by Greg Goode
Following the Western Science of Well-Being
Living a happy, flourishing life is a goal for many people in the Western world today. The relatively new academic discipline, positive psychology, studies well-being scientifically (see the chapter entitled “Freeing Yourself from Negative Personal Labels” for more information). It is one of my (Tomas’) favorite ways to explore the empty life. Positive psychology has given rise to hundreds of new studies in the last ten years. It enjoys great popularity in the U.S., Europe and, increasingly, parts of Asia as well. Besides studies, it has generated popular books and websites, with numerous tested exercises that can raise your level of happiness over time.
As a student of emptiness, you may already suspect that notions like “happiness” and “well-being” are themselves empty, and that one particular field’s definitions of these things probably do not apply to everyone. This is a good caution to bring to any science, including the science of well-being.
On the other hand, as a student of emptiness, you are also acutely aware of the malleability of experience. Since it is the emptiness of things that makes change possible, why not transform your life in a direction that is more fulfilling? In this case, we don’t mean “fulfilling” and “happy” in any elevated spiritual sense, but in the ordinary sense that includes reduced stress, physical well-being, healthy relationships, more positive emotions than negative ones, becoming satisfied with the overall course of life, and experiencing a sense that your life has meaning. Positive psychology takes advantage of the everyday sense of words like these, and studies how to move in this direction.
The techniques used in positive psychology to increase happiness are quite compatible with the emptiness teachings. The techniques often work through transforming how we view ourselves and situations in our lives. This book has presented many techniques that do the same thing, but under different headings.
Many people value personal growth and the process of becoming a person that one would like to be. Studying emptiness supports this, by disabusing us of the rigid ways of thinking that might make transformation seem impossible or unlikely.
For me (Tomas), studying emptiness has become a powerful enabler of personal growth. Seeing the openness of life makes me intensely curious about the many surprises that life can bring and the new things I might be able to do. As corny as it sounds, this openness makes me feel younger in that it brings back some of the sense of adventure of a twenty-year-old when the world seemed full of possibilities and hope – it still is.
Positive psychology has offered me many sensible, concrete ideas about what the good life is and how, and how not to, go about living it. There is an overlap with Buddhist insights about the good life but there are also some significant differences. Positive psychology is concrete and worldly. The down-to-earth well-being that results from applying its principles complements nicely the spiritual well-being that the emptiness teachings bring about. I wouldn’t want to miss either of the two.
Of course, your choice of concrete short-term goals from among all the options remains a matter of discernment. To flourish doesn’t necessarily mean chasing the latest self-help schemes for material abundance or power over people. On the contrary, we think that studying emptiness and compassion along with the science of well-being tends to cultivate an attitude of critical thinking and care for others that makes it hard to buy into programs that may be selfish and simplistic.
For example, you can balance financial security with other life goals. Even though there is a practical need to ensure your livelihood, you can most likely find many activities more fulfilling than working sixty hours a week for your next promotion. Life and world are so much richer! But of course, you need to explore that for yourself. We hope you have confidence in your intuitions about these matters, as well as the courage to live in the way that you find most fulfilling, even if doesn’t correspond to the mainstream version of success that is touted in our culture.
Other Kinds of Empty Lives
We don’t see a limit to the number of lifestyles that you can joyfully engage. You don’t have to teach. You don’t have to live as a monastic or ascetic. You don’t have to be fabulous, famous, iconoclastic, or unconventional. You don’t have to have a job that others envy.
For example, sometimes people don’t think about family in connection with liberation, but it’s a perfect fit. Family is a wonderful way to engage love, joy, and the full range of human experience. You can be a loving daughter, son, sister, brother, girlfriend, boyfriend, wife, husband, or parent. These are fantastic ways to meditate on emptiness and live it as well, where you can explore the kindness, joy and surprise of a very “full” empty life!
And as a way to stimulate your own imagination and creativity, we describe some lifestyles below. Think of them as ways to experience the richness of emptiness.
