Seeing through Emptiness

Like looking at a lake of crystal pure water…

Photo by Mohammad Alizade on Unsplash

A discussion has surfaced, over the arc of this midyear solstice and full moon, on a conversational thread I am privileged to share with a few hundred others worldwide. This is a group of practitioners (sanga;) practitioners of Buddhist and Dzogchen lineage teachings. The discussion (weaving as it were, among others) that I refer to has to do with teachings most often translated into English as “emptiness.”

My great awareness instructor, Dan Brown, would speak of (I paraphrase) a zone of integrity, bounded on one side by ideas of emptiness trailing off into nihilism, and on the other by ideas of presence that danger the delusion of eternal-ism.

Somewhere between these thresholds of sin (to miss the mark) there lays a sacred territory of realized but not reified experience of profound and mysterious majesty; the unnameable divine.

But I digress… One of our fellow practitioners had been speaking with a friend and shared with our group that that friend found the idea of “emptiness” confusing, struggling to see how the idea was not synonymous with meaninglessness. “Did anyone have a favorite resource that explains emptiness in a clear and simple way?”

Not surprisingly, this sanga offered many voices of wisdom, from those exploring the phenomenon in their own experience, describing it as “diaphanous,” or referring to various “not formally Buddhist” teachers speaking on the subject, to easily accessible web articles, or books.

The fellow who offered the initial inquiry elaborated further, pointing to the compassion needed as these kinds of deeper ontological teachings continue to penetrate the West. Particularly when it comes to a time such as ours when anxiety, depression, loneliness, and other deeply felt disruptions are so pervasive, it’s important that esoteric subjects be communicated in a way that doesn’t exacerbate the situation.

As I picked up one of the promising articles to review on the subject, I found myself quickly gazing into the mirror of my own experience.

Speaking with others regarding insights I’ve found in the Dharma is not unfamiliar to me. Indeed, so many of these teachings have provided real stability in the process of meeting and rising to challenging life circumstances, not as an avenue of escaping, but rather but of embracing. I naturally hold them in quite high regard and so doing find myself inclined to refer to them when I see others suffering in similar ways.

In reading the article, however, I was brought quickly to wonder how many times might I have created further confusion rather than clarity through inadvertently introducing “emptiness” not properly disentangled from nihilism.

I was struck by the distinction between speaking from a truly and deeply realized first-person experience, in contrast to the giddy excitement of sharing the recollection of a helpful construct from the past. The gap between these widens, no doubt, in the telling.

I have recently been listening to audio recordings between J. Krishnamurti and Doctor David Boehm. In this format, to my ear, the former is attempting to use the latter as a foil for refining the clarity of teachings on the subject of what we commonly call the Dharma. By virtue of a rigorous scientific intellect and discipline, Mr. Krishnamurti it seems, hopes that the good doctor will provide the necessary crucible for only the clearest and most pointed words to emerge on the other side.

There truly is something in the phenomenon of translating the ineffable into practical teachings for an interested listener. The map, as they say, is not the territory. And yet when we speak in ontological terms, nor is the map separate from the territory. Indeed, map and territory are one and understanding one, we know the other. Think of the proverbial finger pointing to the moon.

I remember a lighthearted Sufi quote on the subject from Mr. Joe Miller:

“You can get more stinking from thinking

then you can from drinking,

but to feel is for real.”

One of the most notable qualities of a broad modernity is the separation of self from world and world and self into parts. This has translated into a pedagogy where our practiced discipline has to do with translating “teachings,” often written in words, into the practical rearrangement of “objects” in our reality. For instance, I can learn to juggle or use abstract math to calculate load and force trajectories to produce structural stability for my home or airplane or iPhone.

I can learn and rehearse the complex symphony, or dance, or process of banking or surgery, or journalism. I can operate on my vocal cords, or numbers, or relationships between others. Operating AS, however, generally in this frame makes no sense.

And yet…

I think this carries through when we, as Westerners, sit to learn meditation and awareness/awakening practices. “My thoughts, myself, my practice, my meditation, my attainments, my struggles, my confusion, my enlightenment…” All of these tend to persist as objects somehow “out there,” upon which I will now bring these newfound teachings and “my developing skill” to operate.

Even “emptiness,” as it were drifts “out in front” of us, some authoritative construct of a reality to which we must attain.

One of our fellows on the channel offered a quote on prior but related thread from one of my very favorite teachers, I think it applies here:

"When we commit ourselves to that path, we cross a state where ignorance and wisdom are mixed. At the end, at the moment of Enlightenment, only pure wisdom exists. But all the way along this spiritual journey, although there is an appearance of transformation, the nature of the mind has never changed: it was not corrupted on entry onto the path, and it was not improved at the time of realisation."

— Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

I think my writing all of this, is really just an expression of gratitude to be in the conversation with this community. These teachings on “emptiness,” what Doctor Brown referred to as “mere constructions of mind,” seemed to me to align with our time, when our fixed ideas of progress, success, righteousness, evolution, and other ideological WMDs are beginning to show undeniably the ways in which the delusion of reification, and the narcissistic self-satisfaction of nihilism to the real majesty of life.

Starting with these teachings, in direct and personal ways, has been a boon for bringing individuals for more compassionate lovingkindness and real care for thousands of years. This continues to be so, and has come to the West.

Our friend in the thread admonishes, “let’s go people… We’ve got to clean this up!” And I agree and raise the suggestion that in cleaning up these teachings for aspiring meditators, that is just the context we need to help us clean up the DNA of our social and cultural practices as well.

May this living ecosphere the well and happy, may all beings among and beyond it be so as well.

Let’s go people! :-)