The Possibilities Are Emptiness!
“Emptiness is described as the basis that makes everything possible”
- The Twelfth Tai Situpa Rinpoche, Awakening the Sleeping Buddha
“The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.”
- Pema Chodron
Emptiness is a tough concept to swallow. Most Western minds immediately go to “nothingness” as the equivalent, which I am learning is not accurate. Yongey Mingur Rinpoche has a fantastic chapter on emptiness in The Joy of Living. In it he makes my language geek happy by explaining the Tibetan words for emptiness – “tongpa-nyi”. He says Tongpa means empty, but only in the sense of something we can’t capture with our senses. He instead substitutes emptiness with inconceivable or un-nameable. Nyi, he says, has no particular meaning but when added to a word conveys a sense of “possibility”. Suddenly, instead of nihilism, we have an “unlimited potential for anything to change, appear, or disappear.” That is cool stuff.
We, as human beings, struggle to perceive emptiness in that sense. Our minds are limited – they can only deal with so much – even with training. The assumptions we make, the perspectives we develop and yes, even the absolutes we live (and too often die) by, are simply our own constructions helping us navigate a reality that would otherwise overwhelm us. I’m not simply talking about moral or ethical realms, I also mean our physical reality. We are comforted by the thought that the chair we sit in and the floor we walk on are “solid” but science teaches us something else. The history of science itself demonstrates our understanding of the world is evolving. Quantum mechanics shows us things not dreamt of 100 years ago. We keep learning new and better ways to grasp how the world works – our knowledge shifts like sand in a desert storm.
Facing the fact that everything, even who we are, is changing creates discomfort, thus we deny it. We imagine an ordered, tidy, stable world where know what to expect, and we know what to accept. We can prepare for anything and feel safe. Often we don’t know that we are creating structures with which to experience the world. We are born into them as much as we seek them out, but the effects are the same. We cling to our habits of knowing out of fear.
Habits of knowing, like habits of behavior, are comfortable, like well-worn shoes or a tasty turkey pot pie. Fear of losing that comfort and the accompanying feeling of safety is why we, collectively, often lash out at anyone or anything that is different from us. In those situations our core concepts of who we are, and how we live, are at risk. But when our worldview is so rigid it prevents us from adapting to what is, our carefully constructed truths are no longer places of refuge, they more resemble prison cells.
Consider a man who has been laid off from his job as a machinist who can only see himself going into work at a factory, but all of the factories in his town have closed. His options for factory work in his town are nonexistent. If that is all he can see for himself his options are very bleak. But if he can open his mind and see another way to put his skills to use – not as an employee of a factory – he can devise a plan of action. I don’t mean that he will transform himself into something different with brand new skills. But if he can let go of the rigidity of what work once meant to him, he has a better chance of finding ways to leverage what he currently has to offer.
The challenge is to hold lightly to what we believe, and to see a lack of fixity as a source of possibility instead of a recipe for loss. In fact I see no loss at all – any sense of control or stasis we cling to is an illusion.
In essence, acknowledging existence as impermanent and transient is just facing the way the world already works – we simply refuse to see it. We might feel uncomfortable with this awareness as it can feel as if we’ve lost the ground beneath our feet, as if we’ve lost the basis for critical thinking, belief or engagement in the world. That is simply our collective delusion speaking. The ground already shifts beneath our feet, and we have relationships, offer opinions and act in the world without the control we crave. Acknowledging a lack of permanence doesn’t take anything away from us, it just helps us see life for what it is, and to accept things as they occur.
Shifting our thinking in this manner can free us to act differently when faced with conflict. By observing our own perspective as simply a perspective we can let go of the very human need to be right and see the different perspectives as wrong. When we cling to right and wrong we can feel attacked and act defensively. This is not helpful. Seeing our perspective as simply what we see and feel, we can engage with others in a more skillful way. Other people feel and see what they do as well, regardless of how we feel about their views. If we, collectively, assess our knowledge and perspectives as impermanent (which seems to be accurate when we look at the history of knowledge) and as products of our mind we can escape much of the dualistic thinking that limits our experience.
We aren’t left with nothing – we will still perceive right and wrong, subject and object, and all the constructions that help us navigate everyday life, but by knowing they are constructions we are freer. We can realize much of meaning is determined by the context of what we see, and we can realize we have invested things and ideas with permanence that isn’t there. Thus our perceptions become less solid – more fluid.
Understanding this lack of fixity can help us flip from fear and despair into peace. We can train ourselves to look through a lens that helps us see possibilities in the emptiness instead of nothingness and hopelessness. Our suffering comes from the prisons of expectations we cling to, not the lack of permanence we so fear. By relaxing into what is, right now, we rest.
As someone just getting started on this practice, I can say it feels much like standing and stretching luxuriously after being stuck in a painfully cramped space. One can learn to do a fine backstroke in the abyss, and abyss is more a fertile sea of possibility than terrifying vacuum.
What a happy surprise.
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Good stuff!