The Social Activist
As a social or political activist, you are very devoted to the compassion aspect of the emptiness teachings. You may be a practitioner of “engaged Buddhism” or the social interdependence that Ethan Nichtern (2007) teaches. Human needs are abundant, with abundant opportunities for care and service of all kinds. Options are to join relief and charity organizations, or social and political activist groups, and support them financially or through donations of time. We have known several people who have started their own non-profit service organizations. Today’s fast and widespread communication media bring more of the world to your living room, and more and more people are reaching out to others in concrete, down-to-earth ways. Service is becoming a more consciously acknowledged part of your spiritual or secular journey. Service, even if only a little bit, is never absent from the heart-centered concerns of the joyful ironist.
The Scholar/Intellectual
Many of the teachings found in this book have inspired us. And they were written by spiritual practitioners, scholars, intellectuals and academicians.
The empty life can be completely non-intellectual, but that’s, of course, only one possible blueprint. It can be intellectual too – but with a difference. Realizing emptiness pacifies the confusing conceptual elaborations to which intellectuals are prey. But thinking doesn’t cease. Rather, thinking is freed from attachment and the pretense that it is supposed to reach a final, resting reality. Thinking becomes non-referential, light and playful. You can treat heavy things lightly and light things with a wonderful sense of gravitas.
You can explore mathematics, sociology, history, languages, philosophy, psychology, medicine, law and other fields. You can, for example, take the anti-essentialist route in your work, and reveal how the idol of objective truth has feet of clay. Or you can create a better mousetrap, a greener technology, more effective medicine, a clearer theorem, and more comprehensible social and historical stories. Seeing things as empty often generates creativity. As a joyful ironist, you can use the richness, simplicity and beauty of conventional truth, with ever greater appreciation that the conventional is as ultimate as it gets.
The Artist
As an artist, you take advantage of the emptiness of various media. You harness their expressive power to build beautiful, startling, evocative, memorable creations. Your work with paper, digital processes, clay, paint, canvas, wood, metal, earth and other things is an emptiness teaching that creates worlds. Your work shows how you affect things and how they affect you. You may design video games or virtual reality devices or DVD covers or tattoos or installation art or streetwear or haute couture.
Your art teaches you and others about the interdependence of phenomena, through new styles, combinations and juxtapositions. And it also illustrates the positive and creative side of the emptiness teachings by bringing new objects and views of the world into being. Art can disclose new worlds to us.
The Spiritual Practitioner/Teacher
This seems similar to the profile of the mystic, but it is different enough that it warrants inclusion. If you are a student and/or a teacher in a spiritual path and at
the same time interested in the emptiness teachings, you don’t necessarily have to go anywhere else. You can work with emptiness teachings even if they come from outside your path. There were times when the more conservative, orthodox members of spiritual traditions were adamantly against teaching elements from outside their own tradition. But they are becoming more open these days to new possibilities and views than even five years ago. Or you can search the history of your own tradition for the non-essentialist, non-foundationalist approaches that lie under the surface. As a joyful ironist, you are familiar with the old adage that there’s always more than one way to interpret something...
Your Empty Life
After having seen several possibilities, some traditional and some contemporary, you may wonder, “Just what will my empty life look like?” We don’t know. This is a wonderful project for you to look forward to! We encourage you to use your resources – which include your heart, your common sense and your judgment – and explore your possibilities!
Emptiness itself is empty, and does not give rise to universal, absolute rules that dictate what one is supposed to do with it. So the last word about emptiness hasn’t been written. There is always another new possibility. This book is one of them.
Earlier, we mentioned that this project began from a class that endeavored to update the classic emptiness teachings and make them more relevant to the modern student. Because emptiness is open, those who study emptiness today, including you, the reader, and the authors of this book, will surely find new and different approaches. We trust that by applying emptiness within your particular way of life, you will discover new facets of the teachings. We hope you’ll choose to share your experiences and discoveries with others. Such a democratic, community-based exchange will help to keep this influential teaching fresh, relevant and exciting.
