The Heart of Suffering and the Emptiness Beyond It
El Corazón del Sufrimiento y la Vacuidad Más Allá de Él
A student asks about the meaning of emptiness and whether direct experience can be trusted, leading to an exploration of why genuine spiritual work moves toward suffering rather than away from it.
The Heart of Suffering and the Emptiness Beyond It
A student asks about the meaning of emptiness and whether direct experience can be trusted, leading to an exploration of why genuine spiritual work moves toward suffering rather than away from it.
You mentioned emptiness. Can you elaborate a bit more? Is emptiness meant in the Buddhist sense, where nothing exists on its own, where nothing is independent and cannot be there without dependency on other things?
You're talking about dependent origination in Buddhism. It's related. I'm using the word in a slightly more abstract, poetic sense, but it's also very literal. There is no better way to describe direct experience than to say it is empty and full at the same time.
Everything we see seems to have something there. It does, and it doesn't. It's very difficult to describe. It has something to do with what you mentioned: that it is no thing. The essence of it is empty.
The ocean and the waves
What we experience as our body, words in a conversation, a person, ourselves: all of that, as a metaphor, you could think of as waves in an ocean. Everything we can know, everything experienced through perception, sensation, sound, sight, the senses, thoughts, emotions, all of it is phenomenological. All of it is waves.
It's waves in an ocean, but in the metaphor, the ocean is not water. In experience, the ocean is emptiness. You could also say consciousness, or beingness. But it's not that there is consciousness and then phenomena appearing within it. The waves don't appear in the ocean. They are the ocean.
That seems to transcend space and time.
It contains space and time. Space and time are waves in the ocean, or aspects of it. You could say they are the mechanics, the system through which the waves move. But they are still made of the waves. If the ocean becomes still, space and time disappear. The waves disappear.
Just to be clear, this is something that can happen experientially. You can then know directly the answer to the question of whether there is something without experience.
How do you know you exist?
For example: how do you know you exist?
Because I have this form. I have sensation. I seem to have a thinking mind.
Exactly. You derive the sense of existence through phenomena. And because phenomena changes, your sense of existence is always unstable and under threat.
That is the most important question: is it possible for there to be something without phenomena, without phenomenological experience? For you to remain without experience, without body, without sensation, without thoughts?
Provided that the definition of "you" is beyond this skin, then probably yes. But if the definition is this person here, then no.
That's the important question: who are you, what are you? At a certain point there are only two options. Either I am what is contained within this experience, so that what I am depends on sensation, perception, and body, or it doesn't. And that question can be answered not philosophically, but experientially.
Can direct experience be a trick of the mind?
I've heard the term "direct experience" very often, and I got the impression that those who have experienced it directly know it without a doubt. But is it ever possible that it is actually a function of the mind that makes the person think they have had direct experience? Perhaps after being immersed in the thought for so long? I'm not doubting you at all. I'm just wondering, with my analytical mind, whether what is called direct experience could itself be a phenomenon of the mind.
What you're asking is: is it possible that we can fool ourselves? Yes, one hundred percent. That's what we're doing all the time. That's what the whole thing is about.
There are two ways to diagnose that. One is: are you suffering? And if the answer is no, there's still a chance you're fooling yourself. In fact, the most common and deepest form of self-hypnosis is the conviction that "I'm not suffering."
The more awareness we have, the more we start to realize how deeply we are suffering. Through something that can be a process, and can also be a sudden shift, that suffering can end. But first it needs to become conscious.
So that's a way to know if we are fooling ourselves. If there is a sense of "I'm done, I have arrived," or "my life is fine," or "suffering happens to others," then we might be very asleep.
So I've had the wrong impression all along. I assumed that people who are more cultivated in the spiritual sense are more peaceful, less suffering. That's an illusion I've been holding?
The deepening into suffering
If I generalize: imagine suffering is going down, and the deeper I go, the more suffering there is. There is a process of conscious suffering. As we begin spiritual work, we go deeper and deeper into suffering consciously. Then there will be awakening. Awakening will take us even deeper into suffering. If the progression continues, there will be glimpses of what we were talking about earlier, emptiness. That's where the change happens. In the end, suffering is seen as illusory, as empty, but only through a deepening into the heart of it, into the core of it. It intensifies.
