by Greg Goode
This is the emptiness of the university. Seeing such a solid and substantial institution in this way can bring freshness and lightheartedness to experiencing it because it is now a more open and fluid entity. Seeing it in this way could even give rise to new creative, perhaps even enthusiastic ways of interacting with it. And you now have a tool for a new way of seeing a familiar object...
Of course Oxford University might not be very relevant to your concerns. But you can try a similar inquiry on other things, such as a corporation or a country. You can try it on your own “self” as well. Is there anything physical or psychological that you can point to that is exactly the self? No. But at the same time, we can still designate a group of phenomena as the self as a kind of shorthand or convenience. We can enjoy the expansive sense of ease that comes from this way of seeing ourselves. (Chapter 10 will cover this in more detail.) Seeing your self in this empty way lightens the whole experience of your life.
This is the beautiful, freeing razor’s edge of emptiness. Emptiness does not fall to extremes. It allows us to avoid the extreme of affirming things as solid, self-defined or objective. This opens a sense of spaciousness to engage with things in new ways. At the same time, emptiness allows us to avoid the extreme of denying things altogether. We are thereby still able to enjoy things and what can be done with them, while avoiding the angst, despair and frustration that come from seeing them as utterly nothing. Because emptiness avoids both extremes, it is often called the middle way. All of this will become, of course, clearer as you work through the present book.
Benefits From understanding the Emptiness of the Self
There are several benefits from understanding the emptiness of the self, even if you don’t do the many meditations we suggest. But as you can imagine, any benefit from a theoretical understanding is much more powerful if you take time to do the meditations. Understanding can turn into realization.
First, you’ll receive several intuitive, no-nonsense ways to think about yourself and life that can help reduce suffering. The reduction of suffering applies to everything – from everyday office politics all the way to the existential anxieties surrounding our certain death. Experiencing your own self in a less exaggerated, distorted way will help you feel a joy that can’t be found in the luxury stores on Fifth Avenue. This joy is a precious jewel that can’t be purchased at Tiffany’s. You’ll be able to learn something genuinely new from these teachings which can dramatically enrich your life experience.
Another benefit from understanding the emptiness of the self is freedom. When you understand yourself as empty, you don’t feel as though you have a fixed nature. You are freed up for the infinite possibilities of personal exploration, growth and transformation. This may sound paradoxical. “So, how can I grow if I am an illusion?” What is an illusion is the self as we usually conceive it. The illusion is the self as a unique, solid, substantive entity. This self does not exist. By doing the meditations in this book you will experience this with the same clarity you see now that the sun doesn’t truly “rise.”
Whatever remains of your sense of self is light and flexible. It is freed from the many rigid beliefs that we tend to construct around ourselves. This light sense of self can’t take seriously beliefs such as “I am not good with people,” or, “My place in life is to be an accountant.” When you are unburdened by these beliefs, you are open to take a whole new look at your life. You can follow your heart.
For me (Tomas), writing this book was a form of deep meditation and a surprisingly profound experience. As I immersed myself in its meditations for several months, I was breathing this material and exploring its ramifications in new ways. The writing time felt like a retreat, in which the perspective of emptiness swept through my life with full force. That brought great ease, as well as connecting me more deeply with other people and the world.
This interconnection ties in with another benefit of the emptiness teachings: they help liberate you from alienation and isolation. Normally, when you feel as though you exist in a fixed, rigid, independent or inherent way, you feel separate and disconnected from everything else. The liberating insight is that you don’t exist in this rigid way, and neither does anything else. The result is a lived sense of lightness, freedom, openheartedness and enthusiasm that opens you to other people. There is also an intimate relationship between this insight into emptiness and a sense of love and compassion, in which you sincerely care about others and wish that all beings be free from suffering.
There is a further interpersonal benefit as well. When we begin to understand the emptiness of the self, we begin to intuit the many ways we all depend on each other. Not only do we work and live together, but we share elements, resources, concerns, thoughts, language, histories, and much more. We become more attuned to each other, perceiving less and less of a wall between self and others. We get out of the way and become more motivated to act for the benefit of others, seeing less and less essential difference between them and ourselves.
Seeing into the emptiness of the self transforms things in such wonderful and mysterious ways that we even come to think of abstract notions like “truth” and “realization” as having close connection with the benefit of others.
Non-Dualism with a Difference
In many Eastern and some Western traditions, non-dualism is the high-point of insight into the nature of reality. Usually, non-dualism is associated with an experiential realization of the oneness of the universe. That is often considered a transformational experience.
This book presents non-dualism with a difference. It’s about a flourishing, open-hearted liberation that doesn’t land on a position of one or many, existence or non-existence. There is no clinging to dualistic extremes such as good or bad, natural or unnatural, etc. This liberation is non-dual by dissolving dualistic extreme positions.
