Emptiness and Joyful Freedom Read online

  This realization is another way that love and compassion are fostered by the emptiness teachings. You realize that you do not occupy a position any closer to the absolute truth of the universe than anyone else. There is a great tenderness and humility that comes with realizing how similar we all are in this respect. Being an ironist about your own views tends to work wonders as a self-correcting device.

  We will have a lot more to say about joyful ironism throughout the book, especially in the final chapter.

  This Book – and How To Read It

  We have organized this book into several parts. In Part 1, we present the emptiness teachings in some detail.

  In Chapter 1, “Discovering the Joy of Emptiness,” we tell a few stories about how various kinds of emptiness teachings have shown up in our lives.

  Chapter 2 presents a prominent Buddhist approach to the emptiness teachings, which we find to be a helpful organizing principle.

  Chapter 3, “Emptiness in Western Philosophy,” discusses various Western philosophies and teachings and explains why you can see them as emptiness teachings.

  In Chapter 4, “How Do I Go About Studying Emptiness?” we suggest a few ways that you can study the emptiness teachings in further detail.

  In Chapter 5, “The Interplay Between Emptiness, Compassion And Happiness,” we discuss how adopting a compassionate, caring attitude can help you realize emptiness, and also how realizing emptiness fosters an open-hearted caring attitude.

  Chapter 6, “How Not to Misunderstand Emptiness,” discusses how to avoid nihilism, which is the most probable and most dangerous way to misunderstand the teachings.

  Chapter 7 lists some important questions that have come up when we have taught emptiness in dharma centers and other venues.

  Part 2 is experiential. We suggest a variety of meditations based on Western science, philosophy and psychology. Unlike the classic Buddhist emptiness meditations, the exercises in Part 2 utilize Western ways to isolate and deconstruct the conception of inherent existence.

  “Readings from Buddhist and Western Sources” is a two-part bibliography of the works we have found most helpful in our own study.

  It is probably best to read the Introduction first. After that, you an skip right to the meditations that interest you, or read through the section that sets forth the source material.

  More on the Meditations

  Joyful irony arises from a global insight into emptiness. To cultivate this insight, you usually have to analyze and deconstruct the self and many other targets. Our prior beliefs are too entrenched to be shaken loose with a few meditations only. In this book we have covered many kinds of targets, including the self and labels we apply to it. We also cover other targets, such as perception, truth, fixed beliefs and spiritual teachings.

  The chapters may be thought of as falling into four different groups, which cover what we often take to be the pillars of our life world. The groups are:

  Self

  Culture

  World

  Spirituality

  Investigating targets in all of these groups is important in realizing emptiness. Taken together, these meditations provide an excellent basis for a global realization of emptiness. Let’s look at them in detail.

  Self

  “Freeing Yourself From Negative Personal Labels” starts out with those things we tell ourselves as though they were truly us. They aren’t always friendly, yet nevertheless can be staunchly believed. The good news is that they can be seen as empty quite easily, by adapting techniques from cognitive therapy. By examining these labels and stories, we lessen their hold on us. A breath of fresh air pervades. Our self-conceptualizations become lighter.

  “Seeing Through the Illusion of the Self” goes deeper. It takes a close-up look at modern scientific accounts of how the experience of our self happens, along with the unnecessary problems that it creates. Arguments from philosophy of mind, history of evolution, social psychology and neuroscience are mixed into a potent cocktail of meditations that are timely, relevant and intuitive.

  Lastly, “Deconstructing Presence” tackles a subtle, yet resilient holdout for “selfing” that affects some spiritual practitioners, namely “presence.” The insights we use for this come from the influential continental philosopher, Jacques Derrida. They give you a taste for the classic deconstructive approach that he pioneered. The meditations allow you to see that what seems to be the closest and most intimate aspect of your self is actually dependent on something quite different and other. This realization helps the self open up to freedom, flexibility and the love of others.

  Culture

  The first chapter that deals with cultural phenomena, “Lightening Up your Social World,” introduces the powerful tools of social construction to the emptiness investigator. Targets such as fairness, gender, sexual identity, emotion and science are argued to be socially constructed rather than ordained by nature. Seeing a phenomenon as constructed is one way of seeing it as empty, because a construction lacks a pre-existing, inherent nature of its own.

  “Refuting Moral Objectivity” targets the intuition that there are objective moral facts out there which truly determine what is good or bad, right or wrong. It targets the idea that there are objective norms that dictate what all humans ought to do. A joyful ironist is not against ethics per se (certainly we aren’t), but against absolutized, non-empty accounts of ethics. These sort of non-empty, absolutist notions of ethics produce individual and societal rigidity, suffering and intolerance.

  World

  In “Loosening up Fixed Meaning in Language,” the target is inherent atomistic meaning. This is the idea that the meaning of something can be fixed in isolation from other meanings. What does this have to do with emptiness? The stoic philosopher, Epictetus, observed that, “People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.” Thus when emptiness meditations open up the rigid notions of fixed meaning, everything else in your life and world experience opens up with it! Our approach is inspired by an essay by W.V.O. Quine entitled “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” which is viewed by many as the most famous paper in analytic philosophy.