We can become better at managing. Sometimes these changes are quite abrupt. There could be a very short period of time where the suffering intensifies and then there is a breakthrough. But in general, if this work progresses, in the beginning it gets harder. We start to deal more directly and deeply with pain and fear, and with the resistance toward them. Over time, we become more comfortable with the fear and the pain. The resistance diminishes. At that level, suffering starts to alleviate.
But it is not, from the beginning of this work, a movement away from suffering. It is into it, into the heart of it. The Buddha didn't sit under the tree from a place of instant bliss. He sought to face all of the distress. Jesus didn't go into the desert for forty days because he was blissing out. He went to sit with what was distressing him. Pure despair. These are extreme, intense stories, but you can generalize. For one person it might be lighter or faster, but it definitely moves toward that which is difficult.
Once we taste that which we're running away from, and we learn that it is okay to taste it, then we don't need to run. We don't become free from it by running faster. We might feel like we are getting really good at managing all the ways of escaping and avoiding.
Thinking that it's being skillful.
Exactly.
Shadow work and the core of illusion
Is what you've described what some would call shadow work?
Part of it is shadow work. Shadow work has to do with the human body-mind: past conditioning, trauma, karma. There are different systems, Eastern and Western, but it concerns the human body-mind. And then there is the core of the mechanism of illusion, of confusion. The closer we get to it, the more distressing it can be. There are always fear and pain barriers.
Pain as in emotional pain or physical pain?
For some it is physical, but I think that's more rare. For me it was especially physical, though not only. Pain of all kinds. Pain is the sensation of something ending that we don't want to end. Obviously there is physical pain, but even that loses the quality of what we call pain when there is no fear for what is ending. It becomes just an uncomfortable, at times interesting, mysterious experience.
I can speak about that. I've had chronic pain for most of my life, all kinds of physical pain, and it was to me the cause of a lot of suffering. Then I realized it wasn't the cause. It was just where I was choosing to place it. To know directly that there can be that same pain and it's no longer experienced in the same way, no longer with resistance or suffering: even the quality of distress that pain would bring just becomes a part of experience. For me, luckily, it also diminished, because the dynamic of trying to resolve it would intensify it.
Progress and timelessness
It's only direct in timelessness. Otherwise it's always progressive, because we experience it through the human experience of living. I can realize my true nature right now, and in that sense it's spontaneous and direct; there's no progression required. But as I live my life, I've been going to a teacher for five years, I've been doing this and that. In that sense, it is progressive.
If you have a sense that you're getting somewhere, I would offer the antidote of more direct-path language.
Actually, that sense has vanished a little bit. It happened earlier, this sense of "I'm getting somewhere."
It has to, because there's a negative side to it, which is "I'm not getting anywhere," and there's a nihilism or depressive sense that "this isn't working."
It's useless.
The antidote for that is the progressive perspective: keep at it. But once this is really seen, it becomes clear what is progressive and what is not, what needs time and what does not. The best answer I've heard to this, in the simplest way, was from someone who was asked how much time is needed. The answer was: as much time as it takes for you to realize it takes no time.
Beautiful. Exactly.
It often takes more time than we think.
The question of love becoming affirmation
I really liked when you said that you can orient toward something as though it were a thread connected to a memory from experiences, or you can just be with its being here. This idea of choice: I can see now how there's a progression from it not feeling like a choice, through spontaneous experiences, to more and more of a real choice. That question you highlighted, "What if I am already loved, and all of my efforts are in vain?" I can see how that can, and even over the course of this conversation on some level has, turned more into an affirmation. The more it crystallizes as an affirmation, the more it just is.
The affirmation is a little tricky. If it's just a mental mantra, it might be helpful, but be careful with that. "Love, love, love," and then you stop the mantra, go out, and feel "I'm not loved." So yes, exactly. That's the thing.