Emptiness, Postmodernism, and Sacred Participation

Daniel Thorson, Jamie Bristow, and Rob Burbea

Posted November 25, 2019

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Daniel: Welcome back to the Emerge podcast. Today on the show I have a special treat. Rob Burbea is coming back on the show. I think this is my fourth conversation with him. And this time I'm joined by Jamie Bristow, who was on the show last week. Jamie is a student of Rob's. He's currently in teacher training at Gaia House. And if you listen to the conversation I released last week with Jamie, you'll recall that at the very end of the conversation, Jamie shared how important he thought the concept of emptiness was, and the practices of really realizing emptiness are, to this whole world that I've been exploring on this podcast -- call it metamodernism, or integral, or metaperspectival, meta-systematic, whatever you want to call it, sense-making, that somehow -- and I share this intuition, this thinking -- that emptiness, and in particular, the kind of crystalline conceptual clarity that Rob Burbea brings to this concept of emptiness is somehow a very vital, core piece to really embodying what so many of these individuals that I've spoken with on the show, actually embodying what they're pointing to. I know that's the case for me.

And so this conversation is a bit of a 101 intro to emptiness, and then Jamie and I will sort of try to draw some parallels, draw out some resonances between the work of Rob and the understanding of emptiness, what that can bring to life, and previous conversations and explorations, topics and themes that have been explored on this podcast and in this space. And so if you have no idea what emptiness is, this would be a great conversation to get started with, and I'll link to some further information if you want to go deeper. And if you have practised in this way before, I think you'll also find lots of value in this conversation as we reflect on it perhaps from a different angle.

And so this conversation, for me, is again another crank in the turn of the inquiry that I've mentioned a couple episodes in the future of the Emerge podcast, this transition from getting an understanding of the cutting edge of the systems change, how to consider systems change, and now turning around to look at the human being, our lives, and how we can imagine ourselves, participate in our own lives, in order to be able to show up in a way that is of service and of value to this time of transition. And for me, from where I'm sitting, Rob Burbea, and more generally the contemplative traditions, are holding a really significant piece of what the work needs to be in order so that we as individuals can participate in perhaps a radically different way -- we can be radically available to participating in the world, such that we can be agents of transformation. And I think there's so much impoverished thinking and understanding in the relationship between personal transformation and systems change, and I think there's also just -- even when people see the relevance of personal transformation to systems change, which is rare to begin with, to then have what I would consider to be a deep understanding of personal transformation is even rarer.

Often in these communities that try to bring together personal and systems transformation, you get what I feel to be -- my judgment is -- a very superficial take on what personal transformation is, a very superficial take on, for instance, what meditation is and what it can open up. So often meditation gets reduced to, "Ah, well, it helps us work with our trauma. It makes us be a little bit less aggro, a little bit less angry, less stressed, and so therefore we can maybe have some more processing power to think about the state of the world and participate in activism or whatnot. That's not enough for me. That's not what Rob Burbea is talking about. There's something else going on here. These practices can, if approached in the right way and if one gives oneself to them, these practices can open up a wholly new way of participating in life. That's what Rob is pointing to. And so this is hugely significant. So yeah, I just want to notice that as we continue to turn into this new inquiry on Emerge. This is a really valuable, enjoyable conversation. It was a real treat to record. And I think that you will enjoy it. So without further ado, here is Jamie Bristow and Rob Burbea.

Daniel: Welcome back to Emerge. Today on the show I'm joined by Jamie Bristow and Rob Burbea, both of whom have been on the show before, and we're going to have a special conversational treat today, at least in my world. We're going to be talking about emptiness. Emptiness is a word that many of my previous guests have either spoken directly to or sort of danced around without ever having spent the time to unpack exactly what it means and what some of the consequences and affordances of this concept are. So Jamie and I, after recording a conversation together, thought it would be a real joy to have Rob on the show, who has written a book on emptiness, to kind of explore what this concept means and then hopefully spend some time weaving some threads between this concept and previous conversations and topics that we've explored on Emerge. And so I'm really excited to have you both here. Welcome, Jamie and Rob, to Emerge.

Jamie: Thank you very much. Great to be here.

Rob: Thank you, Daniel. It's really lovely to be here. Thanks for inviting me. I'm very happy to be with you both today.

Daniel: Great, yeah. So I think, Jamie, if you want to add some colour to the inquiry as you see it, and then maybe, Rob, you can just take it away and we can kind of do it conversationally, unpack it together.

Jamie: Yeah, thank you, Daniel. As you said at the end of our previous conversation, you kindly said is there anything else you want to leave listeners with, and I chose to spend five minutes talking about how important I think emptiness is for this emerging field. And, as you said, previous guests including Bonnitta Roy have said also that emptiness is important, and there's probably a whole podcast to do on it, so I'm really happy that we're getting the opportunity here and Rob's able to join us. Ideas like metamodernism really jumped out at me when I first came across them because I saw immediately how analogous it was to the contemplative practices that I'd been introduced to by Rob through his teaching and through his book. So yeah, I think it would be great to start off by just turning it over to Rob to unpack that term a little bit, because as you say, we've danced around it with some assumed knowledge, perhaps, and so it would be good to have a 101 on the subject.

Rob: Okay. So I feel like I'm just picking up the thread of a history of conversations that Daniel's been having with different people, and that you also have been having with different people, Jamie. But the gist that I get -- so correct me if I'm wrong -- is that sort of post-postmodernism, if you like, there's a little bit of a crisis with regard to perspectives on reality and how can we move forward culturally, socially, etc., emerging out of a time of -- let's call it modernity, where there was the idea that there's one truth and human beings, if they're clever enough, can arrive, deduce what that truth is, what the reality of anything is, and achieve that privileged perspective on the truth of this or that, of the reality of this or that, and then that would be it; it would be enshrined that way through their careful sort of intellectual, scientific endeavours, etc., philosophical endeavours. Then postmodernism came along, so to speak, and kind of blew that, shattered that dream, but left a bit of a vacuum in the sense that everything was just pooh-poohed, everything was shot down -- any claim to truth or privileged perspective was shot down. And left a bit of a vacuum in the sense that it was almost then impossible, or actually taboo, to engage any perspective on anything, so that it was very hard for any creative process to unfold if one immediately gets slapped on the wrist for engaging any perspective because there would be a danger of a truth claim there. So I think that's the sort of place that you're interested in addressing -- what to do in that space. Would that be correct as a brief summary, how to move forward from that?

Jamie: I think that's where we'd like to get to -- that's the framing for why we're having this conversation now. But to start off with, it would be good to unpack the term and to reassure some people who hear it and think it sounds cold and nihilist ...

Rob: Yeah, sure. The reason I asked all that is because one can talk about emptiness in lots of different ways and for lots of different purposes, so I just wanted to make sure I understood the context and the intention. So in terms of that word, emptiness, it's a word that comes out of the Buddhist tradition -- śūnyatā in Sanskrit, and suññatā in Pali. But the first thing we should know about it, I guess, is that okay, Buddhism is 2,500 years old, something like that, 2,600 years old, and these words, emptiness and empty, etc., are used in quite a broad range of different ways in that tradition, and very much so nowadays. So what does emptiness mean, or what does an emptiness 101 lecture sound like? It's going to sound very different depending on who you ask and dependent on what their leaning is and their interpretation. So I think it's really important to say that.

