An Introduction to Emptiness

Okay, so these first couple of days, I was talking this morning about the samādhi, and the focus in the practice, the priority in the practice these first couple of days, is the samādhi as we've talked about. It's just really letting that, in a non-linear way, deepen and collect. That's the priority. And then after that it will be more, as I said, 50/50. However, I'm going to begin talking about emptiness tonight and continue from there in the talks and the teachings. And so some of what I say tonight, part of the talk will be throwing out ways of working -- meditatively, but also off the cushion. So there's some stuff here already that you may find very relevant and hopefully very useful in terms of emptiness and contemplations and ways of looking. And tomorrow night, too.

So this word 'emptiness' -- in English, for most people, it would probably have a connotation of bleakness, barrenness, empty, you know. It doesn't sound very enlivening or heartening unless you've been around these kind of circles for a long time, and even then, sometimes not, as we said yesterday. But to realize emptiness, to realize the emptiness of things, is actually something wonderful. It brings a sense of wonderment and actually brings joy. So it may not always be that joy comes, but that's the direction that the contemplation of emptiness is heading. It's heading in the direction of joy, absolutely.

Why? Why is it wonderful and joyful? Well, we live as human beings and we take for granted the appearances of things. We take for granted a self, my self and your self and his self and her self, and we take for granted the things of the world and the world itself. We take those appearances for granted, and it seems, it absolutely seems, that things have their own kind of solidity -- body, the clock, everything has its own solidity, its own kind of reality, its own sort of 'that-ness.' Or sometimes people use the word 'suchness.' It's just what it is. This thing is just what it is. It's what it is in its essence, in its being. That in some kind of independent way, it exists as what it is. And that much, to us, seems actually obvious. Six billion people would agree on that. It seems completely obvious. That's how we see the world. That's how we experience the world.

But as we go into emptiness and meditating on emptiness and seeing, we begin to see that things are not actually as they seem to be. And that seeing that they're not as they seem to be brings freedom. It brings a freedom. We realize that we suffer because we assent to and acquiesce to the appearance of solidity and independent reality in things. So we acquiesce and assent to it, that appearance; even more than that, we actually make it so. We make things. Without realizing it, we make things appear solid and real. So to the degree, to the depth, to the sort of comprehensiveness that we can realize the emptiness of things, to that degree, to that depth, to that comprehensiveness, freedom is available to us in life. They go completely hand in hand.

That's why it's wonderful. That's why it's a joyful thing. And yesterday we were talking about the relationship with love. It also, again, just to say a little bit, has a clear relationship with love, the realization of emptiness. So put it very simply, have you noticed in your life: when I trap myself, I bind myself, or I trap and bind another, over-rigidly in a kind of self-definition -- "I'm like this. I'm a failure. I'm a this. I'm a that," or "I'm super fantastic, wonderful, and you, they, are like this" -- do you notice how that imprisoning ourselves and others in self-definition actually blocks and limits the flow of love? So we say the definition "I am this, you are that, I am like this, you are like that," over-rigidly -- we said that's empty. And seeing the emptiness of it actually begins to liberate the flow of love. I'm saying that again because there can be this doubt that emptiness leads to love. So that's one very simple aspect.

So emptiness is really not depressing. It's not something depressing. I doubt you would have signed up for the course if you thought it was completely depressing. But like I said, most people, there's some ambivalence there. There's really some ambivalence. We're not totally sure yet. It's also not disappointing. I mean, sometimes people teach emptiness as a kind of teaching of disappointment. And again, I would really, really differ with that. It might be disappointing for the ego, the small kind of ego-mind. But in its fullness, in its depth, there's nothing disappointing about emptiness at all, at all. It's quite the opposite. Nāgārjuna is one of the great, great Buddhist teachers from about four or five hundred years after the Buddha, probably the second most important teacher after the Buddha:

When you see emptiness, you realize that the true nature of all things is peace. The true nature of things is peace.^[1]

There's a Tibetan Dzogchen teacher, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche. He died I think in the nineties, but I could be wrong. He said:

When you recognize the empty nature [of phenomena], the energy to bring about the good of others dawns, uncontrived and effortless.^[2]

Again, there's a key here between emptiness and love and our capacity to love and our capacity to give. So we could say -- and I think it's right to say -- that among the tools we have as meditators and as human beings for dealing with our difficulties and dealing with the existential fact of our existence, the most deep tool we have, the most powerful tool we have, is the contemplation of emptiness. It might not be that immediately, but eventually it becomes the most powerful tool. But it's important to see it and to see this retreat in context, that it's one tool among many, as we have mettā, we have the practice of generosity, we have mindfulness and bare attention, we have psychotherapy, we have talking with a friend -- we have a million things as human beings. But emptiness is one of those tools, the contemplation of emptiness, and it's the most powerful tool.

So what is emptiness? What does it mean? I mean, I said a little bit about it, but let's go into it a bit more. Emptiness, first of all, is not a thing. It's not a thing. That's quite important. Emptiness is not a thing. It's also not a state. It's not a state of consciousness or a state of mind. Emptiness is not a state of mind. We can, perhaps, when we speak loosely, and I and other teachers might go into it, speak of relative 'states of emptiness,' but actually we're being a little sloppy with our language when we do that. So emptiness is actually not a state. Nor is it space or a space, a space of consciousness or any other kind of space. Okay? So it's not a thing, it's not a state, and it's not a space. What actually is emptiness?

Better to say emptiness is an adjective. What we talk about is this thing -- whatever this thing is, a self or a cushion or an emotion or whatever -- we say it's empty, it's empty. And that's more accurate. So emptiness is an adjective that goes with things and phenomena and selves. Empty of what, though? We say, in technical language, empty of inherent existence. Now, that's a very important word. I'm going to explain what that means. It has a lot of synonyms. So inherent existence, substantial existence, self-existence, intrinsic existence -- am I missing any? True nature, thank you. True nature, true existence. Say again? Essence, yes, thank you. I'll go into these. Essence. Sometimes people miss the 'true' out. This is important: sometimes when you read texts, you'll see "This thing has no existence," "This thing has no nature," "This thing has no reality." You have to insert the 'true' there. Okay? I'll explain. We'll hopefully explain.