These dualistic extremes are responsible for how we carve up the world into inherently separate entities (Earth versus Sun, good people who think like me versus bad people who don’t). And so when we dissolve these extremes through emptiness meditations, we are open to a more holistic experience of the world, in which things are interrelated in the most amazing ways. Things are not reduced to “one”; nor are they separated into “many.” Not landing in extremes is a kind of non-dualism most commonly based on the Buddhist shunyata (emptiness) insight, in which the self and the world are empty. This book is a Western, modernized contribution coming out of that tradition.
It Began as a Class
The central contribution of this book is a practical exploration of how powerful Western resources can be used to perform Buddhist-style emptiness meditations. These resources come from Western philosophy, science, therapy and popular culture. It is an everyday exploratory guide, not a scholarly examination. Our motivation is practical. That is, we are presenting these tools for the purpose of helping you experience things in new and liberating ways. Many of the insights and arguments come from academic, philosophical or scientific sources. But the know-how involved (using arguments as meditations to relieve suffering) comes from Buddhism and Hinduism.
We – Tomas and Greg – met for the first time in January 2006 in Greg’s philosophical consulting office in Manhattan. Greg had been studying Western philosophy and various Eastern spiritual traditions for decades. He had a name as a teacher in non-dual circles. Greg had been running a monthly Nondual Dinner as a gathering of friends in Manhattan for a number of years. Tomas had been a student of Buddhism for about five years, and had a number of burning questions about non-duality, oneness, emptiness, and enlightenment that Greg patiently answered. We decided to work together and have been doing so now for a number of years. That meant thousands of emails and scores of long Friday night discussions at New York diners over sandwiches, salads, and endless coffee as the nights went on.
Eventually Tomas, who is a working scientist with a Ph.D. in mathematics, found some of the traditional Eastern examples too arcane and irrelevant for his contemporary t
astes. They were hard to read. And perhaps due to a hefty dose of my (Tomas’) Western intellectual arrogance, they seemed unconvincing.
And then came a turning point. One day, Tomas asked Greg whether one could study emptiness with Western philosophical sources. He hoped that they would be easier to grasp. Greg, who had been trained as a Western-style philosopher, answered: “It sure can be done!” Greg was actually delighted that someone would consider using Western material for this purpose.
With immense personal delight, curiosity and passion, we read broadly across the Western tradition discussing our respective favorites with each other. For example, among others, Greg likes Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida, the ancient Greek skeptics, and the literary and rhetorical tradition. Tomas is a fan of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, positive psychology and science. The upshot was that Tomas found the Western material to work quite well as a tool for gaining spiritual insight into emptiness.
We even encountered academic East-West comparisons between Nagarjuna, who is generally credited as being the leading Buddhist philosopher, and various Western thinkers. Most frequently, the comparisons mentioned Derrida, Wittgenstein, and Sextus Empiricus.1 In spite of these cross-cultural similarities, we had never found anyone using Western material in emptiness meditations. Could this work? We wanted to try!
And that is how this book began – as a class on the emptiness teachings at a Tibetan dharma2 center in Manhattan. We were surprised to find that many people in the class, including Buddhists and non-Buddhists, were also very enthusiastic about the Western approach. We have subsequently given more of these classes. The topics included “Experiencing Emptiness in Everyday Life” and a seminar on emptiness in science, art and sexuality. The Western approach seemed relevant to today’s concerns and maladies. It seemed to address these issues with a focused, laser-like directness. This directness is similar to cognitive therapy. If I feel unlovable or incompetent, I can dissolve the strength of these self-assigned attributes by seeing how they are empty of any inherent truth. The emptiness teachings use the same techniques towards a slightly different end – unconditional freedom.
We noticed that the copious class notes and handouts came to as many pages as a short book. After receiving more and more requests for these notes and posting them on the internet, we decided to reformulate them as a real book.
Emptiness Teachings, Buddhism and This Book
Studying emptiness the traditional way can be tough sailing. Working your way up from the early Buddhist philosophical schools to Madhyamika (where full-fledged emptiness is explained) usually takes years. It is like mastering a new language. The traditional path is undoubtedly beautiful and rewarding. It will teach you much more about Buddhism than just emptiness. We highly recommend it to those who feel drawn to it.
This book, however, takes a different approach and teaches emptiness directly. This becomes possible through leveraging the intuitions, logical training, cultural background and common personal experiences that contemporary Western people already bring to the table. In short, by using Western resources we hope to make the liberating insights of emptiness easily accessible and available to a much wider audience.
A Note About Our References
This book contains references to a great deal of external source material. Our sources fall into two categories. One category is called “Readings from Buddhist and Western Sources.” This includes books, articles and other sources that we feel might be helpful if you decide to continue learning about the emptiness teachings. These sources are gathered together at the end of the book, and are divided into Buddhist and Western sub-categories.