And with each of those different interpretations, of which there are many -- we could rattle off a few, but -- each will, if you like, open different doorways and close others potentially, so that the possibilities, or as Daniel said, the affordances from each version of emptiness will differ. So the Buddha talked about -- he used the word emptiness, and he used the word empty. And it's interesting going back to the original scriptures in Buddhism and getting the sense that actually sometimes he meant one thing by the word and sometimes he meant something else. So sometimes he just means a kind of emptying out of consciousness, and in a way, that's not that interesting for our purposes. Other times he just refers to things as empty, but he doesn't so much or that often expand on what he means. Then, several hundred years later, an Indian philosopher and practitioner called Nāgārjuna really picked up this theme of emptiness and started to really unpack it and explore it and let it shed its light on the rest of the teachings and the whole orientation of the path and all of that.

If we go back to Nāgārjuna's texts, what you find is a lot of very almost cryptic, crypto-poetic statements about emptiness and its implications alongside a lot of kind of analytical/logical explorations of emptiness. So that way in is very, very common within Buddhist tradition. It's sort of taking the structures of logic and exploring what we think of as reality or what we think is a truth or a real thing, and kind of pointing out the contradictions in our usual ways of seeing the world. So it functions from an analytical/logical perspective.

If I think about the way that I would favour approaching emptiness, it's a little bit different than that, and it's maybe what we could call more of a sort of -- I don't know what you'd call it -- more of a radically or plainly phenomenological approach. In other words, taking the experiences that we have as human beings and playing with how we regard those experiences -- what's the relationship, in the moment, with those experiences? So any experiences -- body sensations, sights, sounds, smells, tastes, thought, all the rest of it, the whole gamut of human experience. And starting to play a little bit with what I call a way of looking -- this way of looking at it, that way of looking at it -- and noticing when I look at this thing or this experience this way, what effect does that have? What do I then perceive? How does that thing seem? When I look at it that way, in an alternative way, how does it seem? What happens to my perception?

So there's an exploration, a practical exploration, in practice. It's what I would call meditation, the exploration of these different ways of looking, noticing, sensitive to their different effects. So that's a quite different approach than, say, this analytical/logical approach that's very, very common certainly in Nāgārjuna and some of the Indian and Tibetan streams that came out of his lineages. But this ways of looking approach is quite rare. In fact, I'm not really sure that I know anyone else who's really sort of picked that up and made it the main way into emptiness, so that it may be that when you, Jamie or Daniel, are thinking about emptiness, you're thinking about what you've heard from me or read from me about emptiness, but within the range of contemporary Dharma teaching, that's actually pretty rare. It's a pretty rare approach. So it's worth knowing that.

If you follow this approach, though, of different ways of looking, as I said, what we get is several understandings that come out of that. And one is that basically what I sense, the experience I have, how a thing seems, depends on the way of looking. So this is quite a crucial insight. But the kind of depth and comprehensiveness and radicality of that insight can just increase and increase and become more and more profound and comprehensive as practice goes on, in contrast to just an idea of, "Yeah, sure, I can look at things a different way and I'll have a slightly different experience." Because behind that second point of view is really just one is assuming that something exists independently of the way of looking -- like I'm looking at this vase with flowers in, and I can look at it from this angle or I can look at it from that angle, but in the back of my mind, or in the forefront of my mind is an idea, "Well, there is an inherently existing vase with flowers in it. It's a certain way in itself. It has a certain independent existence," we say, "and sure, I can look at it from this angle or that angle."

But what happens in practice is one comes to a point gradually -- one sees there is no independent reality, independent of the way of looking. And so that idea, that assumption that we retain very deep in our view of things that there is an independently existent way things are, that gets broken, it gets shattered, and one realizes that we participate in the creation of the world at the most fundamental level.

So that's one strand of a way of approach, of this way of approaching emptiness. And the second is to do with what I call fabrication, so that among the different ways of looking that a practitioner adopts and explores, we're, as Buddhist practitioners, particularly interested in the ones that ease dis-ease, ease suffering or pain or whatever it is. Now, when we expand the concept, we don't have to just be interested in those ones that lessen suffering; we can be interested in all kinds -- we can adopt ways of looking for all kinds of reasons. But maybe we can come back to that later.

But if I start to explore which ways of looking bring more ease, and which ways of looking kind of lock dis-ease into place for me or even increase dis-ease, then I start to realize, "Oh, I have an input. I participate in the fabrication of dis-ease." And as I explore that thread within the range of possible ways of looking -- actually the infinite range of ways of looking -- then I start to get quite skilful at adopting ways of looking, engaging ways of looking, playing with ways of looking that dissolve dis-ease. And in so doing, my sense of my self at some point also begins to dissolve, begins to be 'fabricated less' is the language I tend to use. It's being constructed less because this way of looking that I'm adopting now in practice tends to construct self less, whereas that way of looking or another way of looking constructs self more -- more solidly, more contractedly, more separately, etc.

And that trajectory of exploring ways of looking that fabricate less then starts to extend its effect beyond just the self to also the phenomenal world -- in other words, appearances themselves. So not just the self begins to dissolve, disband, unfabricate through engaging these ways of looking, playing with these ways of looking in practice, but then also the objects I'm looking at. So that very vase of flowers, and the flowers, and the colour, and the form there, or this sensation in my back, or this pain in my knee, or whatever it is, that also begins to disband. One begins to [wonder], "Well, what's the reality here? Which way of looking shows me, which way of looking reveals to me the reality of the thing? How painful is this thing? What is the form here?" All these things -- the process can go so deep that the very kind of basic constituents of existence, even space, and time, and awareness, and materiality, and form, and shape and all that, begin to dissolve under the power of certain ways of looking. And that kind of pulls the rug out of any idea of something having an independent existence like that.

So we're not talking here about kind of just the idea that it's good, a sort of intellectual idea that we should be open to different perspectives. I mean, that's helpful. But that would stay as something quite clunky and lacking in agility, lacking in practical import and practical influence. What we're really interested in supporting -- and it's very, very possible -- is for that to penetrate the intellect but also to develop this skill or art in perception and the malleability of perception so that engaging these ways of looking, playing with these ranges of ways of looking, affects the conception of things but also the perception of things. So it actually changes experience, which is very different than just an idea of, "Yes, we should be open to different points of view," or postcolonialism, "We have to be careful about stepping on other cultures' epistemologies," or whatever. We're talking about can I enter into experiences that actually impact my sense of things, so I'm actually living -- I open up lived experiences of very, very different perspectives on anything at all?

So that's really why practice is so important, because if it stays just intellectual -- and I would say a problem with a lot of -- I don't know if anyone would even call themselves a postmodern philosopher any more, but a lot of that kind of thing -- is that the actual ability to enter into a changed perspective, in a way that it changes me, in a way that impacts my sense of things, that it opens up fields and avenues of experience, that possibility is actually very limited if the whole conversation and the whole enterprise stays at a purely intellectual level. It might be sort of, "Hmm, that's interesting," but it doesn't penetrate deeper and actually open up very different avenues and directions and possibilities.

So I could stop there, or I can continue. [laughs] Let me know what you'd like.

Jamie: I'm wondering, Rob, whether if someone at a cocktail party asked you what emptiness was, do you have a short description? I've been asked a number of times and often very different things come out each time. How do you encapsulate it as a concept?

Rob: So, like I said, I would say, just to preface, there are going to be very different answers from different Buddhist teachers. So even the place where I do a lot of teaching, Gaia House, if you line up five or six of the Gaia House teachers and you ask them that question that you just asked me, Jamie, you're going to get very, very different answers. And I want to come back to that, because I think that's interesting from more than just a historical point of view. I think there are both philosophical and psychological aspects that are important there to point out, I think. So perhaps we can come back to that.

But I think for me, in a nutshell, I would say emptiness means that there is no independent reality; that the truth is that there's no independent truth. The truth is, the reality of things is that there's no reality independent of the perspective we take on reality. There's no reality of something independent of the way of looking at it. That would be that. But as I said, you'd get very different answers to that question. Another way of saying it is a thing doesn't exist as any thing independent of the way of looking at it.