I said a little bit before. It appears that this thing or that thing has a nature, it has a nature of its own which exists from its own side. It is that thing, by itself, from its own side. It doesn't need anything from me to be that. We say a chair has a kind of chair-ness over there in its own nature. Somehow the chair-ness is residing in the object. You look at me and you say the Rob-ness -- some people know me and look at me, "It's Rob. Of course it's Rob." Or Pascal, "Of course it's Pascal. The Pascal-ness is right there." [laughter] It's there. It's in the object somehow. And that seems completely self-evident, completely self-evident to us. It's residing in the object. It seems that things exist in their own right, we could say. They exist as they appear to us. Again, we could say an object exists in and of itself, as what it is.

Very importantly, it seems that things exist independently of the perceiving and the conceiving mind. It seems that things, things of the world, exist independently of the perceiving and the conceiving mind. Again picking up what Pascal said, things are then -- actually, in actuality -- we say, without essence. And what's essence? Essence is -- another teacher describes, Chandrakīrti says, "A nature inhering in itself." It's just other words for what we've just said. And to say that something is empty is to say it has no essence, it has no essence. It's not the way we feel and sense and perceive and think about the world. We can also say that, although it's obvious that the clock is there and Rob is here and Pascal is there, when I actually look for these things and these selves, I cannot find them actually. So on one level it looks obvious. When I actually go looking deeply for them, I cannot find them. So one other angle on emptiness is the unfindability of things.

A theme I've already mentioned and we're going to return to many, many times, is, having said all that, this is not a nihilistic philosophy. It's not going over the edge into nihilism. This is extremely important. Teaching this stuff, I'm aware of treading a tightrope here. Sometimes when I teach, I lean this way a little bit, and sometimes that way, and different people get upset at different times. [laughs] We're going to go a lot into this. In Chinese Buddhism, they say -- because they tend to lean a bit this way in Chinese Buddhism and Indian Buddhism tends to lean a bit this way -- in Chinese Buddhism they say:

Truly empty, [hence] unfathomable existence.^[3]

It's saying something that's saying, "Hey, it's not nihilism." Or another, again from Chinese Buddhism:

True emptiness equals wondrous being.^[4]

So the Buddha -- someone was asking for quotes, sources of quotes. I have some and not others, so I hope that's okay. Sutta Nipāta, verse one, chapter one:

The practitioner who knows with regard to the world [this is the Buddha speaking] that 'all this is unreal' sloughs off, shakes off, the near shore and the far shore [in other words, shakes off saṃsāra and the world of duality, the world of even saṃsāra/nirvāṇa duality], as a snake its decrepit old skin [the practitioner who knows that all this is unreal].^[5]

So the Buddha talked about delusion and ignorance being the fundamental, root cause of our dis-ease in life, our unnecessary suffering. Delusion and ignorance. What is that? Again, this is Nāgārjuna in a text called Śūnyatāsaptati:

To posit things arisen through causes and conditions as real is what the teacher [meaning the Buddha] calls 'ignorance.'^[6]

So this concept of ignorance, delusion, is actually very, very central to the Buddha's teaching, extremely important. What does it mean? What does delusion mean? What does it mean to say 'ignorant,' 'deluded'? It's not just -- this is quite important -- that we don't know that things don't have an essence. It's not just the sort of 'not knowing' of their emptiness, okay? It's not just a failure to know something. Delusion is actually an active mistaking, an actively mistaking of the fundamental nature of how things really are. We actively superimpose -- of course, unconsciously; we're not aware of this -- a concreteness, a solidity, an essence, an independent existence, etc., on selves and things. And it actually seems that the world of things and selves exists independently. It seems that way to us. And we, as I said, accept, acquiesce, assent to the way that things seem.

It takes a certain amount of insight to see that that's the problem. I don't know, as I say this now, I'm not sure -- it's going to land in different places -- whether it's obvious that that's really the problem. It may not be obvious. I don't think it's obvious. I think it takes quite a lot of practice to see that that's actually the problem, that's the root problem. So we talk a lot, for instance, in the Dharma about impermanence. And for somebody who's been practising a little while, it begins to be a little bit obvious: if I cling to things that are changing and only going to disappear, hey, I'm going to suffer. It takes a little practice, but that begins to dawn to someone. Relatively speaking, it's quite obvious. It's a much deeper thing to realize, a more subtle thing to realize, that when I perceive something as inherently existing, I suffer and I cling to it. I don't think that's so obvious. It may be or it may not be. I'm not sure.

So there's a story that was kicking around a few years ago, actually quite a few years ago if I remember. I think it was concerning a monk in Sri Lanka. I don't know the monk, a Theravādan monk. And someone asked him, "Why do we suffer?" And this monk replied, "Why do you suffer?" He said, "You suffer because 95 per cent of what you do, you do for yourself -- and there isn't one."^[7] [laughter]

Now, we're going to say something more than that, something more complete than that here on this retreat. We're going to say: because everything you do, think, believe, react to, suffer over, is based on believing in an independently existing world of outer and inner things, including the things that seem to make up my self. That's a bit more full. In the teachings, in the tradition, they talk about the two selflessnesses. So they're not actually different in any way, but it's just for (what's the word?) educational purposes. So this self -- you say, "Look at Rob," and there's Rob's self, there's Pascal's self, there's Tony's self, whatever -- there's a self there, and we say, "That, actually -- its actual nature is selfless. It's empty of a real self."

