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.