The art of soulful emptiness
I wrote this post after a 7-day silent meditation retreat at the Gaia House. I’m also deeply influenced by Rob Burbea’s teachings, and I made a short map to navigate them. Some of the experiences and states of awareness I describe below became possible for me for the first time; others are ineffable and/or undigested, and the majority of them are yet to be discovered.
You start by perceiving events, “internal” or “external”. “Internally”, you can perceive the body using a variety of lenses. For example, its materiality (earth, water, wind, fire, space), feeling-tone or the sensory experience of objects with a pleasant, unpleasant or neutral energetic quality (vedana), perceptions, thoughts, mental formations and emotions. You could also focus on the "external" experience: the world, phenomena, events, sounds etc. All of these can be deconstructed further, and you can spend many hours just getting deeper into any of these dimensions. You can increasingly fine-tune your sensing capabilities and perceive a broader range, depth, and subtlety. To do the above, you need a deep sense of stillness or collectedness, an alive unshakeability (Samadhi). This may take days, weeks and months to build up and stabilise.
You will soon realise that these sensations will pull you and push you; you will be clinging, craving, and trying to grab or let them go. Increasingly you will learn to soften this pushing and pulling. When you notice the pushing and pulling, you will look for a change in the body and try to relax that contraction. You then notice the effect of that relaxation on the mind, and you will go deeper into this back-and-forth loop.
Having achieved stable awareness and the softening of the pushing/pulling, you will notice that all these perceptions depend on certain conditions. The condition of the observer (you in this case) as an observer who brings something to the process of perception- your expectations, context, background, and history to any given perceptual experience. You also notice the conditioned reality of all external phenomena.
The more this sinks in, the more you start tuning into the quality of their constant change (aniccā) as conditions shift. All these phenomena are constantly changing at all levels. From the femtosecond change of reality to every cell in your body coming together to generate this experience, you will start to dwell and notice the finer details of the dance of entropy.
When the noticing of codependent arising and conditionality of the phenomena comes to the fore of your attention, then you start seeing a dissolution; you are not sensing into an essential nature of the phenomenon as a singular entity, but rather as a dynamic change. You stop getting caught up with the phenomena themselves. You might start feeling a softer categorisation or mental labelling taking place in the background. As sensations and perceptions shift and change, you will also begin to notice their impermanence.
One realisation you might have at this point is that this multiscalar change is largely outside your control. Whether you like it or not, there is a constant change of phenomena at rates, scales and levels you can't control and quite possibly can't fathom. We might try to control some, but at the highest bandwidth, resolution and emergent, codependent arising, we can't.
From this point of expanded bandwidth in which consciousness can arise, you go a few layers inwards and look at the looker; observe the observer. By now, you are sensing into dissolved sensations, and you start feeling a sense of centredlessness, an inability to identify with any aspect of this sensing process. It's as if each data point of experience does not connect to any central point of knowing, e.g. if I feel a sensation in my hand, the knowing of the sensation is in the hand, and there isn't a sense that that sensation is related to something happening in the head. Without a centre, there is no sense of a single unified epistemic agent.
At this stage, you notice that awareness is happening involuntarily (well, ok, you can choose to terminate your live. But in any other circumstance, you don't have a choice as to whether you are aware or not of anything). Awareness feels like a stream, washing you away, permeating your conscious experience. And in the process of doing so, it also fabricates a sense of self, the sense that there is an "I". And you don't need Buddhism to tell you this; there is increasingly more evidence from neuroscience (e.g. Anil Seth’s work) that the self is a controlled hallucination built up from an assemblage of perceptual best guesses, prior beliefs and memories. It has many different parts- memory, emotional experience, the experience of agency, and the things we associate with the slippery concept of free will. This leaves you with no sense of an epistemic agent at all (anattā)!
So you are left with this: if internal and external perception depends on a fabricated “I” that does the perceiving and barriers between these two slowly dissolve, then we might say that there is no "I" and that nothing has an inherent existence. Another way to say this is: “I” look out to an ever-changing stream of changing things, which depend on an ever-changing stream of my perception, which is something that "I" have no control over. This means there is no meaningful distinction between inner and outer, the perceiver and the perceived. Not only that, but if reality depends/is conditioned upon something that is perceiving it, and if perception depends on a self that is an imagined, fabricated point in spacetime, then we start sensing that things are empty of both an essential and an independent nature.
This doesn't mean nihilism, and it doesn't mean we are trying to annihilate the self. Instead, we seek to understand something about the self and all phenomena: their fabricated and illusory nature.
In the Yuktisastika:
"One does not gain liberation via reification. Nor does one free oneself from samsara through nihilism. By thoroughly understanding existence and non-existence, the great beings obtain liberation".
Seeing emptiness and loosening the clinging to epistemic categories opens compassion, generosity and deep care. It opens the possibility of feeling more freedom and less fixedness. It’s actually a humorous place to be, a humongous cosmic joke. Like, why is everyone so fussed with themselves? From this place of looser boundaries between epistemic agents, a closer relationship with other beings (human and non-human) can be cultivated. You can further tune into beautiful qualities, like loving-kindness, and soak into these realisations, fully emanating them outwards like light. This is a liberating way of looking into the world.
Deep insights about being and non-being, the nature of reality and ourselves, and the relationship with desire and control can all be intellectualised. Insights can live in the brain and be processed cognitively; you can study western philosophy of mind and epistemology all you want, as I have done for years. But I'm coming to realise that there is a vastly different qualitative difference between conceptual understanding and experiential understanding.
It's thus one thing to have reflected upon a concept, another to have briefly experienced something and then recall it; quite another to be able to induce an experience at will, and yet another to have a constant and pervasive realisation without even having to tune your attention to get into it; and another thing to have the insight so integrated to your linguistic faculties, allowing you to speak from it in real-time. What I describe above, I metabolised through my heart-body-mind; it doesn't only live in my head, it was processed by my system, and it reverberates in my heart. (In the Pali language, there is not one word for "mind". It rather translates to “mind-body-heart”, pointing to a post Cartesian phenomenological vantage point)
These possibilities and many more are within reach if one is willing to dedicate time, attention and care to them. I love the visual of the Garden of One Thousand Buddhas, which was established to represent the 1000 Buddhas who are believed in the Mahayana tradition to be born into our age. I think there are hundreds of thousands of "Buddhas" out there. I don't mean it only in the religious sense; rather, I mean wise people who can inhabit their heart spaces with compassion and their mind spaces with reason and are on a path towards more enlightened, less fabricated, less constricted ways of being and looking at the world.
The ladder of divine ascent has many forking paths. We have such long and exciting roads ahead of us!