Daniel: So what's coming up for me is I can imagine somebody encountering this kind of idea, more or less for the first time, and thinking that it takes us to a place that's similar to the kind of postmodern nihilism that you mentioned. So I'm curious: how does it not do that? How does it take us to this place beyond postmodernism, as you talked about at the beginning of your answer?

Rob: Yeah, so a few things there, Daniel. One is, it's curious -- if you think just intellectually, almost abstractly for now, if there is absolutely no reality (in other words, there's no ultimately privileged perspective on things), then where does that leave you? In a way, you could say, "Oh, we can't pick up anything," or you could say, "Well, we can pick up everything, because there's no privileged reality." What often happens in people's sort of minds, in the back of their minds, is "Yes, yes. I see -- different points of view or whatever, or there's no privileged perspective," but in the back of their mind there is a hanging on to some privileged perspective. I mean, sometimes at the forefront of the mind, but oftentimes it's at the back of the mind. But if that really goes, then in a way, it opens up the field rather than closes it. So that's one level of answer, because the kind of reluctance or resistance, I think, often comes from some hidden commitment or hanging on to some view of what reality is, therefore I cannot engage this view, because actually I think, "Well, something is real, is realer than that, relative to that." So there's a kind of -- hmm, I don't want to say "levelling of the playing field," because that's not quite accurate, but there is an opening up of the possibilities rather than shutting them down. So that's one aspect of the answer.

Another is that I feel that, again, if one goes into it more than just intellectually, but really with the fabric of one's being and one's perception, including the intellect, but really with one's perception, lets oneself be affected by all this in meditation, over time, that there's a level that we begin to grasp of the depth of -- let's call it the mind's participation in the sense of reality. That begins to get clear to us. And for me, that opens doors, and also can restore a sense of sacredness in things as well. But that's slightly different than sort of sitting back with your arms folded in an armchair and just sort of shaking one's head at everything that's ventured as a possibility. One is actually in the middle of something that's very lived, and the depth of participation there that involves the core of one's being or one's consciousness in the sense of perception, in the sense of what things are and what appears, that changes something. And it's almost like we realize: unavoidably, I'm participating. Unavoidably, the mind shapes experience. And then the question is, how do I want to shape it? I cannot step out of shaping experience. I cannot kind of take a stance that either is the stance of some kind of privileged, neutral, truth-revealing, pristine perspective of things -- I cannot do that -- nor can I step out of the whole process and just not engage in perception. We perceive. That's our life. Our life is perception. And I realize I'm always perceiving, except in very, very deep meditation. And because I'm always perceiving and the consciousness, the mind, the way of looking is always implicated, involved, wrapped up, participating in the shaping and the fabricating of what's perceived, I cannot step out of that. So what am I going to do? I have to engage. And the more flexibility I have, the more possibility I have there.

Again, I could say more, but one also realizes that each -- perhaps I'll just say this for now: any way of looking has consequences because a way of looking shapes perception and it also shapes and kind of constructs, fabricates the self, too, and the state of mind. So that there's a certain -- yeah, partially moral implications and constraints that come out of the ways of looking. So it's not then that kind of anything goes -- I mean, theoretically it does, but one lives the price and the cost and the implications of how perception is shaped, so these are not things that we can run away from. And if I think I'm kind of avoiding the whole issue, or if I think I'll just step out of that whole playing field, that, to me, would be delusion, because it's actually not possible.

Jamie: One of the things which I understand to be important here is that we're not saying that things don't exist at all, but that there is a Middle Way between existence and non-existence. So even though it requires our involvement, could you say a little bit more about how things -- it's not fair to say that they don't exist at all?

Rob: No, and again, we'd have to unpack what does that mean, to not exist at all, because clearly we have experience, and so experience exists at a certain level. You know, there are maybe parallels here -- I'd be a little cautious making parallels with quantum physics because, you know, twenty years might go by and the whole scientific view starts to shift and then those parallels are no longer helpful or valid, but in a way there's a little bit of a parallel between the way most, let's say, quantum physicists would regard what exists independent of our way of looking, independent of our observation. So if we have, I don't know, a particle, an electron or whatever, at the moment -- and in fact, for the last hundred years -- the dominant sort of streams of thought within physics would say, "Well, actually you can't really say what exists independent of the way of looking, in between observations or measurements." What seems to happen is the very process of observing an electron or whatever, if you like, constructs a perception, an observation, a measurement of it being like this or like that, as a wave or a particle, or here or there, or having this mass or that mass, or that momentum. Independent of that way of looking, most interpretations say we can't, we don't know what that is. There's no way of talking about it, because this electron is neither a wave or a particle, or it's somehow both -- it's superposed in the technical language. It's not anywhere in particular. It has no location. It has no momentum. It has no speed. It has no particular this or that. It has none of the qualities that we automatically and completely, in an ingrained way, think of when we think of thing-ness. So are we talking about a thing, or not a thing?

And then some of you will know there's Schrödinger's wave equation, which is a very interesting thing. It's an abstract equation in multidimensional mathematical space. What does that mean? And if you square the result of this differential equation, then you get the probability that an observation will find the electron here as opposed to there, or there as opposed to here, or whatever it is, at this velocity or whatever it is. So in between observations, the electron is characterized by this abstract mathematical entity that, in multidimensional space, when you square it, it gives you the probability. It's like, what is that? So there are certain parallels between -- does it not exist at all? No, you couldn't say that. Does it exist in the way that we think of when we say "a thing"? Because when we say "a thing," we tend [to think] a thing exists in time, at a certain moment in time, or it has a trajectory through space, or it has a location or whatever, or it's a this thing as opposed to a that thing -- it's a wave or a particle, or this atom has decayed or it hasn't decayed. All that is sort of dissolved, if you like, in between observations. Or it's just left as a, "We can't go there," in what's called the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.

So there are certain parallels with that and with what we're talking about with emptiness. What exists if the mind doesn't fabricate with its way of looking at all is something that you can't put into words. Is it worth knowing? Yeah, it's absolutely worth knowing! [laughs] It's one of the most ... I don't even have words for it ... gorgeous, transformative openings that a human being can have. Could you say what that is in words, in concepts? No, because it's the very obliteration of concepts, so you can only maybe talk negatively. So is that existence or not existence? I don't know. What I see is that to exist as this thing, it needs a way of looking that promotes the perception of that thing. But more than that, to exist as anything at all needs the input of the way of looking. Without certain factors in the way of looking that are called 'clinging' in a loose sense, without those, nothing will be fabricated at all -- at all -- in perception. No object, no subject, no space, no time, no thing.

And so without some, let's say, fabrication or input from the way of looking, a thing will not be a thing for consciousness. So to be this thing or that thing depends on the way of looking that makes it this thing or that thing. To be anything at all also depends on the way of looking. Beyond that we say, does it exist or does it not exist? It's kind of both and neither. But when we talk about 'exist,' or when we unpack what does that word mean, then usually implicit in what we mean by 'exist' is to exist as something, or to exist at a certain time, or in a certain place, or to be this or to be that. And what one sees through practice is that that is not the case. And I don't know how it sounds to some listeners, but for a practitioner discovering this, it's radical shattering of views, opening up of possibilities and perspectives, and much more. So I don't know -- does that kind of answer a little bit?

Daniel: Yeah! [laughs]

Jamie: Yeah [laughs], I think so a little bit! Yes. There are a number of different ways I could take this here. Daniel, is there anything you want to ...?