  The next chapter, “Recognizing the Myth of the Given,” targets the idea that sense data are objectively present and given in a pre-existent way, which then grounds our knowledge of the world. Normally, sense data, such as a red patch or a hard texture, are taken to be an instance of basic, uninterpreted and irrefutable knowledge of the world. This givenness is taken as something objective about the world, and something that exists as non-empty, that is, independently of human concepts and minds. This chapter contains insights and meditations that make clear that what we consider a foundation for knowledge actually depends on other knowledge already! This has been considered a revolutionary insight in twentieth century philosophy.

  In “Challenging a Common Notion of Truth,” the target of our emptiness investigation is the idea that language and thinking provide an accurate picture of an independently existing real world “out there.” We usually think that words correspond to objects, and sentences correspond to states of affairs. It can be a beautifully unsettling experience for you as an emptiness meditator to realize that this way of picturing an external world doesn’t make any sense. This chapter is perhaps a little more challenging than the others, but it can be extremely rewarding. The world will never look and feel the same again.

  Spirituality

  “Liberating Yourself from Rigid Beliefs” targets beliefs – those attitudes and statements that we cling to, defend or staunchly refute. The insights apply to any belief whatsoever, but we have chosen to focus on beliefs about spiritual teachings, for instance: “The highest teaching is emptiness,” or “I am (am not) enlightened”. These beliefs are often unnoticed, and yet at the same time, they carry a strong charge for people. Clinging to statements like these prevents a global realization of emptiness. The meditations in this chapter propose an alternative to this clinging, and show you how to withhold assent
and live peacefully in not-knowing. The method is inspired by the Ancient Greek school of Pyrrhonism, also known as skepticism. Pyrrhonism is one of the greatest Western examples of philosophy used for human freedom.

  In “Living a Joyfully Empty Life,” the last chapter of the book, we discuss what life is like after you have done many emptiness meditations. Where does the emptiness journey go? What are the results and benefits? How does it affect your ordinary life? What new possibilities open up? We discuss these and other questions. We say more about joyful ironism, the fruition of these teachings, and present a range of examples for empty lives, such as being a regular person, or an artist, a mystic, a Buddhist, a social activist, or spiritual teacher. Such vignettes are meant to inspire, rather than to privilege any one particular way to be. The emptiness teachings, at least as we are construing them, do depend on a compassionate frame of mind. But beyond that, they do not require a commitment to Buddhism or to any other particular notion of the good life. To grasp this is one way of realizing that the good life is itself empty, open-textured and not universally agreed-upon. This last chapter has many sources, among them the writings of the astonishing anti-essentialists Martin Heidegger and Richard Rorty, as well as the English mystical poet Thomas Traherne.

  Do All Our Sources Agree with Each Other?

  We are using a wide variety of approaches to what we’re calling emptiness. Although they have something important in common – a challenge to certain notions of inherent existence – we don’t mean to imply that they agree on everything else. If you look more deeply into the approaches presented here, you’ll find differences as well as similarities. You’ll find that social construction, neurophilosophy, deconstruction, modern Western analytic philosophy or ancient Pyrrhonism don’t all talk about the same things, and where they do, they might disagree. And you’ll find some of these approaches resonate with you more than others. This is true for our part as well.

  This is perfectly fine. In fact, diversity and variety are part of the openness that one finds in any facet of human inquiry. We are not suggesting that you settle on a view presented here. Rather, we are offering an open-ended toolkit that may be helpful in dispelling certain fixed and rigid views. You may already have an approach to inquiry that these sources can help with. Or you may grow fond of the sources presented here. In fact, we think that this exploratory aspect is part of the fun.

  Jumping to the Meditations Right Away

  After reading the Introduction and perhaps “Discovering the Joy of Emptiness,” you may wish to move directly to Part 2. This is because there are two chapters, “Emptiness Teachings in Buddhism” and “Emptiness in Western Philosophy,” that require a steep learning curve. The Buddhist chapter introduces quite a bit of classic Buddhist terminology and machinery. We include it not because one must be Buddhist to benefit from the teachings, but merely so that we can draw out the similarities between the Buddhist and Western approaches.

  These chapters are not required in order to follow the rest of the book. So, in case you find them challenging or boring, please feel free to skip them.

  In fact, you may wish to jump directly to the meditations even now. This is fine. You can always circle back later to the explanatory material.

  As for the meditation chapters, we have tried to organize them in an intuitive order. But what is more important is that you resonate with the targets to be refuted. So feel free to skip around as you please.

  Enjoy Yourself!

  We have greatly enjoyed engaging these life-changing teachings. We have found the process fascinating and freeing. It has also been inspiring to explore what some of the greatest minds on this planet have come up with. Some of the arguments you’re going to read about will surprise you. As in a good thriller, there are reversals, where the good guy goes bad and then good again, or where seemingly innocuous details suddenly gain huge significance. You will find all of this and more in the following pages. We sincerely hope you’ll have as much fun with these wonderful teachings as we do.