But we also say that about alarm clocks, about emotions, about situations -- that they seem, again, to have a self in the sense of this kind of essence and true nature that we were talking about before. They seem to have a self in that sense. I was talking about a phenomenon having a self -- it doesn't mean having a personality; it means having that true nature, etc. So there are two selflessnesses: one of persons, and one of phenomena. Does that make sense? So when I say 'phenomena' on this retreat, what we're going to get to is, actually, I'm including awareness. I'm including time. I'm including space. I'm including quarks and protons and bosons, hadrons, or whatever they're called, all of that. All of that -- selfless, lacking self-nature. So even the most fundamental building blocks, the most seemingly obvious facets of our existence -- also lacking in self-nature.

Now, if we're interested in emptiness, and really to go into it deeply, we need to see the emptiness of phenomena as well, all phenomena. In some traditions, in some schools of teaching, the personal selflessness gets emphasized more. You see the emptiness of self, and that gets kind of leaned on more. But what we're saying is we don't fully understand that personal selflessness until we also really see the emptiness of phenomena and the emptiness of the elements that seem to make up the self -- what we call the 'aggregates,' which we'll go into in more detail.

So Chandrakīrti -- we're going to get to him in quite a major way in some time. He was a seventh-century monk in India, in a place called Nālandā, and he is now considered one of the great, great teachers on emptiness, and other aspects, too. Chandrakīrti, on his commentary on Nāgārjuna's Yuktiṣaṣṭikā, if you're interested -- do you want to spell that? Yeah? [spells Chandrakīrti]. Very, very famous. Very, very important teacher:

The abandonment of the afflictive emotions [simply] does not occur for those who may wish to abandon the afflictive emotions but who [still] apprehend the inherent existence of forms and so forth.^[8]

In other words, I might really want to be rid of suffering. I might really want to be rid of misery and this or that afflictive emotion. And I might try this, and I might try that, and all of it might help. But I can't cut it at the root, to borrow the Buddha's analogy, until I have seen the emptiness of all things. However, there's a problem here, and maybe you already sense it; I'm not sure. If this inherent existence, the appearance of inherent existence, is woven into the very way we experience things -- if I see inherent existence and I sense it and I feel it when I'm listening to a sound, when I'm looking at something, even when my awareness is very simple and very basic (and we talk in the Insight Meditation tradition about bare attention and just being very simply and very directly with experience), but even that has woven into it a perception of inherent existence -- how am I going to see through this illusion of inherent existence if it's woven into the very way I see all my experience?

I said yesterday night, I don't feel like just being with our experience, just being with, moment to moment, our experience, is going to do it. Because my 'just being with' has woven into it the sense of inherent existence of things. So we need to actively contemplate in a way that sees through the illusion of inherent existence, actively kind of cut that illusion. Today I was talking with someone who reminded me to bring something up. I don't want to go off on a side tangent here, but I regard there being different modes of insight meditation, so to speak.

(1) So one mode might be just paying attention to my experience, just being present, etc., and in that quietness, and in that simplicity of being with my experience, one notices insights just pop up, and I understand something about myself or about impermanence or maybe even about emptiness, etc. Whatever it is, they just pop up by themselves in the simplicity, in the quietness, in the simple presence, in the bare attention to things. And that's a very important mode.

(2) There's another mode which has more to do with deliberately contemplating in a certain way, to cut deeply, to probe more deeply. So they're both important, both completely important for the fullness of meditation. On this retreat, we're emphasizing a lot of the second one, actually deliberate ways of contemplating, deliberate ways of seeing to see deeply into emptiness. Probably for most of you -- not all, but probably for most of you -- that will be unfamiliar and may feel a little uncomfortable; I don't know. But we're leaning that way on this retreat. They're both important, but this retreat leans one way a little bit.

Okay. So how are we going to see through? Well, that's what obviously the retreat is about, the 'how to,' what it means and the 'how to.' But let's start -- I think I said last night, some, I don't know, levels of understanding of emptiness, are actually quite commonsensical. They're not far away from us as human beings, from us as thoughtful and conscious human beings. We don't even have to meditate to kind of pierce that level of reality. So, for instance, you're in an argument with someone, or something happens, and there's a lot of issue around, a lot of heat, a lot of something that's a problem around. It might be not even involving another person; it might be just myself thinking about something and obsessing about something, thinking round and round about this thing, about this situation or this issue, whatever it is.

And whether it's an argument or whether it's me obsessing about something, some time goes by. And later, later we think, "What on Earth was all that fuss about? What was all that about?" And we see with hindsight how we just got our knickers in a twist, basically. We just got into some whole thing which didn't really have any reality. Partly what practice is about is taking that time lag -- which sometimes, I think with myself, some things, it was years, years later, I look back and I think, "Goodness me!" [laughter] Such a thing that sometimes took years to go through, and then years later I begin to see, "What a lot of fuss. That was all just ..." What we want is the time lag to get from years to months to da-da-da-da, minutes, seconds, until eventually, right there in the moment, hopefully -- not always.

We have this phrase, 'making something.' Often the mind gets into a relationship with things, it's making something. And often when it makes something, what it makes is a problem. It's making something. And we talked this morning about the hindrances and how the hindrances have these hooks (metaphor). Hindrances have these hooks, and these hooks sink into things, and then they shake them up, and they make something, they make something. Or the way the thinking mind, the thinking mind when it's unskilful, when it's unchecked, it ends up making something and making a problem. It's important to see this. It's really important. So this is a level of emptiness. It's a level of emptiness.

And there's a whole other level, again, that we don't particularly have to be meditators to inquire into and to realize: the whole level of social convention. Oftentimes we fall for, we believe completely, the conventions of the society that we move and exist in without questioning them. So for example, I remember being sent to quite a sort of -- I don't know what the word is -- academic, sort of pushy high school. And it had a lot of really great things about it, but there was a lot of emphasis there on how one did academically, and what grades you got, and "Were you in the A stream or the B stream?", and what university would you get into, and all this stuff. There was quite a lot of pressure, and it was something that a lot of people were preoccupied with. I felt like I very much got sucked into the suffering of that. And then it was occurring to me at a certain point -- it's like, "Does this actually have any inherent worth to it?" So that kind of, you know, academic-type intelligence, which is a lovely thing, but somehow it felt like that was being given an inherent worth, whereas if we had moved back -- I don't know -- ten or eleven thousand years, my calculus ability wouldn't have helped me in hunting the woolly mammoth or whatever. There, my prowess in the society would have been relative to that. It's completely relative. And somehow, in the believing, we don't see the relativity of it, the cultural conditioning for it, and we fall for something.