Daniel: Yeah, I think something that's coming up for me that I can imagine listeners who have been following along with the inquiry of the show might be curious to hear your thoughts about -- you say that we're in this position where we can't help but participate in the fabrication and construction of the world, like we're kind of in this helpless position. And a lot of the sort of post-postmodern theoretics that I see being proposed often kind of offer some sort of theoretic orientation to how to move forward in light of deconstruction -- like how do we kind of orient ourselves in this, often referred to as a kind of post-truth world? So I'm curious, from your perspective, how do you think about orienting after deconstruction? What kind of guides that process? What's the compass there? How do you kind of explain that in a way that people don't feel just -- I can imagine feeling lost in light of what you've said so far.

Rob: Right, yeah. Thank you. That's really, really important. So as I said earlier, I wouldn't -- let me just, again, preface a little bit. We could regard the situation as hopeless or helpless, but I would turn it around and say quite the opposite. Because we participate, if we develop skill and art in how we participate, and therefore how we shape things, how the world is that we feel ourselves to live in, then actually that's very hopeful rather than helpless. We are engaged. We can be proactive. We can develop over time a kind of really extraordinary range of how we actually sense the world, the kind of worlds. In one day, in one meditation session, in one ten-minute period, one could, a practitioner could -- and I really mean this -- move through or move between a whole number of different worlds. It's this world, so to speak, but one's actually inhabiting a very, very different world, with a different sense of self and everything that comes out of that, everything that that implies about existence, about choices, about what it does to one's feeling, what it does to one's sense of one's existential situation -- all of that.

So rather than being helpless and hopeless, I would say helpful and hopeful. In Buddhism, as I said at the beginning, the sort of paradigmatic or cardinal kind of teachings are related to very much everything's about reducing suffering. So that becomes -- okay, here's this, in terms of the paradigm that I've just outlined in terms of ways of looking and fabrication, it becomes, all right, this is what's going on, either in my life, in my body, in this situation, in the world right now. How can I look at that? What ways of looking at that are appropriate or helpful right now for reducing suffering? I might be talking about my personal suffering or I might be talking about a wider suffering. I might be talking with someone else or whatever. But everything in Buddhism is geared towards -- theoretically and for practical purposes almost 100 per cent -- is geared towards reducing suffering. So that becomes the kind of yardstick or the orientation, the compass for determining which ways of looking are helpful right now. So for a lot of Buddhists, that's it -- that's how they approach the world, and that's how they approach ethical choices and all the rest of it. But as I said also earlier, one could expand it beyond that and say, well, there are other ways of looking. There are ways of looking, for instance, that, as part of what they do, they create or they open up a certain kind of beauty, and others that will open up another kind of beauty, or a certain kind of sacredness versus another kind of sacredness.

For me, those three kind of parameters -- decrease in suffering, sacredness, and beauty -- they may overlap at certain times, or they may pull in slightly different, call us in slightly different directions. But to me, those would be three really important ways to orient and to kind of suggest what ways of looking. I don't know if we'll get to it on this show today, but we've talked a bit before, Daniel, you and I, on a podcast about the whole soulmaking teachings that we're developing. So another kind of orienting factor might be that I want a way of looking in this moment that's just more -- what we call more soulmaking. I don't know if we have time to unpack all that, but it's involved with sacredness and beauty, or rather sacredness and beauty are implicated in what soulmaking means. But that might be also what steers one towards this or that way of looking. But really there are many, many possibilities, and if you like, we're free to decide what's important, you know, or what we want.

If I can just continue for a second now, there's something I wanted to say before, earlier. There's one thing about all this that's, I think, really important to point out psychologically. As I said, there are different -- there's a whole range of different interpretations of what emptiness means. So for example, one interpretation of what emptiness means is that there is nothing but the sort of atomic constituents of a person's being, the physical constituents, atoms and physical processes in the body, and the mental constituents of mind moments or neuronal pathways or neuronal sort of events or whatever. And really, when we look inside or have a sense of ourselves, when we feel, "Oh, I feel myself to be Rob, and Daniel feels himself to be Daniel," and we get the sense of a real self, one version of emptiness is saying, "That's all nonsense, all this business about personality and self. What you really are is just the flow in time or the process in time of these constituents or aggregates, these psychophysical constituents or aggregates." There's a sort of atomization of the process and regarding that process as that is the reality, and what's empty is the sort of more complex sense of, intuitive sense of self that you have. Or another view of emptiness seems to be just kind of targeting what might be construed as sacred. So it very much targets any possibility of divinity or angels or anything like that, and, in a way, leaves a lot of other things, as Jamie said, uninterrogated.

What's interesting to me, apart from just the fact that there's such a wide range, is why someone chooses one version of emptiness over another. And this relates to the question that you asked, Daniel, for me, partly, because I think in choosing different versions of emptiness, one is also choosing different Weltanschauungs, different world-views, and different self-views. And what prompts one person, what prompts my colleague to choose a view of emptiness that blocks certain possibilities and opens up others, or that leads to a certain view that what's actually real is, for example, our existential situation? "We live in a purposeless, meaningless universe, which we're thrown into for no reason and kind of by evolutionary accident. It's just the purposeless, meaningless, dimensionless, random, relatively random play of atoms that somehow, over enormous spans of time, have created this strange phenomenon of consciousness and life, etc., but that's actually the reality of things. Everything else is empty. Therefore, my job as a Buddhist practitioner, as a kind of brave and awake human being or whatever, is to realize that. Let go of any other fabrications that are built up on the top of that reality and confront that existential situation, open up to it, bear it."

Or one might have more of a sort of computer model of a human being: "A human being is just an intricate computer and this process of psychophysical constituents trundling on in time, sort of programming each other." That might be the view. Why does someone adopt that view? What does that close? It closes a door to any kind of sacredness or much beauty, as does the first one. And sometimes there's almost a semi-deliberate intention to adopt a certain view of emptiness, or a certain interpretation of that whole teaching of emptiness from the whole range of possibilities there, for the sake of feeling oneself to live in a certain world and be a certain kind of self in a certain world. And I think that's fascinating. And why?

So if you ask me "Why? How do you choose?", I can tell you what are the important factors for me in choosing, and what seem to be important for many people -- certainly students and people I talk to, in choosing sacredness, reduction of suffering, beauty, soulfulness. But clearly for some people those are not what's important, and they're choosing for a different reason. And why choose that? What's behind that choice? What's going on psychologically that one is kind of steering one's choices in the direction of certain worlds? If that makes sense.

Daniel: Yeah. What comes up for me is there's a common phrase in this sort of conversational sub-culture this podcast is in that's something like, "We don't have ideas. Ideas have us." It's a kind of reference to the nature of ideological possession and how often we think we're using ideas but actually we're being used by them. I'm curious, you know -- is it the case for you with the ways of seeing that even if you've never practised meditation in your life, you're already kind of practising ways of seeing? You're kind of constellated by ways of seeing that are then constructing a certain self. So just like with we can't help but participate in the construction of reality, we can't help but invoke ways of seeing that construct the world that we live in. Is that another way of saying what you're saying, or would you agree with that statement?

Rob: Yeah, absolutely. I would say those two statements that you've just made are actually equivalent. So in the way I would understand things, there's always and inevitably a way of seeing. I tend to use the phrase 'way of looking' because it puts a little more emphasis on the active possibility of looking as opposed to seeing, but still. There's always a way of seeing. I cannot have a perception without a certain way of seeing or way of looking. How conscious I am of that fact and how much art and skill and range I have in altering the way of looking -- that's what comes with practice. And how conscious of the fact I am that I cannot get away from that and that there's no independent existence of a thing outside of a way of looking -- that usually is what comes with practice.