This book took you on a long journey during which you got to see ever more clearly the emptiness of your own self and the world. We hope you began to experience the freedom, ease, love, joy and unlimited possibilities that come with this realization. Emptiness doesn’t flatten out the world or make it dull. So perhaps, while you leisurely walk down a busy street in your town, the rich and precious way that everything exists will fill you with wonder, curiosity and surprise. And as you catch your reflection in a store window, a big smile may appear on your face, just as it did for the little group we mentioned walking down 5th Avenue at the beginning of this book. Perhaps even the thought “Wow, I’m an illusion!” may cross your mind as well.
References
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche (1996). In: M.Ricard (ed). Journey to Enlightenment: The Life and World of Khyentse Rinpoche, Spiritual Teacher From Tibet. New York, NY: Aperture
Heidegger, Martin (1996). The Priniciple of Reason. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press
Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche (2011). Repeating the Words of the Buddha. Hong Kong: Rangjung Yeshe Publications
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (2001). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge
PART 3
LIST OF MEDITATIONS READINGS FROM BUDDHIST AND WESTERN SOURCES
LIST OF MEDITATIONS
The University
Meditation – Loving-Kindness (Short Version)
The Diamond Slivers Meditation
Meditation – Loving-Kindness (Long Version)
Meditation – Your Own Negative Labels
Concluding Meditation – Labels – Generalizing Your Realization
Meditation – Tuning Into the Sense Of Self
Meditation – The Link Between Self and Suffering
Meditation – The Fear of Death
Meditation – Finding the Self in Experience (I)
Meditation – Finding the Self in Experience (II)
Meditation – Finding the Self in the Parts of the Body
Mini-Meditation – Brain Swapping
Mini-Meditation – Brain Uploading
Mini-Meditation – Cloning and the Smith Virus
Mini-Meditation – Whose Unconscious?
Mini-Meditation – Functional Subject and Object
Mini-Meditation – The Disappearing Function
Meditation – A Robot’s Self
Meditation – The Intentional Stance
Meditation – The Narrative Self
Meditation – The Socially Constructed Self
Meditation – The Self as Decider
Meditation – Intentional Hand Movement
Meditation – Virtual Reality
Meditation – Deconstructing the Self Into Impersonal Awareness
Mini-Meditation – The Self as Doer
Mini-Meditation – The Self as Memories
Mini-Meditation – The Self as Values
Mini-Meditation – The Self as a Localized Spot in the Body
Meditations – The Emptiness of Presence
Mini-Meditation – This Room
Mini-Meditation – The Sense of Presence
Mini-Meditation – Not Always Present
Mini-Meditation – Repeatable
Mini-Meditation – Must Be Repeatable
Mini-Meditation – One at a Time
Mini-Meditation – Absence!
Mini-Meditation – Presence Constituted by Its Own Absence
Mini-Meditation – The Presence of the Present Thought
Mini-Meditation – The Living Present
Further Meditations on the Self
Meditation – Social Constructions
Meditation – Your Own Emotions
Meditation – The Roles You Play
Meditations on Moral Objectivity
Mini-Meditation – Diversity
Mini-Meditation – Strangeness
Mini-Meditation – Parsimony
Mini-Meditations On Moral Objectivity: Conclusion
Moral Objectivity – Concluding Meditation
Meditation – Finding a Sheet of Paper
Meditation – The Cat Is on the Mat
Meditation – Questioning Fixed Meaning
Meditation – Can All Meaning Be Empty?
Meditation – Changing Past and Future Meaning
Meditation – Pointing with Wittgenstein
Meditation – Up or Down?
Meditation – The Beetle in the Box
Meditation – Is the Past Fixed?
Meditation – Is Future Meaning Already There?