And the same thing with success and success in the world and how it's often measured in terms that are purely culturally ordained, culturally prescribed. So I'm thinking, you know, financial success, etc., and how that often gets respect. And I'm not saying it's good or bad or anything, but there's something that we're falling for there. It's dependent on a view. In other words, what we feel about this thing, the seeming importance of this thing, is dependent on a view, and in this case, right now what we're talking about, it's dependent on a culturally conditioned view. So this dependence on a view ends up being the most important thing in emptiness. Obviously I'm talking about a very everyday level right now, but this dependence on view, dependence on a way of seeing, ends up being the most important thing. And if I don't see that, if I don't see, as I did when I was in my early teens, if I don't see the relativity of this, I get pulled into something and I suffer more than I need to.

Again, countries -- countries are a human social convention. How much suffering in the history of humanity has been over believing in the inherent existence of a country? And then that country fighting this country or fighting about its borders. Look into a country, it's always -- first of all, a country is always in relationship to another country. If you have no countries, there can't be one country and something else. Do you understand? A country is always in relationship. It doesn't stand on its own. England does not stand on its own. Wales does not stand on its own. Israel, Palestine, these places, they don't stand on their own. That's one thing. But again, they are part of an agreement. A country needs, to be a country, it needs human (first of all) agreement. It needs purely human agreement. It takes that agreement, and when there isn't that agreement, then there are the problems, there's the suffering and there's war and there's conflict. So a country, first of all, is in relationship to -- does not stand on its own. And secondly, stands, as a concept, given its support by human agreement and convention.

Again, if we're just staying on this everyday level, we talk a lot, and again as human beings we suffer a lot, around at times (some of us) the notion of being 'in' a relationship (usually a romantic relationship) or 'out' of a romantic relationship. And that can be very charged as a sort of duality: "I'm in one, and I want to be out," [laughter] or "I'm out of one, and I want to be in." I know people know both. But the whole concept, it gets built up. Again, this is a concept we're going to return to, the way the mind builds something. It gets built up as a thing, as a perception, as a reality. When I look at what a relationship is, I see actually it has lots of holes in it. My relationship has lots of holes in it, and that's very natural. It has holes when I'm, in a way, not really in a relationship at that time. So right now, I'm giving a Dharma talk; I'm not in my relationship. There are plenty of times when I'm not even thinking about my relationship. When I'm fast asleep, you know, you might be even dreaming about someone else. There are times in a relationship when we're actually, if we're honest, as human beings, we're relating very, very poorly. We're not really relating very well at all. And yet we call it a relationship.

There are times, as well, dimensions of a relationship, where we feel actually only parts of us are relating. And yet somehow with all of that, it gets such a solidity. And again, I also see, I have, we have as human beings, relationships to many people, to animals, many animals, to things, to events, to inner and outer things and events all the time. Somehow, some particular kind of relationship is getting solidified, over-solidified sometimes. And again, if I don't see this, I will tend to suffer with the 'in' and the 'out,' and the whole notion of relationship ends up being more and more solid, more and more either a prison or something that I need to have. Of course -- this is where this balance comes in -- we're not saying no commitment. Of course commitment in a relationship is important. Of course on one level there is a relationship. Of course there is. But the question is, am I stuck in ways of seeing? Am I stuck in ways of seeing things? That ends up being the important question.

Everything that I've just said about relationship, I could say in terms of roles, and the roles we get in terms of jobs or parents or children or whatever it is. I'm the Resident Teacher at Gaia House, and I live here. If I walk around thinking, "I'm the Resident Teacher, I'm the Resident Teacher, I'm the Resident Teacher," I'm going to create a complete nightmare for myself. It's too much. It's too much reality to give to something like that. Believe me. [laughter] The same with a retreat. And again, where's the retreat here? Where's the retreat? First day, first evening, you think, "I'll tell you where the retreat is. It's in my knees is where it is!" [laughter] But aching knees? You can get aching knees any time. We tend to focus on the differences. We tend to focus on 'retreat life' versus 'outside life.' In a way, we're just some people who are kind of living together for four weeks. We focus on the differences, and we build some thing called a 'retreat,' and then we feel perhaps imprisoned by it or whatever.

So my focusing on it. What's really that different? We meditate a bit. We walk around. We eat. We sleep. We go to the toilet. All of this stuff we do outside anyway. Can't actually find the difference if I look. Even meditation -- if I'm sitting here meditating, and actually I'm spacing out for x amount of time, is that meditating or not meditating? If I'm walking down the street in Newton Abbot and just organically, spontaneously, by itself, some mindfulness comes without effort, is that meditating or not meditating? Where is the meditation? Of course there's meditation, of course there's retreat, etc., but somehow we grasp onto it as having a reality that's too solid, too self-existent.

Okay. So I said before that actually simple mindfulness isn't enough, but we're actually going to start with simple mindfulness, because it's a very powerful way in and it's also, for most people in here, their background and what you know. So there's something about this that I think is quite interesting. Sometimes when people start talking about emptiness and teaching emptiness, they start talking about chairs or tables, etc., and it's quite a philosophical investigation, and can be great and wonderful. My experience, for myself and working with people, is it can be, it often is, best to actually start the inquiry into emptiness right where we feel the suffering in our life, right where we feel the discontent. That's the best place to start. Why? Somehow the emptiness is actually easier to see there, funnily enough. And of course it also feels much more relevant than talking about "Does the chair ultimately exist or not?"