  CHAPTER 1 – DISCOVERING THE JOY OF EMPTINESS

  Sooner or later, almost everyone realizes the emptiness of something or other. The roots of this kind of realization can be simple. You may discover a creative new slant on an old idea. You may realize that what seemed permanent is only temporary. You may make the discovery that things can be looked at in more than one way. These simple realizations are foretastes, carrying the fragrance of emptiness. They prepare you for the more classical realization that the essence or true nature of selves and things can’t be found.

  We don’t need to have a complete realization of emptiness in order for it to be transformative; in fact, it’s said that having even a suspicion that emptiness is the nature of things will cut through the root of our confusion. So having even a little doubt about the validity of conventional reality, like thinking, “Maybe the way I’ve always seen myself is not the whole picture; maybe everything’s not as solid as it appears,” is helpful. Even that level of doubt can loosen our fixation and shake up our view of the world.

  Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche (2011)

  In this chapter, we recount some everyday discoveries of these kinds. We will say much more about the hows of emptiness throughout the book. But here we’d like to talk about the transformational power that even small tastes of emptiness can have.

  Encounters with Emptiness

  – Greg Goode

  The joy from a taste of emptiness can come from the most unlikely places. And it always opens the heart. This taste doesn’t depend on having an intention to be spiritual or to study emptiness. It can happen whenever you see through one of your fixed ways of relating to the world. What felt like confinement and rigidity comes to be experienced as light, free and open. It feels like having walls come down. You feel intimately connected with things that previously seemed separate and distant.

  If you do have an intention to study emptiness, you can focus on different things and realize their emptiness. It can be something that troubles you. It can be something that you cherish. It can be yourself. It can even be everything.

  Emptiness is not nothingness or voidness. It is more like relatedness. It’s how things exist, by depending on other things. It’s simply the fact that things, and your self, do not have essences or substances. They don’t exist in an independent, self-powered way. Instead, things are interdependently related to everything else in differing degrees, as expressed by the image of Indra’s Net.3

  A Philosophical Security Guard

  About thirty years ago, I encountered an emptiness meditation in one of these unlikely places. I was in the Army stationed overseas. I was working 12-hour shifts as a security guard behind a desk. I had plenty of time to read, and for several months it was Brand Blanshard’s (1939) monumental midcentury classic, The Nature of Thought. I was very curious about thought, and things, and what exactly constitutes things. What is the essence of things? I was surprised by Blanshard’s analysis, for he argued passionately about how things have no essence. We often think they do, but they don’t.

  With Blanshard’s help and a lot of contemplation, I looked intensely for the core of things, but never found it. What I did find actually upset me at first, but it later led to a lasting sense of freedom and joy. I found that instead of things having a core, all they have is properties. There isn’t even something to hang the properties on. Blanshard helped me to examine the properties and analytically remove them, one by one, in an attempt to reveal the naked core of the thing. And all I found was more properties! When the properties were gone, I found the thing to be gone.

  This insight had a profound effect on me, even though at the time I wasn’t trying to do anything official like meditating on emptiness. At first, I was unsettled by this no-essence insight. It felt like I was about to fall through the bottom of the world. That lasted a few days. But I noticed that things went on as usual. I didn’t fall. The sky didn’t fall. After the unsettling feeling left, there was a curious sense o
f openness and freedom. I felt light, and things felt almost ... transparent. Things no longer seemed to be mysterious or opaque. They didn’t seem to have a hidden inner essence. I felt a sense of free expansion towards things, and felt things open up to me.

  This new openness changed my relationship to the physical world. Everything took on a lightness and an unconstrained freedom. The change came in handy, since the Army can get pretty physical and heavy. I started becoming less stodgy and more integrated with my own body. I began to work out at the gym. When I left the Army a few years later, I kept going to the gym and began to ride a bicycle again. This was the first time I rode as an adult. Later, I became interested in riding a fixed-gear bicycle with no brakes. I also learned to do inline skating on the street, also with no brakes. Realizing the emptiness of objects improved my relationship with objects, as well as with myself!

  Many years later, I came to recognize the similarities to Chandrakirti’s Sevenfold Reasoning on Selflessness (Wilson 1983) where you investigate a chariot, and later your self, to find the essential, inherently existent core. You never find it. Realizing emptiness is the discovery of the contingencies pertaining to something that you thought was fixed. It’s the discovery of relations constituting something that you thought was self-contained and standing on its own.

  Not only are these discoveries thrilling, but they open the heart.

  Actualization of emptiness dissolves the afflictions of delusion, clinging, and antipathy into insight, non-clinging, and compassion.

  Huntington (2007)

  The Emptiness of Rationality

  In graduate school, I was enrolled in a Ph.D. program in philosophy. My dissertation was on rational choice theory. One of my core assumptions, which I had acquired from the Austrian School of Economics, was the following definition of rationality:

  (R) For an individual, given the free choice between objects of desire under standard conditions, it is rational to choose a greater amount of the object rather than a lesser amount.