But effectively, as a consciousness -- not even just as a human being; you could say the same for sheep or whatever -- in any perception, which is effectively saying with any experience, any experience at all, there's always some way of seeing it. There's always some way of sensing it. What we mean by 'way of sensing' is a certain relationship with it -- I like it, I don't like it, I'm pushing it away, I want more of it, I want to hang on to it -- a certain conception (of which so many sub-factors are part), a certain conception of what a thing is and what the subject is in relation to this thing, concepts of time, concepts of space -- all these come in -- concepts of possession or non-possession, identification or non-identification. All these concepts are part of what we call a way of looking. And the very way we tune our instrument -- all these factors make up this kind of rich phenomena of what I call a way of looking. And that's there inevitably in any consciousness's perception, meaning experience of anything at all. So we're always participating. What we're very unlikely to have if we haven't practised a lot with this is, as I said, a full awareness of that, a range of skill and art in different ways of looking and in shifting that and in moving in and out of different ways of looking, and also this kind of fullness of depth of the degree of participation and the lack of independent existence of things. But effectively, yeah, the two statements that you made, for me, would be basically interchangeable, Daniel. Yeah.

Jamie: And so we have the opportunity to practise seeing things as fabricated, as empty, and to be aware of our way of looking. And I know from my experience that it takes a long time to get it into the bones, for it to become more than just an idea but something you deeply believe about how at least the mind works. I remember sitting in meditation, and it's a little bit like playing Duck Hunt, the really old Nintendo game, where you have a little gun and you're shooting ducks out of the sky -- trying to spot things in my conscious awareness which weren't considered to be empty, which were solid and real, and how over time it was more difficult to spot them. They'd be sort of hiding in the wings, and then it would be like, "Oh! That! There! There's something that's real right there." [laughs] And then practised sort of seeing that as being fabricated and me bringing a way of looking to it. I wonder, is there anything more to say, Rob, about the importance of practice, and how we move -- like certain silos of things we can see as empty, but other things are completely unseen? And also, how deep does it go? So we can be looking at the emptiness of emotions, or the emptiness of ideas like modernism or whatever, but often I think there's a level at which we have metaphysical constructs which are uninterrogated without a consistent practice. One example, I think, of that which often comes up for me is oneness. Like there's an idea that oneness is a truth about the world, that things don't exist; that they're kind of a unified oneness does. And your book also goes into looking at time as well. So how important is a practice, and how deep does it go?

Rob: So something in what you said, Jamie, made me realize it's important to stress: there's a double movement here, I would say, in practice for me. There's a deconstructive movement, an unfabricating movement on the one hand, and then there's the possibility of what we might call artful or helpful construction, reconstruction, or fabrication on the other hand. So a practitioner, the way I would view it, eventually -- and this does take time -- a practitioner is kind of exploring both of those possibilities: the deconstructive, the unfabricating of the perception of things, and therefore realizing that things are empty because they're fabricated, fabricated in the way of looking, and then there's also the need for reconstructive or the possibility of reconstructing, fabricating artfully, skilfully, helpfully. So that feels important to make clear to people. Sometimes what you get, again, in some strands of Buddhist teaching, is just the emphasis on the deconstruction. And in a way, what that can do is set up a duality in terms of what's real and what's not real. What is not constructed, what is unfabricated, is then deemed to be real, and everything else that's constructed -- which means our normal experience -- is deemed to be fabricated and not real and empty. So we get a duality, and a duality of value as well. The unconstructed, the deconstructed, the Unfabricated is regarded as more real, more worthy, more sacred, etc., than the world of fabrication, which is essentially the world of normal experience.

I feel it's very important to go so deeply into the process of unfabricating things -- so in answer to your question, yeah, absolutely everything, and there are certain things that it seems to me very common for people to leave out -- so, for example, oneness or awareness is often not regarded as empty. Awareness is often, "Ah, yes, the awareness. All this phenomenal experience is not real. I can see that it's fabricated," but the awareness is then taken as real, and its emptiness not seen. Or time. Or one maybe sees the past is empty, the future is empty, but the present moment, the now, gets kind of hyped up as something real. It may be explicit; more often, it's implicit. But it could be either. So time, awareness, oneness. There are all kinds of possibilities, and a lot depends, really, on what we've been exposed to and what we've been sort of taught or what's been left out of different teachings.

So one way of approaching this in terms of thoroughness is, as a teacher, to point to: "Okay, what about this now? What about that now? What about that element?" But it takes time. You can't sort of do that all at once. To me there's, for most people, a kind of gradual process. I hesitate to say 'linear' or 'formulaic,' although sometimes it is, in terms of one gets to a certain level and then, "Ah, I didn't see that was empty too. Ah," and then there's this other level of phenomenal existence -- for instance, time or space -- that I didn't see that was empty, or what about the awareness itself. So usually it goes step by step, but there are always unpredictabilities in people's process. But basically it should go everywhere, so there's nothing that's not empty, absolutely nothing that's not empty, including emptiness itself -- so as a view, that becomes just a view that one can pick up or put down. And even the whole notion of fabrication and ways of looking -- all of it is empty. And the whole thing kind of dissolves itself or eats its own tail, so to speak. What that does is it legitimizes and liberates the possibility and the open playing field to reconstruct in different ways, to fabricate in different ways. So as much as one is practising unfabricating, one also takes time to develop the skill and the art of skilful, artful, helpful fabrication. So to live, to experience oneself in a certain kind of universe -- whatever that is, and we could give a million different examples, actually endless -- that also takes some skill. The freedom to do that, and probably some of the skill to do that, depends on the thoroughness, depth, and skill that I've developed in unfabricating as well.

In Buddhism they talk about avijjā is the Pali word, and Sanskrit avidyā. It's usually translated as something like ignorance, but fundamental delusion is quite a good translation. One of the sort of root meanings of what that word can mean is the delusion that things exist independently, that something has an independent existence. Now, we can take that up -- this or that thing has an independent -- "I believe in time," or "I believe in the reality of awareness," or "I believe in whatever it is, in the fundamental existence of materiality." It can be a philosophically espoused position -- one's very conscious of it; one talks and argues about it or whatever. More often than not, and the more interesting levels to work with, are where the fundamental delusion of a human being is actually clinging to certain views about this or that having independent existence and we don't even realize that we have that view, that ontological commitment. And so one can meditate and do some very deep practice, and then there's a kind of elastic band effect: we will revert to our usual views of reality, of what's real, our usual ideas. There's a kind of default mode that's really quite entrenched. So when the Buddha in the original teachings said, "Don't underestimate just how deep delusion goes, just what a deep program it is in consciousness ..." It's very, very rare for someone to have one experience of this kind of even deep unfabricating, deep fading of phenomenal experience, and then that's that. Much more what I see as a teacher is people dipping in and out, in and out, and at certain points, you know, a penny drops to another level, and there's just a gradual kind of process there of, let's say, the mind at a very deep level beginning to understand something, beginning to open up a very different view.

So I think -- I don't know any other way that that would happen without practice, but, you know, I'm always surprised; sometimes that does happen. It's very, very rare, and if anyone's listening, as Pat Metheny said when I was a musician in a master class, he said, "There's maybe one person in every generation that's able to do this without practice, but it's pretty safe to assume it's not you, so you better just get to work." [laughs] So it might be, absolutely, but it's rare. If we just briefly touch on the soulmaking thing -- so soulmaking involves, again, an actually infinite and endlessly growing range of different perspectives that we can have on anything at all, that, as I said, open up different worlds, really, different sense of the world, different sense of the self, different sense of human being, different sense of this thing or that thing. Some people are able to engage that kind of creative play, that kind of creative construction of perception, without the whole deep emptiness thing. And that's interesting. I think a small portion of people, a very small portion of people, probably have absorbed the lessons from contemporary philosophy deeply enough for that to legitimize it and make it work for them and give them that freedom and that possibility. More often than not, the people I see who are able to do that without the emptiness are people who just kind of have what I might call easy access to a poetic sensibility or an artistic kind of way of viewing things, so that just as in poetry -- you can read a line of poetry and it's obviously not literally true, or you can engage in art or watch a film that's very touching, very powerful, opens up a world; we know it's not true, but it's having this very deep effect on the being, on the perception, on the choices then that come out of that for how one lives, etc., even though one knows it's not real. So some people just have a sort of -- I don't know if it's innate or trained -- capacity to kind of hold that space available for themselves, and they don't necessarily need all the emptiness thing. But that's kind of one of the ongoing questions I have, is just how much emptiness practice and to what depth do different people need in opening up the territories for creative and beautiful, soulful, or helpful, or freeing construction of perception. So again, I'm not sure -- did I answer your question in the right direction there?

