermines the sense of separateness between self and others, self and the world. The borders between me and the desk and between me and you are empty. They are not solid, not able to be pinpointed. We contain traces and elements of each other; there is nothing we can find which is truly and solely our own. Even physical objects don’t appear as solid as they used to. Without this solidity, the rigid separation vanishes. The previously rigid borders and preferences confining our love are also no longer solid. Excessive self-concern melts into a broader concern for others, and can include non-human and even non-sentient objects.
The outflow of love and compassion is not a moral commandment in the emptiness teachings. It doesn’t feel dictatorial or oppressive. Even a typical Buddhist compassion meditation, such as the metta meditation, is presented as something optional that you may or may not want to do – it all depends on what you would like to do with your mind. This itself is a loving approach to becoming loving.
Another source of compassion comes from seeing that so much suffering is not necessary if people grasped the emptiness of the self even a little bit. Imagine – now that you know how easy it is to stick the label “unlovable” to yourself, and yet how nonsensical and unnecessary the label is – your heart cries out to your friend who is in agony over this very same label. Your compassion wells up. “If they could only know...!” You feel as if the tragic could be avoided, the way Romeo’s suicide would have been avoided had he only known that Juliet was still alive.
Another source of compassio
n is not deep or complicated at all, but simple and right on the surface. Seeing things as empty, we realize that we are dependent upon others, and that others are dependent upon us. We don’t say things like “I make my own way, I make my own luck; I don’t need others.” We no longer look upon ourselves as the single cause of our life.
Our interdependence happens through language, culture and shared resources. Realizing this emphasizes the felt similarities and reduces the felt differences between myself and others. The similarities and differences are not inherently existent, which brings us closer together. This brings out kinship, empathy and connection.
Deep Connection with the World
This is a fruit of emptiness that is similar to love, caring and compassion. It can be experienced as an outflow of the recognition that you and all things are related. The relatedness is not just causal but multivariate. Size, shape, location, number, molecular makeup, having a history that relates to other histories, being in a time or place – all these elements and more are shared with other beings or things. The more we examine any one thing, the more we are carried out into the vast web of interconnectedness, known as the world. Separation and disconnection are not the way we discover things to be when we look closely.
We and other things consist of elements that are present not only in us, but are repeated or repeatable elsewhere. No person or thing has a monopoly on anything. Wherever we look, we can find traces of things that can also be found elsewhere, including in us.
The very perception of things is also seen as relational. For example, to see a cat is to be able to see other cats. To see a cat is also not to see a dog and many other things. So even in perception, we are involved in a wonderful web of relations, where there are things present and things not present, seen and unseen. Realizing this can bring about amazement, enthusiasm and celebration!
This realization is not a transcendental state of being above the world or denying the world. We don’t get the feeling that “I am the world” or “the world happens in me.” On the other hand, we don’t feel lost, like an insignificant grain of sand either. Rather, we feel continuous with the world. We are separate enough to go to the store without the world going to the store. But we have lost the feeling of being “in here” and the world being “out there.”
Realizing emptiness is a deep recognition that we and the world depend upon each other and constitute each other in luminous, groundless, empty, multidirectional ways.
Hope
Seeing that phenomena don’t have any persistent, inherent nature gives rise to profound hope for the future. Because things can change and respond to conditions, they can improve. They can go the other way too, of course. But the realization is that neither bliss nor doom is inherently necessary or prefigured. There is play and room for movement in this lack of necessity. You even have the ability to fashion your own beliefs, at least a little bit. Our thoughts and intentions can help make the world a better place, as clichéd and sappy as that can sound!
These days the flexibility of identity has seeped into popular culture. It’s easy and even expected to reinvent yourself periodically, at least in superficial ways. Social media sites invite you to “Pimp Your Profile.” Celebrities like Madonna come out with new personas every few years. This might seem like a ridiculous extreme and might prompt the observation, “Yes, but that doesn’t get at the core of our identity.” But of course, that is just the point – what is the core? Can it be found? Is Madonna fundamentally and inherently off-base? Have you ever felt like a “new you” by traveling to a new place or putting on a new wardrobe? Imagine the possibilities when you realize that you are empty all the way down! Even imagining that can make the self seem more changeable and more amenable to positive transformation!
And what if the changes were just in how we think and feel, and not in how we look and present ourselves to the world? What then? But these changes will still make things look better even if a camera wouldn’t detect a change.
These are some of the fruits of emptiness. In what follows, we will sketch a few possible profiles of empty lives.
Reality by Design – Examples of Empty Lives
One of Tomas’ favorites, Ludwig Wittgenstein, once said,
The world of the happy is quite different from that of the unhappy.