So what do we notice when, as practitioners, we bring mindfulness to our experience, we bring that simple attention, simple openness to experience, and just seeing what we can learn? One of the things, and someone said this to me the other day, and some people regularly notice this, is that when there's a difficulty -- either so-called 'inside' or so-called 'outside' -- the attention tends to get sucked into that difficulty. The attention gets sucked into the difficulty, and then it feels like -- it could be something difficult in the body, it could be a sense of tiredness, it could be a fear, it could be a situation, it could be that you walk into a room and there's some kind of social situation, and you think someone has a problem with you, or there's something unresolved, and then how easily the attention gets sucked towards that person: "What are they thinking? How are they looking at me?", trying to read what they say. The attention gets sucked into, very often, where the difficulty is. And in that, the difficulty then feels like it's taking up all the space, and the size, the felt size of the difficulty increases, and the felt solidity, also -- it feels very solid.

(1) So, as practitioners, first of all we want to notice that that's going on, and then is it possible to see space around this thing? So it could be space around some bodily discomfort, space around an emotion, space around a situation. Even in this room, when we arrived yesterday -- and I think for everyone it felt like, "Gosh, it's a bit cosy in here. It's a bit cramped" -- we don't notice, actually, there's a lot of space in this room. There's more space than there are people. One can actually not get so sucked into what can feel like, at times, the problem of the people and the lack of space. Actually, there's quite a lot of space in here. As we said before, space is not emptiness. Emptiness does not mean space. It's rather that the mind gives solidity through the way we relate and see and conceive to something. Okay, so that's one possibility thrown out. It's very simple, very simple aspect of mindfulness.

(2) Second, the mind likes to create abstractions and then suffers with those abstractions. So a little while ago, I was talking with someone, and this person said, "I have no idea what I'm going to do with my life." They were really in quite a state with it, really suffering, "No idea what I'm going to do with my life." And this situation was unknown, work was unknown, living situation -- "I'll be homeless!" A lot of fear, a lot of agitation, a lot of trembling, really, and not seeing how those two statements -- "I have no idea what I'm going to do with my life," and "I'll be homeless" -- are actually gross abstractions. We've painted something, and painted it big and bold and abstract and solid, and then suffer with it. We've reacted to that very painting that we've created.

So when that's the case, and the mind does this, is it possible to actually (2.1) question the ways that we're seeing something? In this case we were talking. It's like, actually, this "I don't know what I'm going to do with my life" -- first of all, it just applies to a job, you know. It doesn't apply -- "I'm going to get a cup of tea in five minutes" -- that much is clear. It applies to just an area of life, and actually it's an opportunity, and I can see it as an opportunity -- an opportunity to choose differently. This person was also, "Well, I keep choosing jobs out of fear," or out of x or whatever. Actually can see, "Oh yeah, I'm taking time as an opportunity." It's a different way of seeing something. And in that, I'm caring for myself. Yet the mind had got locked into a whole other way, this abstracted way of seeing it: "I have no idea what I'm going to do with my life." Locked into that and suffering with the solidity and the abstraction of it.

Again, we went into, "What does 'homeless' mean to you? What does that mean, that word? When you jump to that, what does that mean?" And again, "Does it mean that you're really going to end up on the street? Is that what you really feel inside?" "No, actually, I don't really feel that's going to happen." So what does it mean? Looked, went into it a bit more, and actually what it meant -- the mind was, again (this is a whole other thing), going off into the future, spinning a reality: "I will end up lonely in some bedsit, bed and breakfast or something somewhere, and be completely without friends." So can I question the ways of seeing? Can I see what's underneath this abstraction? Number one.

(2.2) Number two: can I be in the body, with the emotion that's with what's going on? I'm just talking about simple mindfulness practice now. So in this case, there was fear, there was sadness, there was actually a whole bunch of emotion there. But the mind was kind of bouncing off all that, was away from the heart centre and the feeling of the emotion in the body. When this person was able to do that and come more in, working together, come more into the body and into the emotion, and feel it, and just hold it, and be there with it, and allow it to unfold and express itself, actually, guess what? Began to soften. The actual emotion began to soften, the emotions began to soften. And in that softening of the body and the emotion, the views softened. The views, the ways of seeing, soften. They open up. And it became possible for them to see differently.

Also, in being with the emotion, it's like they realized it's not just one emotion that they were running away from. There are actually lots of strands there, lots of strands. There was actually anger, fear, sadness -- I can't remember what else. There was a bunch of different things. Beginning to see the strands there, they begin to reveal themselves, and we can feel them. And that tends to actually decrease the sense of overwhelm and the sense of solidity of the whole thing. "Ah, there's this, and there's this," and the whole thing begins to lose [solidity] -- the whole texture, the whole experience or situation, begins to seem less solid. So both together: questioning the ways of seeing, and working with the emotions. Together, they bring confidence in relationship to all this. In that case, what's empty? The abstraction was empty. The abstraction of the situation, we said, was empty, empty of being real, empty of being "That's what it was," that abstraction.

(3) So for an insight meditator, for someone whose prime modality is sort of simple mindfulness, something else begins to get obvious as we get more familiar with working with mindfulness. We begin to see that our experience that seems so solid actually has lots of gaps in it. So this could be something inner, something going on in the body. It could be an emotion. It could be something outer. Actually, when I look at it, first it seems solid. When I look more closely, what seems solid actually has lots and lots of gaps in it. When you were a child, did you, like me, have those drawing books? They were called 'dot-to-dot.' Do you know? They have numbers, and you follow the dots, and then you get a picture of something. The mind does that with experience. It joins the dots. When I look carefully, what I actually experience is the dots, moments of this and moments of that, and I join those dots.

