The Buddhist idea of Emptiness, and what’s happened to my face?

Estragon: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?

Vladimir: Yes, yes, we’re magicians.

(Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot)

‘Absence, the highest form of presence’ (James Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

Christmas is a time for filling up. Stockings and ovens and trays of horrible sets of little glasses that came with the bottle of grappa in a box purchased at the airport with your last euros. At Christmas no space is empty of in-laws and people you share many genes with, but not necessarily much else. And the TV is full of ‘Christmas Specials’, in which sinister light entertainment acts from yesteryear are disinterred for one dark night of the soul, when the mirthful undead walk again. This year on the BBC it was the Chuckle Brothers. Dr van Helsing, get down the woodshed now, sharpen up some stakes.

Packed full like this, Christmas empties of meaning. Meaning is always the last hunger in the line, the one empty bowl we really don’t have the time for. But in Buddhism, the word ‘Emptiness’, which is the usual translation of the Sanskrit term shunyata, is itself the ultimate truth and meaning of things. If everything arises in dependence upon conditions, then nothing exists independently of those conditions.

Take my appearance, for example. Within a few months I have lost the use of half my face, and this is not just a weird and uncomfortable feeling. I can’t smile broadly. I can’t laugh open-mouthed. Kissing – I know, looking like I do, it’s not an issue that comes up much; anyway, it’s a non-starter. I can still sneer and snarl though. Emotion and its expression are conditioned by one another. Your expression or lack of it changes you inside. My speech is affected. People look at me differently; so I experience myself differently. I met an old student of mine when I was having my scan; she said to me, ‘Oh, you used to be so handsome!’ Yeah, thanks.

This happens to everyone to some extent. As you age you gradually turn into a grim-faced gargoyle, but so slowly you don’t notice - your natural vanity spares you the full Kirk Douglas (he was 100 recently – well done Kirk). My fast-forward metamorphosis gives it to me straight.

Now, ‘Emptiness’ is a way of expressing the fact that nothing in your experience stands aside from this kind of transformation. We tend to assume that there’s some entity I call me that is the same as it was fifty years ago. But where is it? What is it? If you look carefully enough, you’ll find there is nothing there; there is no one there experiencing whatever is going on for you. Obviously there is a ‘me’ here, a personality, constantly changing but still recognizable, as well as a physical presence, changing but also recognizable. But this is the point. I consist in change. My experience of being me is empty of some kind of nugget of me-ness. My life is not happening to me. It never did happen to me.

This understanding is not as weird as it sounds. There are times when you’re quite open and engaged, you’re getting on with things, you’re concentrated. There are times when who you are isn’t experienced, when your own needs do not push themselves forward, when that separateness from what you’re doing, from the world, from others, that itchy discontent or conflict, isn’t there. It’s that idea of ‘flow’ (though I think it is going on intermittently more often than we give ourselves credit for – not just when we’re working creatively).

Now, what is actually going on at those times? Or rather, why does what is going on at those times seem mysterious, and out of focus? And what happens when that flow breaks, when you think, ‘I want that seat’; or, ‘Are there any seconds?’ Or, ‘That’s a hurtful thing he said’, or ‘You know, I just have to check out my ‘likes’ on facebook’. Or in my own case, five weeks into chemo and radiotherapy, ‘The pain is going to get worse than this? I really can’t handle this.’ Before this thought there was plenty going on, there was plenty of awareness, but it was empty of me. But then it’s as if everything closes around a central focus of meaning to the world, a central fixture. Me and mine. And everything else becomes objectified, fixed, out there.

Any animal has an instinct to promote and guard its interests and attachments. And humans naturally make this conscious. We give it a name – me, mine. The name at once fixes it, and stories gather around it. All this is fine. The problem is when ‘me’ starts taking itself absolutely seriously. It becomes a fetish. An addiction. Everything has to be about me. You just have to look at ‘the Donald’ to see how this one works out. You feel locked out of a more nourishing world, in which the self is a useful reference point, but in the end, no more than that, empty. The point is that we unconsciously face this choice of worlds to live in at any moment. The real world, or the Donald world.

We all do this. I had a ‘Donald moment’ just recently in hospital - I had a bit of a meltdown because a senior registrar with a large group of professionals surrounded me in my hospital room and told me what they had decided to do with me, not realizing that I could barely say a word as I was (look away now) almost drowning in my own sticky mucus. I just felt so undignified, and I reacted by telling them all quite forcibly to leave. So unfortunately I wasn’t able to access a sense of this undignified moment as just that, a few uncomfortable minutes, which I did not need to identify with, which I did not need to make into part of the old on-going story I call ‘me’. Fortunately, these medical professionals are highly trained in patience and kindness.                                                                                                                         

As for the real world of ‘Emptiness’ you can get into it in even quite basic meditation practice. When you attend to the sensations of the body, this can be initially quite difficult. Your ‘Donald’ mind perhaps begins by ‘objectifying’ parts of the body in sequence. So if you try to be aware of your left ear, for example, you may visualize it; you may even touch it: your Donald mind looks for a clearly defined ear, ‘out there’. However, in the reality of your experiencing of it, your ear is not ‘out there’. Your awareness already inhabits it. And as an experience you will find it has no clear definition, no boundaries; it does not exist as something separate. It is real, it is really there, but it is empty.