Wittgenstein (2001)
He could have said that the happy interpret the world differently. But he said that the world of the happy is different. Is it really a different world? Part of the fruit of the emptiness teachings is to make a less metaphysically rigid distinction between the world and its interpretation. They both depend on each other, and we discover that we cannot come between them. That is, we can’t put ourselves in a position where we have a world without interpretation on one side, while having an interpretation without a world on the other side. Wittgenstein looked into these issues with great care, precision and originality, and his succinct words are all the more beautiful for it.
Here is another Western example of a reality by design. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger gave a lecture in 1949 where he talked about technology (see Heidegger 1982). As mentioned earlier, he had formulated a poignant critique of a calculative, technological world view. In speaking about the Rhine river, Heidegger observed that the river becomes something quite different if you put a hydro-electric power plant into it than if there is a wooden bridge across it that has been there for hundreds of years. The river becomes what he calls a “standing reserve” or “stock.” That is a very different river from the one described by the German lyric poet Friedrich Hölderlin in Der Rhein (The Rhine).
Since the world has no inherent nature, we have the very powerful ability to interact with it in many varied ways. We do not have to treat the world as a mere “standing reserve.” In fact, with our contemporary knowledge of the Gaia concept and environmental awareness, we have seen the consequences of treating the world in that way, and there are many options open for new ways of interacting with “nature”. This is a discovery very much in tune with emptiness.
There can be many lifestyles that are lived in recognition and celebration of emptiness. The example of the Buddhist monk or the lay Buddhist practitioner are well-known. They need no further introduction from us. These are not the only examples of an empty life. How could there be just a single possibility for a life lived in this recognition? The mere fact that there is one way means that there must be another. “Where there’s one, there’s two.”
Here are some dreamed-up profiles, which may inspire other ideas! You may just read through them or contemplate (some of) them as possibilities for yourself.
An Ordinary Person
Imagine being an ordinary person, who just may happen to love the emptiness teachings. Realizing emptiness makes it alright to be ordinary. You may turn out to be special and revered, but this is not necessary for your happiness. Ordinariness is perfectly fine. You keep emptiness warm in your heart and see it reflected in all the people and things you encounter. As a joyful ironist, you feel OK whether you are religious or not, Buddhist or not, Advaitin or not, spiritual or not. In fact, as the Buddhist teacher Karl Brunnhölzl puts it, “You don’t even have to call it ‘emptiness’.”
Occasionally during the day, you may stop in wonderment or amazement, and reflect on the objects in your everyday life as empty. The more they seem to be defined in a particular way or as solid things, the more joy you get from seeing that they are not like that. You see them as “gathering” human and non-human elements and causes and conditions (to use an apt and evocative Heideggerian term from his essay “The Thing”).
How wondrous! There is certainly a mystery to what it means to exist, and you can explore this mystery in your everyday meditations. Your goal isn’t to come up with a Final Answer. Instead, you have developed a taste for this mystery of the Being of beings, and so you savor the world as it discloses itself in such a different way now. The world is a wonderful array of interdependencies, and not a “s
tanding reserve” to be exploited for your purposes. Suddenly, something as ordinary as the Brooklyn Bridge or the Golden Gate Bridge or the Sydney Harbour Bridge or London Bridge becomes a source of marvel, speaking to you so differently than if you regarded it merely as a transport mechanism conveying people to work and back.
Heidegger calls this approach “meditative thinking,” as opposed to “calculative thinking.” It is a way you can engage emptiness that has a wonderful rhythm and flavor.
A Mystic
Mystical experiences and insights are commonly found in all major religions. They often have a unitive nature, disclosing previously hidden aspects of reality and being accompanied by great bliss and peace. These peak experiences tend to be deeply transformative. Your world is not the same again after you have had them. Such a profound union can be experienced with God, as oneness with nature or as not being separate from “ultimate reality.”
Clearly, whether you believe in God or not will have an influence on the type of unitive experience you might have. In traditions that do not have the notions of a personal God, this experience is decidedly impersonal – it is not about you as a separate person or about a divine being.
Buddhism
In some of the Buddhist traditions, emptiness teachings are given before the tantric teachings in which you experience yourself as a deity or fully realized Buddha. The idea behind this is that not attributing inherent existence to selves, persons and deities is not only part of the purposes of Buddhism, but also empowers you to be more creative and focused in your visualizations. You will not be burdened by thoughts like “But this is impossible!” At the same time, it protects the meditator from becoming megalomaniac through thinking that he is “truly” a deity. Yes, he is a deity but only emptily so.