So we might, for instance -- the weather wasn't great today, cold and rainy and a bit windy. Someone might say, "It's terrible." When I actually go out into it and I look, I really look at the experience with mindfulness, I really open to the experience with mindfulness, what I get is gaps, certainly, gaps in the terribleness of it. There's maybe some coldness on the neck, and then maybe a raindrop falls and you don't like it on the thing, and then nothing, and then actually the breeze feels a bit nice for a second, and then it gets a bit cold. That's actually the nature of the experience, moment to moment. The mind has come in too quickly and joined all those dots together, kind of hurried through the ones that are the opposite, and created this terrible, terrible, Devon English weather or whatever it is. [laughter] The Americans are laughing, so. [laughs] You get used to it.

We do it with the opposite. Lunch. You're sitting here meditating, "What's the time? What's the time?" And then the lunch bell goes. "Great! Lunch!" And the sense of, "It's going to be fantastic. Lunch is going to be fantastic. It's going to be really, really wonderful." [laughter] And if I'm up for it and I actually go to the lunch hall and I take my lunch, and I sit there and I take it as a meditation, and I bring all the mindfulness I can muster to the experience of eating, what do I notice? Here's the food in my mouth. Chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp. Taste. Wow! Maybe very pleasant. Chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp. A bit more taste. Maybe actually quite neutral. Chomp, chomp, chomp. Pleasant. Chomp, chomp, chomp. Maybe a taste I don't like so much. Chomp, chomp, chomp, etc. That's even if I'm mindful. [laughs] What do we do? We join the dots, and then something either seems terrible or fantastic. And by joining them, we've given something solidity, substantiality it doesn't have.

What we want is the mindfulness begins to expose the solidity as a fabrication -- it's a fabrication of the mind -- to an extent. We were saying mindfulness is just a start with emptiness, but it's a very, very important start. We could say, what's actually there in my experience when I do that? A lot less is there, either to be afraid of, to dread, or to feel is so wonderfully fantastic about lunch or whatever it is. What's actually there? That happens also with inner experience, with emotions. Again, can feel like fear or anger, or sadness, or whatever it is, is so solid. Or pain -- so solid. And when I look, it has gaps in it. It has gaps in it, and we join the dots.

So this third one actually needs, it needs willingness. It needs a willingness to pay close attention to the things that I'm suffering over, or the things that I'm craving, or the things that I'm rejecting. I actually need to really scrutinize that thing with mindfulness, whether I'm craving it or rejecting it. Needs that willingness. If I believe unquestioningly its solidity, I will suffer. Even if it's something I like, eventually I will suffer. Okay. So these are things to do. We're focusing on samādhi, but these are things to do if you want. Bring them in over the days, on the cushion, off the cushion.

If you've been around or read teachings about emptiness before, you may well have come across people saying, "To say something's empty means to say it's a dependent arising." You come across this a lot: "Emptiness is the same as dependent arising."^[9] John and I will also be saying that. But it's not quite as simple as it seems. Often you hear that, "This thing is empty because it's dependent on causes and conditions." Okay? So this microphone, this bowl, this Buddha statue is empty because it depends on causes and conditions. Now, certainly the Buddha statue depends on causes and conditions. Someone, by the looks of it probably in Thailand, moulded it, etc. A lot of stuff -- it took that person to get fed. It took whatever it's made from (I don't know what it's made from), the materials that it's made from. They had to be mined, by the looks of it, etc. So it's dependent on causes and conditions. All these factors had to come together. You can trace all these factors, and actually, a lot, a lot of causes and conditions had to come together.

Now, I have no idea how much that's worth or how unique it is as a Buddha statue. It might be just a factory assembly one. [laughs] They might just churn out a whole bunch. But let's say it was completely unique. I might say, "Well, yeah, but the gold that it's made from is from a specific mine in this very remote province of Thailand. It was actually very difficult to get to this mine, very dangerous, because there are -- I don't know -- tigers around, and da-da-da-da-da. And the craftsman was from a lineage that descended many generations, so there's a lot of causes and conditions there," etc. All of that, if that's the case, is only going to increase my attachment to it. So saying something is dependent on causes and conditions is not enough for the fullness of emptiness. It's not enough. Do you see? We'll come back to this. I don't have time to go into this fully. What's actually quite important is dependency, but dependency on the mind. Dependency on the mind. So the examples I gave before and the ways of working were all ways we could see: the mind is actually doing something here to build, to create, to make things seem a certain way.

This is the most important dependency: dependency on the mind. And it's the one, when we see it, it brings the freedom. You can see -- how many times have you been in a group of people, and you've all seen the same situation differently? I mean, if you come to a Gaia House meeting and see how ...[laughter] We all see the same situation, see it completely differently, all in the same room together, and the same thing happened. If we take this chair again, wooden chair, how we as Western humans see it -- how does a termite see it? It's lunch. It's dinner. How does -- I have no idea -- but how would a cow see it? Cow probably sees it quite differently from either we as Westerners or a termite. How would a spider see it? Very different perception to a spider. How would someone, if there still exists, from another human culture who had never seen a chair before, they don't have chairs like that -- what would they make of it?

So we say -- another sort of technical phrase -- things are imputed by the mind, imputed by the mind. Imagine for a moment a piece of wood or something that's slanted like this. And it's sort of 20 feet outside the window, and coming slowly this way, magically. And another piece of wood slanted this way, 20 feet outside of that window, coming slowly this way. And another piece of wood that's horizontal, 20 feet that way, coming slowly in. And they're slowly, slowly, very slowly, coming together. What do we make of that? Strange. At a certain point, the mind goes, "Oh, it's an 'A.' It's a capital 'A.'" At what point does it say that? We begin to see that (and we'd all maybe say it differently at different times) it's the mind that's giving something its reality at a certain point. You begin to get a sense that its thingness rests in the mind. Because I could see that it's an 'A' before they actually joined to make an 'A.' Someone else might not see it as an 'A' yet. It's the mind that's giving it that thingness.