Meditation – Connecting Things
Meditation – Interbeing
The Radical Interdependence of Meaning – Concluding Meditation
Meditations on the Given
Red Patch
Is It Talking
Put the Sensing in a Sentence
Foundations and Givens – Concluding Meditation
Meditation – The Ruler
Meditation – The Causes of Our Ideas
Meditation – The God’s-Eye View
Meditation – Using a Tool
Meditation – The Human Significance of Objects
Meditation – Concerns Are About the World
Meditation – The Seamlessness of Perception
Meditation – Re-Enlivening Your World
Spiritual Teachings – Guided Meditations
Rebirth
Awareness and Biology
I’m Not Enlightened
READINGS FROM BUDDHIST AND WESTERN SOURCES
Readings From Buddhist Sources
There are scores of books and articles on Buddhist emptiness teachings. This is a short selection of what we have found to be some of the most significant items. Readings indicated with an asterisk are probably the easiest ones to begin with.
Batchelor, Stephen (1998). The Freedom to Be No One: Buddhism, Mind and Experience. This unpublished essay was written for a conference on Buddhism and Psychology in Los Angeles in May 1998. www.stephenbatchelor.org/index.php/en/the-freedom-to-be-no-one.
Brunnhölzl, Karl (2004). Center of the Sunlit Sky: Madhyamaka In The Kagyü Tradition. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications. Including a
Translation of Pawo Rinpoche’s Commentary on the Knowledge Section of Santideva’s The Entrance to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life (Bodhicaryavatara). This seminal book gives the first (in the West) comprehensive account of the Kagyü lineage’s approach to emptiness. With its almost 1000 pages it covers a lot of ground. It has great value as a Madhyamika source book for a Kagyü practitioner. Even for a non-Kagyü emptiness student it can be illuminating to trace the differences in how various Tibetan Buddhist schools approach emptiness. For example, the book explores some interesting issues in the debate between the Eighth Karmapa, Mikyö Dorje, head of the Kagyü school, and Tsongkhapa, founder of the Gelug school.
* Brunnhölzl, Karl (2012). The Heart Attack Sutra: A New Commentary on the Heart Sutra. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications. In this witty and profound book, Brunnhölzlexplains the well-known Heart Sutra to the Western audience. One of the merits of this book is that it is not just a philosophical exposition, but it also brings the mythology around the Heart Sutra vividly to life.
Conze, Edward (translator) (1995). The Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines & Its Verse Summary. San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation. Copyright 1973. This is Edward Conze’s translation of the eight-thousand-line Prajnaparamita (Perfection of Wisdom) Sutra, which is one of the foundations of Mahayana Buddhism. There are other Perfection of Wisdom sutras, which include the popular Heart Sutra and the Diamond Sutra. Nagarjuna’s Treatise on the Middle Way is regarded as a philosophical systematization of these sutras. This is a medium-length version. It contains beautiful evocations of a whole range of teachings related to emptiness, such as emptiness as “conditioned co-production,” the limitlessness and supreme value of perfect wisdom, and the relationship between realizing emptiness and the perfections of concentration, vigor, patience, morality, giving and wisdom.
Cook, Francis H. (1977). Hua-Yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Cowherds (2011). Moonshadows: Conventional Truth in Buddhist Philosophy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. (The Cowherd are Georges Dreyfus, Bronwyn Finnigan, Jay L. Garfield, Guy M. Newland, Graham Priest, Mark Siderits, Koji Tanaka, Sonam Thakchoe, Tom Tillemans, Jan Westerhoff). This is a collection of articles on the notion of conventional truth in Buddhism from a group of top-notch Buddhist scholars. The articles focus on the nature of conventional truth in Madhyamika philosophy, and how truth can be helpful in our lives even though it is not ultimate truth. Of particular interest to you as a student of Western emptiness are the diverse approaches to conventional truth being presented, including even the Pyrrhonist approach that we cover here.