Emptiness: deficient or liberating?

"And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you"

~ Nietzsche

“People are scared to empty their minds

fearing that they will be engulfed by the void.

What they don’t realize is that

their own mind is the void.”

~ Huang Po

You may have heard that Buddhism, at least in some of its schools, stresses the "emptiness" of phenomena. This may not seem a very appetizing goal for the spiritual life, so I thought I'd explain this a bit.

In one of my other blog posts, I outlined the somewhat more positive spiritual goal of unity or oneness; briefly, we can consider that emptiness is the other side of the coin - if everything is essentially one, then what appears as separately existing objects and people are actually not ultimately so. If "oneness" means the transcendence of the subject-object duality that in everyday life seems so obvious and taken for granted, then emptiness points to the ultimate lack of solidity and separateness of both self and other.

But we will begin with a focus on the psychological state of "deficient emptiness", a very (in my view) common experience where we can feel both that we are missing something deep and important in life, and also that we are seriously deficient as a result. I think this sort of feeling is quite universal, and behind a good deal of what seems intolerable and needs to be medicated and anesthetized in addiction. The sense is very much not just that my life is lacking, but that who I am, my identity, is lacking, that I am not enough. Though this is a painful affect, I believe that it is also a portal, and that through facing and feeling this emptiness, this void, we can be delivered into a different and potentially freeing understanding of ourselves.

From the Buddhist perspective, believing we are a separate self, while pragmatically necessary, is ultimately an illusion, or perhaps delusion, in terms of the amount of suffering it results in. Though this emptiness takes many forms, not just a painful affect, but also this sense of not being comfortable and satisfied in the moment, the sense that we always need to get somewhere else in order to be okay (and we're not there yet).

According to the Buddhists, everything is included in the nature of our minds, so that means both the deficiencies associated with our history and ego identity, and also that spacious, open and inherently complete side to our true nature and freedom from the sense of feeling separate. Just to be clear, as a psychotherapist, we need our sense of separate ego identity and a good deal of what causes us suffering in our life, including the major obstacles in the way of our deeper nature, comes from problems from our past, and trying to avoid these in favor of pure awareness is often called "spiritual bypassing." What I'm talking about here is not getting rid of the ego but focusing on ego identity, the sense that my ego is exclusively and only who I am. Thus, we work on parallel paths, dealing with the individual issues that need to be addressed on their own merits, and at the same time working on what we could call the larger identity of awareness and moving towards that. Eventually, we see that there are not two paths, the human and transcendent, but one.

From this point of view then, the deepest sense of lack and deficiency comes from identifying entirely with the separate sense of ego identity. So how do we go about this, if we are so completely convinced that our usual sense of individual self is who we are?

Basically, we do this by facing, feeling and experiencing this deficiency as best we can. If we have a history of trauma or other difficult feelings such as panic, this should definitely be done very carefully and gradually with someone who knows what they're doing, preferably a professional. But to be honest, my personal experience is that it is very difficult to do on our own. As we explore these extremely difficult states, I strongly suggest you find someone in your spiritual community, such as your meditation teacher, who is familiar with this process and who can guide and support you through it.

As is usually the case with our psyche, there are layers and levels that begin to emerge as we stay with these feelings. But ideally what happens is that as our resistance to our most difficult thoughts, feelings and memories reduces, and we are able to look at this material, not from it, it becomes clearer that these are essentially mental representations and self-images that have been with us as long as we can remember, but that as mental concepts, they are empty of inherent existence. It is truly an uncanny feeling when not just as a cognitive or intellectual understanding, but as a felt sense, we see that our idea of ourselves is simply that, an idea, and not a solidly subsisting individual thing called "me."

As we continue this process and it goes deeper, it becomes not just about this or that negative, or positive for that matter, idea about ourselves but the very idea of ourself as a separate entity. When we really see that who we have been taking ourselves to be is this very deeply ingrained idea and sense of ourselves as a separate being, it can be deeply unnerving to say the least. In fact, the later stages of this process are what is traditionally known as "ego death."

The very good news, however, is that after a "death" of this kind, we see that of course we have not actually died, just a very deep idea of ourselves has died, and this in itself leads to a rebirth with a new sense of who we truly are. It is worth pointing out here, that the death rebirth cycle is, of course not limited to this particular tradition, but is very much a part of other traditions, including Christianity, and mystical traditions in general worldwide. In the Christian tradition, for example, St. Paul says "It is not I who lives but Christ who lives in me" which from a Buddhist point of view is the same as saying that I'm no longer exclusively identified with this separate sense of self based on my body and history - though that is included; rather, I am that empty consciousness that constitutes everything.

The spiritual teacher A. H. Almaas, sets this out very clearly (I can't recommend his book below strongly enough!):

"...deficient emptiness is nothing but space experienced through the filter of ignorance (which is composed of images from the past taken to define oneself, accompanied by wrong beliefs and emotions associated with the images). This explains why when the deficient emptiness is experienced, it transforms into space as soon as the wrong beliefs and their accompanying emotions are seen and understood. Of course, the ignorance has in it, connected to it, the memories of the original childhood experiences that led to the various self-images. The psychodynamic understanding removes the dullness and darkness of ignorance by shedding light on its specific content. This brings about the clarity of understanding, which dissipates the ignorance and reveals the true nature of the deficient emptiness, which is immaculate space. This argument shows that deficient emptiness is nothing but space obscured by ignorance and falsehood."

So, we can end up feeling not that we are a separate ego-self experiencing awareness, but awareness itself experiencing the ego and its contents. This is said to be the end of suffering, at least that which is based on reactivity, though the tradition is very clear that this is also the beginning of the new life, not the end point. So we begin the task of integrating our realization with our history and patterns, (which will continue to forcefully express themselves for quite a while, its ongoing actually), though as AA says, its about spiritual progress, not perfection.

If this state seems impossibly far away, it is really not that different from how we were when we were children (though we didn't know it, and thus took if for granted). Before our personality crystallizes into the defensive structures that are inevitable as we grow up, it was easy to be fully present without interfering with our experience, without the sort of self-referencing that tends to inhibit us. With the re-training of the mind that meditation offers, over time we can increasingly revert to what is called in Dzogchen, the natural state.

The Void and Inner Spaciousness