Or sometimes I say, if we take this chair again and we throw it in a bonfire, and it starts very slowly to disintegrate, when does it become not a chair? Exactly when is it no longer a chair? Again, the mind is going to call it at different times. It's dependent on the mind. Or if you're reading someone's handwriting, begin to see that -- I can see that's an 'A' or a 'C' or whatever it is dependent on the letters around it and the words around it, the context. Let's take an emotion again. Let's take two things -- let's take an emotion and a body. If I have an emotion of, let's say, fear or sadness or whatever, let's say I had the ability to pluck out certain moments of the experience, in the stream of the experience of sadness, sadness, sadness, or fear, fear, fear, whatever it is, and I could pluck out selective moments of that. I pluck out one, and I pluck out another. How many would I have to pluck out until I stop feeling it as sadness? It's completely arbitrary. It's the mind that calls the shots. It's the mind that gives the thingness to things.

If I chop my arm off, you still look at me and you say, "There's still a body there." I chop the other arm off. "There's still a body there." I chop a leg off. "Still a body there," you'd probably say. Chop the other leg off. [laughter] You'll still say, "All right, but there's still a body there." Start chopping more off. Chop the head off. "All right, there's still ..." At some point, again, the mind is going to call the shots. The thingness, the definition of a thing, is given by the mind. We say it's imputed by the mind. So there's a sūtra -- it's called the Questions of Upāli Sūtra:

[The things of the world] are posited through the power of conceptuality. Through the power of conceptuality the world is imputed.^[10]

There was a very famous example -- again, this was years ago; some of you who have been meditating a long, long time might have heard it before, but it's interesting here. There's a constellation, a stellar constellation, that in America they call the Big Dipper, and in England they call the Plough or the Great Plough. I have no idea how they got 'Plough' out of that. That really is joining the dots. But Big Dipper I can see. If you look at it, it looks like a kind of saucepan. Yeah? Does everyone know the constellation I'm talking about? Yeah? So this example is, can you look at the Big Dipper without seeing a big dipper? Can you look at the Big Dipper and you get a sense that the mind is actually giving it -- and actually, if you really try, you can actually look at it and not see a Big Dipper sometimes. It's a bit like those Escher paintings; you can flip in and out of seeing something. You begin to get a sense: the mind is giving it the Big Dipperness thing.

And that's great, and that's really important to see. Then we say its Big Dipperness is empty of Big Dipperness, Big Dippertude. Anyway. We're going to go much further, much, much further. Not only is there no Big Dipper, really, there are no stars, really. There's no awareness that sees the stars, really. There's no space, really. There's no moment in which I see the things, really. We're starting very simple, and we're going to go very, very deep with this. But that's what the teachings of emptiness are actually pointing to. Starting simple, starting everyday, and actually it goes all that way. There are layers here, and we work up to that. We're going to work up to it slowly. And for me, it seems like, for many people, one of the best ways is going actually via the suffering and via what actually helps in relationship to this dissatisfaction that I feel right now.

With all that -- and I say there's no space, and there's no awareness, etc. -- we're still respecting the functionality of conventional reality. We still have respect for the functionality of conventional reality. It's like when I was talking about relationship. Of course it's still a relationship. Of course I'm committed and monogamous and all that stuff. But actually seeing it's empty. It functions, it has a conventional existence, and it's empty. When I see its emptiness, the suffering goes out of something. It still functions, and it still has a conventional existence, but the suffering goes out. And that, as practitioners, is what we're interested in. So there's a Middle Way here between existence and nonexistence.

There's a famous text called the Ratnāvalī, again by Nāgārjuna, attributed to Nāgārjuna. He says:

It is confused to apprehend this mirage-like world as either existent or nonexistent. If confused, one will not obtain liberation.^[11]

'Middle Way': Nāgārjuna called the teaching of emptiness 'Middle Way' -- Middle Way between existence and non-existence. We're going to come back to this, but it's very important. The suffering, the greed, the aversion, what we call the kilesas in Pali, depend on conceiving inherent existence. And again, I'm not sure how obvious that is. It might not be obvious yet, and that's fine. But they actually turn out, that our suffering and the presence of greed and aversion depend on conceiving inherent existence of things. In other words, they depend on the thing and the situation seeming to really, independently be that way. When we begin to see it's actually dependent on the way of seeing, the way of perceiving, the way of looking at with the mind, we can let go. We let go. We see it's not actually, really that way. And with that, the greed and the aversion in relationship to that thing also go away. They don't arise.

Āryadeva was Nāgārjuna's direct student:

All afflictive emotions [all painful emotions] are overcome through overcoming ignorance [overcoming delusion]. When dependent-arising is seen [remember, that means the same as emptiness], ignorance does not arise.^[12]

You could say ignorance is not generated.

Insight into the selfless nature of phenomena destroys the seeds of saṃsāra.^[13]

So of course we can hear something like that, but we need to practise it. It's a practice. I need to practise this over and over and really see it. So when we say things like this, it's not that we want you or you want, hopefully, to have the right intellectual position and be on the right kind of team. It's not that just someone says something and you go "Aha!" or "That's interesting. That's very interesting. Hmm." It's not that. It's that this is heading to liberation. This is heading in the direction of liberation. It brings liberation to some degree or other.

We talk about, and the Buddha talks about -- nibbāna comes from ethics and samādhi, as we talked about this morning. It comes from training in realizing the emptiness of things to whatever degree, different degrees. To realizing, in other words, that nothing has its own self-nature. Training in realizing that. And the operative word is 'training.' And then, thirdly, through getting used to that realization or those realizations. Getting used, habituating the mind to that seeing. And that takes time. I mean, there are stories of people getting it like that; even the people that talk about "You can get it like that" say, basically, it takes time. And it's extremely, extremely rare. You're talking about maybe one person in a millennium. It takes time. And even someone who has realized very deeply, directly, the emptiness of all things, there's still refinement. There's still deepening of that understanding. What we call a stream-enterer, someone who has actually cut very deeply -- there's still a refining and understanding to have.