Jamie: Yeah!

Rob: Okay, good.

Jamie: It might be good to move on, Daniel, to where we think this touches some previous conversations that you've had on the podcast. There's one thing I'd like to mention before we do, and that's an interesting piece published in Aeon online magazine recently, a critical perspective on mindfulness training. And one of the things it sort of picks out there is the Buddhist idea of anattā or not-self. It says that mindfulness practice requires it, which ... it doesn't. But it does have an interesting anxiety about this concept, anyway, that I thought it could be good to just address briefly. Because there's some concern that by deconstructing the self phenomenologically by looking at how thoughts are not facts -- they just sort of come and go in the mind -- and pain is not sort of my pain, how we don't have to be totally attached to it, we can be just an observer of it, mean that -- this deconstruction basically means that we eventually have no self, and that has lots of problematic implications for how we interact with the world and our sense of responsibility for our actions and how sort of intimate we can feel with our emotions and our personality. It's to say that we want to step out of all personality view. And I think in your book you talk about how sometimes it's very skilful to deconstruct and to get a bit of peace and a bit of distance, and sometimes it's helpful to actually get closer to the emotion, to really feel the humanness of it, the pain of it, and to go into the detail of it and try and understand what it means and to kind of go through the constructive phase. So it's a way of looking, but that's one of the most primary ones. It's like, is it most skilful right now to deconstruct, for peace, for distance, for a bit of calm, or is it helpful to knowingly go into the mud and into the complexity of our personality views? That's an observation, really, that that's interestingly come up in the context of the mainstream mindfulness world -- albeit with lots of misunderstandings about mindfulness practice and theory. Is there anything you want to sort of comment on that, Rob? Or is that ...?

Rob: Thank you. I think it's really important what you're saying -- maybe just more expanding the comment than anything else. Yeah, so for me, this is really, really important. At least the way I teach emptiness and the students that I come across through teaching them, I don't encounter ever -- for someone who is actually practising; it's different for someone who is just hearing about it and then kind of sitting back and trying to sort of live their life from the perspective of a certain philosophy of "there is no self" or "the self's an illusion" or "emotions are an illusion" or "I should be free of emotions." Someone who's sort of almost abstractly trying to adopt a certain philosophical position, that's (A) not what I advocate and (B) that's where I would see kind of problems and imbalances. Someone who's actually engaging these practices, I almost never encounter something like a kind of -- what would the word be? -- a sort of ignoring of self, or ignoring of emotions, or ignoring of responsibility. There's something about, as a practitioner, recognizing one's participation firsthand -- you live it. You experience it. You're in the middle of it. You're in the thick of it. You cannot take yourself out of that implication, that involvement, that participation.

And as well, the whole thrust of the teachings, it's really, as I said, it's not just about deconstructing. So some versions of Buddhism, and perhaps other spiritual traditions as well, will just emphasize the deconstruction. And what comes with that is a devaluing, a dismissing, a disparaging of what's constructed -- the self, the emotions, etc. But if one, I think, practises in the right way, or goes into it deeply enough, and also if the teachings are presented in a way that frames the goal clearly enough as having freedom with both deconstructing and constructing in different ways, with both self and not-self, with both emotion and the quietening of emotion, and actually what one's really interested in is opening up that whole range -- one is so free that one can move anywhere in that range. There's no fear of self. There's no fear of emotion. There's no fear of letting go of self, or the total dissolution of self, or the total quietening of emotion, absence of emotion, or the absence of thought or position or whatever.

So it doesn't tend to arise for a practitioner -- at least not the practitioners that I teach and the way I would present it -- but it may be a caution that's necessary for people who are just hearing about this without practising, or who've come from certain other streams or traditions of teaching where there is this kind of one-sided emphasis on the deconstruction and, again, the disparaging of self, etc. But self, responsibility, ethical responsibility, emotional life -- all these are available to deconstruct, to unfabricate certainly at times for different reasons -- either just for the sake of understanding the emptiness of all things, or for the sake of getting a bit of freedom in this moment, or for another reason -- and they're also available to enter into. One of the things I wanted to add to what you said is that there are many ways of -- I think you used the phrase "going into the mud." So again, the mud doesn't inherently exist. I can therefore decide that mud is a worthless thing and I shouldn't pay attention to it, but that's privileging the unfabricating, the deconstruction over the construction. If I understand mud is empty, that means my experience of mud, what kind of mud, where's the mud, how is the mud, is there mud or isn't there mud depends on my way of looking. And I understand that and I develop different ways of going into the mud. Then my experience of that mud actually has a whole range of ways, and all that becomes available. And similarly with the self. It's not just that there's either a view of self or there isn't. There are countless kind of conceptions and senses of self that I could have, and as one's art grows with all this, and especially with, again, the dual aspect, the double movement of deconstruction and construction, of unfabricating and fabricating, then that range of the possible senses of self grows and grows.

And if we talk about ethics, you know, sometimes we have to retain the viability of the view of free will, at times, and responsibility for one's actions. So that becomes, "Yes, it's empty, but I can thoroughly engage in that view, and I can feel real remorse for what I've done, or I can feel I want to do this thing differently." Why? Because it's empty. It opens up the doors rather than closing them. But none of these things have any truth. So even the mud of emotions, you know, depending on our background -- going back to something I said before -- what will be the adherence of my -- what ontological commitments? For some people it will be, "This is my existential situation, the dire meaninglessness of existence in a cold, purposeless universe." That's the sort of basic ontological commitment. For a lot of people nowadays, a basic ontological commitment will be, "Oh, this happened in the past. It caused this reaction in my psychology, and therefore these patterns and these emotions are here," and that becomes a truth.

I think what I would like to say is that's a way of looking. It's really, really valuable. Actually it's not even one way of looking, because within that there are all kinds of psychological paradigms and teachings and theories about how it all works. But I think we need to retain that view and all these other views as possibilities. Thoroughly empty, but therefore thoroughly able to enter into that view and feel all, as I said before, the impact of it. So I can enter into -- let's say I'm feeling a certain emotion. I can enter into a certain theoretical psychological paradigm of why that emotion is there, and I can feel all the grief and all the whatnot of it, and a part of me knows it's empty. At other times I can kind of, let's say, lean on my emptiness understanding a bit more in the moment, put the emptiness insight gas pedal -- press it further down, and actually the whole thing dissolves a little bit. That doesn't mean it's always better to dissolve it. But if I'm retaining what you're calling the mud, that mud can be perceived in all kinds of different ways, not just either unfabricated, either dissolved, or "It is what it is, because this is its history and this is its truth."

So to me, this is really important, and that's how I would frame the teaching. This is where we're going, as opposed to we're going just towards a kind of disparaging and so-called letting go of self or trying to live without self or without emotions. Some people do get these ideas, and I think there's a real cost to them. There's a real danger to them. So for me, it's important -- when I teach, often I like to present where are we going with this, what's the bigger picture, before we actually embark so that people have that framing and orienting kind of map and view about where they're trying to go, because that's actually very influential regardless of how much practice one's done.