Fixed views and doctors.

‘I am seeking the truth, not laying it down’. (Montaigne: On Prayer)

Views. There’s a lot of them about. A lot of them not very nice views, rather iffy views in fact. However, my guess is that in the case of Trump, his views are offensive rather than policy positions. They seem so far to be held provisionally.

This makes him, picturesquely, a bit more of a Buddhist than those who hold more agreeable views than his with a sense of righteous certainty. For us in the west, perhaps as a legacy of the priority of doctrinal orthodoxy in Christianity, your ideological position is who you are. However, as a Buddhist it’s not like that.

Buddhist views are less important than the way you hold ‘em. The important thing is not to get stuck in a view, attached to it, or identify with it, not to build a fixed self out of it, or use your view as a weapon. Not to take it absolutely literally. The Buddha’s teaching sets you off; it’s not meant to wrap things up for you.

Over the past few months I have lost the use of half my face. The reason for this is that my GP took a certain view of my symptoms and did not want to have second thoughts. My GP is old school, an elderly, reassuring guy, authoritative, good bloke. He said the lump I showed him in my face was bone. I also presented numbness on the same side of the face. As the weeks went by and half my face became more paralysed and numb, he said, ‘Bell’s Palsy; a slightly unusual Bell’s Palsy, but it’ll be fine.’

He eventually referred me to a neurologist, whom he advised to reassure me about the ‘lump’ on my cheek. When Claudia asked the neurologist - this was in July - if the symptoms could signal cancer of the parotid, the neurologist said that yes, they could. But he just carried on with his own specialism, using little hammers and pins to check how my nerves were doing, and asking ‘How many fingers am I holding up?’ And then he ordered a brain scan. Nothing wrong there.

If you have a fixed viewpoint, you don’t see what you aren’t looking for. In September, I was telling my GP my lump felt a bit tender; he said it was a distraction. Bell’s Palsy. Finally, at the start of October it got a bit painful and Claudia dragged me to A&E at UCH on a Saturday night.

There, reception said to me, ‘Can it wait till you can see your GP on Monday?’ I said to her, ‘NHS treatment is world class, and free, and I am extremely grateful for this. But it is not actually ‘free’ if the diagnosis is too late. It can cost you everything you have.’ She waved me through. A head and neck surgeon is always there on a Saturday night to deal with people who have been punched in the face, and so I finally got the attention I needed. Thank you the flying fists of British pub culture. And the very newly qualified specialist. For a diagnosis give me the uncertainty of the beginner’s mind any time. A month later the tumours were removed.

The narrowly locked focus that is our modern iphone-induced mental (as well as physical) posture loses touch with the open shared space in which conflicting views are tolerated. Even music is now experienced not as filling a physical space that includes you in it, but as occupying a mental space, your own ‘headspace’, between your earphones. In the public sphere too we no longer want to debate. We find it difficult to acknowledge that there might be something bigger and more important than our own position, our own experience.

Again, though, you pay a price. At the Democratic convention of 2009 they had an Evangelical pastor speaker (God is big in the US) and as you might expect the guy had views on LBGT issues that not everyone liked. At the 2013 Democratic convention a similar pastor with similar views was forced to withdraw. So between 2009 and 2013 the capacity of these people at the Democratic convention to value debate over one particular set of views disappeared.

Parliamentary democracy is based on the principle that the debating chamber is more important for arriving at the most useful conclusion than any one view or judgment that may be expressed within it. Similarly, mindfulness is a valuing of awareness or attention itself, over any one view or thought or feeling that arises and passes away within it. It is not really about inviting unhelpful or ‘judgmental’ thoughts to leave. It is about holding them in a larger, open space of awareness.

This is sometimes, I’ve found, difficult, for people to ‘get their head around’ - because you can’t think your way into that open space. We tend to identify with our thoughts, emotions and feelings. That is, they emerge as being all about what is going on in the world around us, rather than what is going on in us. We polarize with our experience: ‘I like this, I don’t like that’. But as soon as you have been able to identify a thought as a thought, a view as a view, an emotion as an emotion, or a feeling as just that, a feeling, you have, if only momentarily, opened up that space. You are no longer possessed by those thoughts or feelings. You have begun to open up a path to some kind of freedom.

Me? Well, it now looks like cancer. There are feelings of relief, mixed with intimations of mortality. Hopes and fears banging about. I try to notice, to make conscious, to make room for in my awareness, my sense of other things going on, especially breathing, but also the sky, the whole world of particular things, not the sky in general, but this cloud, its unrepeatable shape and colour; and likewise, this person here, the unrepeatable character and tone of their world in its brief collision with mine. Not everyone really wants to follow me into this grimly significant place where I suddenly find myself, and I likewise can find myself sometimes uninterested in really taking in their world. But there is room in awareness for all these things, including the sense of not wanting to take an interest in things. Awareness is spacious by its nature.