We have an inborn habit -- this is what the Buddha was talking about with delusion. It's an inborn habit. We are born with a habit of delusion, of seeing self-existence in things. It's an inborn habit, okay? So it's quite a project to overturn that. There's a sūtra called the Samādhirāja Sutra. It means the King of Samādhis or something like that, Samādhirāja Sutra:

If the selflessness of phenomena is analyzed [remember that word 'selflessness,' it's just another word for emptiness; if the emptiness of phenomena is analyzed], and if this analysis is cultivated [in meditation], it causes the effect of attaining nirvana. Through no other cause does one come to peace.^[14]

It's quite a strong statement. It's like, basically, this is what needs to be done. So that's quite interesting. I find that a very interesting statement. It's actually quite a famous quote. What is also being implied there is that it's not just enough to kind of withdraw the mind from contact with objects in some kind of space inside where not much is happening. That's not enough. That's not going to do it, whether that's samādhi or whatever. If that were the case, then I could just fall asleep, and falling into deep sleep would do it, or going into a coma or anaesthetic or something. That would be the way for liberation.

Tsongkhapa is one of the great Tibetan teachers from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries:

One should draw the distinction between the nonengagement of the mind with the two selves [the self of personal self and phenomena] and the engagement of the mind with the two selflessnesses.^[15]

That might be a little difficult to understand. Should I explain that, or does that make sense? Explain? He's just saying what I just said in different ways. He's saying, you can find ways, either falling asleep, going into a coma, going under anesthetic, or some -- I don't know -- weird drug or something, or some states of samādhi where you're actually not engaging with the self. As I was saying this morning, there's not much self around. There's not even much world around. There's just not much happening. So it's a whole lot of nothing. And that's quite lovely, or one gets used to it, but after a while you realize it's quite lovely. That's a non-engagement with the personal self and the selves of things. Draw the distinction between that and actually actively engaging and contemplating the emptiness, the selflessness of this self and other selves, actively cutting through rather than just not being present with selves.

We begin to go into this, and a practitioner begins to really get a feeling for this. And really, the heart gets very, very involved in a very beautiful way. It begins to be that seeing emptiness, the seeing of emptiness, begins almost to have its own momentum. What at first seemed so strange -- such a strange way of looking at things, such an effort to look at things that way -- may still be a bit of effort, but it begins to have a momentum. It's like the mind keeps finding its way back to seeing emptiness and wanting to see the emptiness of things. The whole thing has its own momentum, and conviction builds. And again, I don't know how this sounds, what I've said tonight, and hopefully it actually does make sense. Maybe some of it sounds far-fetched; I don't know. But the conviction begins to build, and it builds and builds, based on our experience.

And through practice, when we hear -- and you might hear me or John or someone else, or you read someone who says, "This thing or that thing is a dependent arising. It's dependently originated," and it sounds like ... pfft. Sounds like an intellectual mouthful. But it begins to have resonances that are more and more profound, more and more radical. We begin to get a sense of the radicality of what's being said when we say this or that is a dependent arising. Slowly, with practice. Begin to get a sense of the beauty of what that's pointing to. Immense beauty in that. It really begins to touch the heart, what that means, that intellectual-sounding mouthful, to say that this or that is a dependent arising. The heart is really, really touched by that. And it begins to be more and more freeing, the more we see that.

So I'm going to say, only in line with the tradition: to see emptiness and the dependent arising of things, or that things are empty and dependent arisings, is actually the most significant fact of our existence. It's the most significant fact. And again, it takes a lot of insight to even realize that it's the most significant fact. So you know, people debate about this or that, and "Is this or that real?", and "Is there a God?", and all kinds of stuff. But the most significant fact is that if there is a God, he/she/it is actually empty of inherent existence. That actually turns out to be the most significant, profoundly significant fact of all of our existence. And there are levels, as I say, of understanding this.

Someone said (I can't remember who it was; it might actually be in some text somewhere) that there are levels here, and the quote is, "If your mouth is not hanging open when you hear about dependent arising, you haven't quite understood it." [laughter] There's a radical -- we're going to go into this. We haven't got to it tonight. But there's a complete, as I said last night, mind-boggling, counter-intuitive, profound radicality here that is totally and utterly awesome, absolutely awesome. So for me it's a razor's edge, existence/non-existence. What does it mean to say something is a dependent arising, lacking inherent existence? We're walking, in a way, a tightrope, a razor's edge here. If my contemplation of emptiness and my practices on emptiness, etc., if they're leading, if I look at myself and my life and I find that, actually, less compassion in my life, less love, less care for ethics, less generosity, something is off. Something is very off and out of balance in my contemplation of emptiness. Because the opposite should be true -- more compassion, more love, more care about how we are with each other, and more generosity. It's probably gone to lean over into nihilism if the first was the case. So from the Yuktiṣaṣṭikā again:

One does not achieve liberation through reification [through making things real, and things, real things]. Nor does one free oneself from saṃsāra through nihilism.... By thoroughly understanding existence and nonexistence, the great beings obtain liberation.^[16]

So not nihilism, not nihilism. What we're seeing is that things depend on the mind, and on this retreat we want to see exactly how they depend on the mind, really go deep into that question of how things depend on the mind, the fullness of what that means. It also turns out that the mind or awareness is also dependent, too. It's also dependent. It's not like you've got something that is real building other things or whatever, or something that's exempt from this being built. Mind, too, awareness, too, is empty of inherent existence. That's one of the places where this is extremely radical. It's like, "How can that be?And what does it mean?"

I'll finish with Nāgārjuna. Again, I actually said it before:

Anything that arises in interdependence, anything that is a dependent arising, is also peace in its very essence.^[17]

It's peace in its very essence. There's something here that's so beautiful, that touches the heart so deeply when we begin to get an understanding of this. We're not just being intellectual here at all. Something begins to be more and more moving to the heart.