Jamie: Yes, Rob, that's exactly what I was driving at, and I think there may be -- mainstream mindfulness could be taught in a deconstructive way, and so that's something to look out for. But it's not how it should be delivered, as it has been sort of entirely deconstructive.

Rob: Yeah. I mean, if I could just, again, there, I would say -- you are much more in the mainstream mindfulness world than I am, so you would know better, but it may well have that leaning just from the sort of little bits I hear. It may well have that leaning towards the deconstruction. And at the same time, not quite paradoxically, it leans towards only a certain level of deconstruction. So again, it leans towards a deconstruction of, say, the more complex, rich dimensions of personality, for example. That tends to be viewed through lenses in mainstream mindfulness that tend to both atomize it and kind of almost see through it. It's like you put glasses on that take you down to a more atomic level; therefore you don't see the emotion. Emotions become just sensations and thoughts, for example. So I'm actually deconstructing it to a certain level. So it deconstructs that way. It also deconstructs it again in the kind of meta-message that's put out about what's important and what isn't, and what's valuable and what isn't, and what kind of psychological health looks like and what it doesn't, so that in a more subliminal way, the more complex, rich, and also dimensions of our psyche and personality and selves get devalued. And also certain ranges of expressions of self get devalued, in terms of certain emotions, or certain manifestations in the world, or certain personality types. So it gets devalued both through the tendency to adopt only or primarily deconstructive unfabricating lenses; also through the kind of more implicit meta-message of what gets included, what doesn't, what gets talked of as valuable and what doesn't, what gets held up as a paradigm of, a vision of "This is what health or awakening or whatever looks like."

And at the same time, as I said, it only deconstructs to a certain level, so that, for example, what might be viewed as real are the neuronal processes happening in time, or the physical matter of the brain, or, in Buddhist jargon, the sort of what's called the five aggregates, the elements of the body and the different elements of the mind. Those are retained as real. They're not deconstructed as well. So you get this curious thing where the emphasis is on deconstruction and that that's what's valuable, and that constructing is a little bit delusional, and self-stories and self-manifestation is a little bit delusional, and at the same time, the deconstruction that's engaged or taught, in my view, reaches a certain level and then it goes no further. And that's also problematic because, if we go back to what I said right at the beginning, such a view does not actually open, for example, the possibilities that I talked about about viewing sacredness. There's nothing in such a view or such a mode of teaching unfabricating and deconstructing that then opens any doors for something like soulmaking or a sense of sacredness or even beauty. There's no legitimization. There are no avenues opened there. So again, we go back to which kind of views of emptiness -- and even if they're not talking about emptiness as such, using that word in some of the mindfulness traditions, there's still a range of teaching, a range of discourse and what's implied there, and what by default gets shut out or made not possible. So all that's involved, as well.

Jamie: Just to kind of balance that, the mindfulness courses taught well that involve sort of poetry and inquiry about value in life and deploying practices in the service of sort of richness and flourishing, so there's a little bit of that, although it's not sort of explicitly couched in the terms of reconstruction. Daniel, I've got my eye on the time. Are you needing to go?

Daniel: No, I have some more time, and I thought what would be interesting to do maybe is, Jamie, if you and I could kind of at least allude to some of the resonances and symmetries between what Rob has shared and some of the previous conversations and topics that I've been exploring on the show. And then I imagine after we kind of do that little pure exploration we could hand it back to Rob one more time to just sort of reflect on maybe what we've been discussing. How does that sound as a path forward?

Jamie: Sounds good.

Daniel: Yeah, so, there are so many different places we could start. Is there anything on top of mind for you that feels like it wants to be said?

Jamie: I wonder whether there's anything more to be said about the metamodern development over the last few years. That's the thing -- I met Hanzi, the author of The Listening Society, and one of the first things I said to him, whenever it was, a couple years ago, was, "Do you realize how well this fits with emptiness and what we've been talking about?" Down to the importance for them in expressing ourselves through sincere irony, or sincere flippancy. I think there's a certain lightness that you get when you are taking something seriously because it exists as much as anything else does and also you are totally on board with the critiques of postmodernism; you know it also doesn't exist as much as many other things. So from that position, we're able to be more playful and be more flexible and potentially to have different types of conversations and go on to have more radical and more penetrating ideas. So I was struck by your conversation recently with Bonnitta Roy on her six ways of going meta, and how the second one was deconstructive, almost exactly as we've been talking about it here. In the context of -- I think it was that one -- it was described by her as "emptiness is a direct path to creating a clean palette." So the deconstructing move is part of it, but then it sort of prepares you for different types of reconstruction that require us to be quite nimble and outside of our normal range of thinking about things, and, as you said, I think, emptiness implies malleability. Actually, not just preparing the ground for later ways of going meta -- some of them are, I think, much more directly implicated, particularly what she described as the orthogonal move, and a liberation of creative energy and experimentation, because we're no longer burdened by complexity from that deconstructed place. So that's one field. Feel free to jump in.

Daniel: Yeah, yeah. What was interesting in this conversation -- I had never made this connection before, but one of my favourite lines from The Listening Society is, at the very end of the book, it says, "The new game of life looks a lot like this: whoever has mastered the most perspectives when she dies wins." And there's something so beautiful here in, I think, what we've been discussing in this conversation, where this approach to practice really is an embracing of the infinitude of possibility when it comes to ways of looking -- not just for the sake of relieving suffering, but for the sake of exploring new horizons of meaning and beauty and sacredness. And yeah, there's something that the practice of emptiness as described here kind of affords the capacity in a myriad of ways to playfully adopt and put down perspectives as well as -- and I think this is really important -- sort of like reveal our hidden allegiances to perspectives. That, I think, is something that within the kind of meta community, certainly maybe a lot of the teachers are very good at having kind of deconstructed those hidden allegiances, but the people who are listening to them, I don't know. It's an open question to me. If I don't see these practice being done, I'm sceptical that there's not a lot of -- yeah, I guess I'll just use the word again -- hidden allegiances hiding under the surface that are informing the expressions in ways that we don't actually fully comprehend.

Jamie: Exactly. If we haven't, through practice, developed the kind of habit of mind that more and more wants to see more and more of the contents of mind as empty, we'll get caught up with things that -- the phrase sort of "hiding in the wings" or just outside of your peripheral vision that are causing havoc. Your quote there from the back of The Listening Society reminded me of one from the historian Theodore Zeldin who I really appreciate as well, which is, "Nothing influences our ability to cope with the difficulties of existence so much as the context within which we view them. The more contexts we choose between, the less do the difficulties appear to be inevitable or insurmountable." Yeah. So one of the other speakers you've had on, Nick Jankel, talked about a particular flashpoint of identity politics, and there we have our views and our identities as solid things that need to be defended. And he also talked about identities within the metamodern sort of scene, saying that even in this world he sees enormous amounts of identity-driven triggering and reactivity. And perhaps -- I think you talked about Ronan Harrington's vulnerability approach as sort of acknowledging that's always going to happen. I won't say I'm beyond a bit of triggering, but certainly the intention to empty out these constructs I think can be very helpful for those involved in this conversation, that if there's some way of making these ideas more palatable or ... yeah, a kind of secular and philosophical approach for introducing these into wider society, I think it would be helpful for that particular flashpoint.

Daniel: Yeah, yeah. And another resonance is coming to me as you're speaking, which is with the work of Daniel Schmachtenberger and Jordan Greenhall. They kind of position this concept of human sovereignty as being one of the sort of key capacities that we as human beings need to develop in order to meet the challenges and complexities of our time, and that's a three-part capacity: one is perception, which meditators are already training well in already. And then there's meaning-making and agency. Agency is like actuating capacity, like acting in the world. Meaning-making really has to do with finding and living according to or perceiving according to certain mental models, like flexibly playing between different mental models or ways of seeing in order to discover which one is the most appropriate for any given situation. The idea here is that as the kind of meta-narratives of our world break down, we as individuals need to become very facile and agile with kind of taking on and putting down different frames of what's going on in order to kind of discover what it is that actually helps us make sense and move forward in a world that may be falling apart in various ways, whether ideologically or institutionally or whatever. And so it seems like these practices might afford that capacity and therefore enhance human sovereignty in a way that's uniquely suited for this time that we're entering into.