The other category of source material includes works with particular quotes or insights that we’ve found useful in our presentation, even if the works in their entirety might not be so helpful as to be included at the end of the book. These sources are listed in the References section at the end of the appropriate chapter.
So when you encounter a reference or citation in the text, it will look like “Huntington (2007)” or “Nagarjuna (1995) 24:14.” To find the work thus referred to, look at the end of the chapter containing that reference. If the work is not listed there, it will appear at the end of the book.
You Don’t Have To Be a Buddhist
Before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half the world. This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality. We aren’t going to have peace on Earth until we recognize the basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (quoted in: Nichtern 2007)
In this multicultural world emptiness is in the air. Physics tells us that matter isn’t as solid as we thought. We see widely diverging views from different cultures on TV news programs. The Sunday newspapers inform us that, according to neuroscience, no such thing as a self can be found in the brain.
We think that studying emptiness will come naturally to most readers. It doesn’t require that you subscribe to any particular religious or spiritual viewpoint. You don’t have to become a Buddhist. You don’t even have to be particularly “spiritual” to benefit from these teachings. Many of the Western thinkers whose material we use certainly haven’t considered themselves to be spiritual.
If you can meditate in an unreligious way for 20 minutes to calm your mind, you can probably study the emptiness teachings and benefit from them. You may have your own framework to which the teachings can be added. For example, if you are an environmentalist, the realization of the interdependence of things at a very deep level may provide new directions in your work. You don’t need to have the official Buddhist ideal of perfect enlightenment or the ending of suffering for all beings. Smaller, local motives are fine too. Actually, if we were to state a set of prerequisites for studying emptiness, it would probably be sincere curiosity about the world and life, an open mind and the willingness to think for yourself.
This book takes a first step by presenting emptiness disentangled from many of its religious origins and commitments.
You are free to explore the emptiness teachings in your own way. You are free to write, create websites, portals and online communities. We ourselves have a website (www.emptiness.co) and a Facebook group that discusses these teachings. We teach at local dharma centers. And we try to encourage those who are better qualified to do the same.
The Fruition – Joyful Irony
“Joyful irony” is how we describe in non-Buddhist terms the result of having done many of these emptiness meditations. Joyful irony is the lightheartedness you feel when realizing that your self, your views and the world are not as solid as they seem. As a joyful ironist, you realize that none of the things you say point to any objective truth. Although it seems counterintuitive, this is actually a great delight. It’s the basis for wonderful freedom.
Irony in this sense is not meant as sarcasm or the occasionally negative verbal trope in which you say something nice (“our most wonderful worker”) but actually mean the opposite (“laziest guy in the office”). Rather, irony is life lived with no landing, no foundations. As in poetry, your thoughts, words and language take on a new meaning, which is different from the literal and habitual interpretation.
Held in emptiness, even common human predicaments, such as current suffering, worries about the future and death, are not the same anymore. The openness and non-solidity of phenomena give rise to hope, because you know deeply that bad things are never intrinsically so, and they don’t have to stay the way they currently are. They can change, and very often you can make things better.
Joyful irony is thus an antidote to helplessness, hopelessness and the victim mentality. Joyful irony is certainly not non-dual quietism, passivity or escape. An empty world is neither dull nor bleak. On the contrary, it is experientially rich, full of meaning(s) and a source of continuous wonder and beneficial activity.
Love and Compassion
Studying emptiness is never just abo
ut you. It radiates outwards, to others. Actively cultivating an attitude of love and compassion is an important part of any successful emptiness study project, whether you are using a traditional approach or looking at the way we present it here. The more love and compassion you develop, the easier and more joyful will be your emptiness realizations. It’s as simple as that.
And when the illusory walls that kept you trapped inside your skin dissolve, then your heart will naturally open towards other living beings with a greater sense of caring, benevolence, love and compassion. In a significant way they are you, and you are them. For most people, the times when they are deeply filled with love are high points. Similarly, a major source for the joy of the joyful ironist is the love and care you feel. Realizing emptiness multiplies this. You realize that a better life is not just a possibility for you, but, at least in principle, for all other people. And it is often a highly practical, achievable possibility. In many cases, you will not just contemplate positive change, but also be sincerely motivated to act on it. Joyful irony is thus open, loving and engaged.
Joyful Irony Starts at Home
One the most important insights along this Western path is to realize the emptiness and ultimate unfoundedness of your own most cherished beliefs. The hallmark of a joyful ironist doesn’t consist of seeing that other people’s views are not ultimately grounded in the nature of things. Rather, it is a global insight about emptiness that sees through the structures that make inherent, objective truth and falsity seem possible in the first place. The most radical and meaningful effect of this realization comes about when you see that even your own beliefs are not objectively grounded. They function, but they are empty of inherent existence and truth.