Jamie: Yeah, another of your topics has been why do Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, and Ezra Klein fail to have generative conversations, and I wonder to what extent things would be different if they were committed to emptiness practice. I know that Sam Harris is a committed practitioner, but he seems to be very rigidly within one way of looking, one meta way of looking. And I think -- was it Bonnitta who was talking about how one of the issues is that each of these people have different meta-narratives, which have such explanatory power that they cannot be -- each thinks that that's the best meta-narrative, that's the peak of the current period. And rather than having the different meta-narratives in superposition and being able to sort of move flexibly between them, they're unable to sort of combine different meta-narrative because they're uncombinable. But if you hold them in a stack, in superposition, using emptiness as a ground, then you're able to more flexibly move between them and see eye-to-eye enough to have a generative conversation.

Daniel: Totally, yeah. And I do want to hand it back -- I'm increasingly curious how this is landing with Rob. I will say, too, it occurs to me and has occurred to me before that I think the only reason that I'm able to have the type of conversations that I've had on this podcast is because of my practice in emptiness, right? People come on and say things that are way outside of my conception or idea of how the world is, and I can kind of meet that or move into their world partly because I've deconstructed and destabilized my own sense of how things are. So there's a way in which I can see directly how these practices have afforded me the capacity to kind of move into that liminal space with a little bit more skill. It's less of a miracle and more of a thing that often happens when the context is right. But yeah, so I'd be curious, Rob, how is what we're saying and kind of exploring together in this little peer-to-peer jam session, how is it landing with you? What's coming up for you as you're listening?

Rob: In terms of those folks you just mentioned, it sounds really interesting, and a lot of it sounds -- just from the little bit you said -- sounds, yeah, very congruent, very much so. I also have encountered this sort of hidden allegiances phenomenon. It's quite common. Say in someone like -- well, he's dead now, so it might be a little unfair to pick on him, but someone like the philosopher Richard Rorty, who says a lot about "We need to keep the conversation going. We need to keep it open. There is no kind of privileged ontological position or epistemological position. Let's scrap all that and keep the conversation going," but as far as I could tell, there was very little conversation coming. He just kept repeating that point. And very bright, very articulate, great writer and all that. And then reading closely his writings, he often defaults to a view of exactly a kind of classical scientific materialist view of sort of purposeless movement of atoms as if that's the reality. It's almost like it seeps out the cracks in what he's writing. But some of the people you're talking about -- I don't actually know their work, but it sounds like they're a bit more keenly on top of that and interested and perhaps one way or another have found that workable, actual flexibility of different perceptions, and so can, as I said, move into these different worlds, different perspectives, as lived experience, and therefore open up really fertile conversations as opposed to just having a conversation about "It's good that we have conversation." So it sounds wonderful, what you're talking about. It sounds really great.

Jamie: There's one more thing I would like to make sure I mention, if that's all right, Daniel, before we wrap things up, and that's -- well, two things. What Miki Kashtan talks about in terms of the colonization of culture and how there is no sort of human nature that exists before our culture, how we absorb so much of it before we -- yeah, we see the world completely conditioned by our cultures; we can't see the water we're swimming in, in other words. And although emptiness may not be enough on its own -- emptiness practice, rather, may not be enough on its own to see some of the most entrenched ones, it could really facilitate the process of us waking up to some of the more destructive frameworks, and so has implications for addressing some of the crisis that results from our current cultural systems. And the other one, I just want to come back to Jordan Peterson and how much traction he has got in the world by talking -- well, by re-enchanting the world, and getting a sense of how sort of flat and what scientific materialism and the sort of deconstruction of science, of the enlightenment project has done to our souls and sense of our place in the world. He uses the mythopoetic framing to bring some of that back in. But without this grounding in emptiness, it has a tendency, I feel, to be reified and to be brittle and incompatible with each other, like different types of bringing back in the mythopoetic. So there's something -- I'm one of those people who is deeply ambivalent about Jordan, and there's some real helpful stuff that he's opening up that really needs to be, and some stuff which is, yeah, not so helpful! And I feel like this is perhaps a missing piece for him, is how deep the fluidity goes when he talks about this area. So it's kind of like soulmaking, but not quite as deep as what is offered by Rob, I feel.

Daniel: Beautiful. Well, I think this was a fantastic conversation from where I'm sitting. It both shed more light on emptiness from my perspective, even though I've listened to Rob talk about it for hundreds of hours. I still feel like I learned and had new insights in listening to this. And I loved exploring some of the resonances with other conversations with you, Jamie. I guess at this point I'd just be curious, Jamie and Rob, is there anything that you'd like to say as we close out this conversation? Anything that's kind of up for you or that you feel like you just want to put into the space before we close?

Jamie: I guess the only thing -- I'm left with a single word, which is 'playfulness.' That's what I feel this allows, even in the face of collapse and the great dangers and fears that we hold. It allows for a kind of nourishing freedom even in the midst of all that, and so it has very practical implications to resource change agents and leaders in the coming decades.

Rob: Yeah, thank you. I also feel playfulness is just a really key thing to emphasize, key ingredient of certainly the way I practise and the way I would teach about any kind of meditation practice, so I really want to echo that. I think, at the same time -- and again, I'm just wondering who's listening and what their background is, but if we think about or consider some of the sort of catastrophic sort of ecological situations we're in, multiple challenges of climate change and species loss and all kinds of things, you know, the very complex reasons and conditions that have given rise to those kind of crises, but this kind of playfulness that we're talking about can still -- I've said this before, but I'll say it again today -- yes, very playful, but you can enter into perspectives on, for example, nature, or the earth, or this tree, or this ecosystem, or what it is to be a human being, or all that, that although playfully entered into and playfully held, and, as you said, held with sincere irony or -- I've forgotten the other phrase you used, something flippancy -- but can still have tremendous power in the being.

So to be able to look at the world and the world of nature and our climate and our precious earth, and actually to sense deeply in one's heart, in one's soul, in the fabric of one's being its sacredness, its preciousness, its dimensionality, its necessity, its divinity -- all of these words -- can all be held with this sincere irony, and yet have tremendous power for how they then affect us in the moment, in the heart, and the soul, and the perception, and the mind, and the thinking, and the conception, but also then how we choose to act, how we then are going to relate to the world of nature and the other species that we share the planet with.

So there's something, I think, such a gift here -- this balance of playfulness and potency that we're talking about through practice. Someone might be listening and saying, "Yeah, I can engage a kind of playfulness in that," but it doesn't have the impact on the being and therefore on the choices about my ethical choices, my choices in regard to nature, in regard to my fellow human beings, if it doesn't have that deep way that it goes in and really impacts the being. And at the same time, it can be held very, very lightly, and as you say, playfully. There's some kind of fortuitous blessing and gift in the way that this can work that couples together the playfulness and the potency, and boy, we really need some potency right now as a species, because some things really, really need to change; some doors need to open for enough people pretty quickly, in terms of the basic ways we sense what existence is, what a human being is, what the world is, what the earth is, what nature is. Some really fundamental avenues need to open there to offer different possibilities and not get into fights with each other about it, you know? And that's where the playfulness comes in. So there's something, for me, as we're talking, it's just reinforcing for me that happy marriage of playfulness and potency that I think comes with holding this the right way and exploring it the right way.