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December 3, 2012

In the great Ch’an poem “Trust in Mind,” the Third Patriarch, Sengcan, says something that may cause you to scratch your head; it certainly caused me to ponder its meaning:

Live neither in the entanglements of outer things, 
nor in the inner feelings of emptiness.

The first line is easy: Don’t get caught up in the external, ever changing world of phenomena. This is a perennial truth shared by most religions and philosophies. But what about that second line? Don’t get hung up on inner feelings of emptiness. What on earth does that mean? Who wants to live in the “inner feelings of emptiness”? We spend our lives running away from inner feelings of emptiness. Clearly, the painful, psychological state of emptiness and loneliness, so pervasive in our contemporary Western culture, can hardly be what Sengcan means by “emptiness.” But perhaps we are simply looking at sunyata (the Sanskrit word for emptiness) from the opposite perspective. Most of us are familiar with a fundamental teaching of Buddhism that “form, feeling, perception, intention and consciousness are empty.” Empty of what? Empty of self, says our Buddhist teachers of old.

Sengcan advises us not to live in the inner feelings of emptiness, but from our Western perspective, that’s a slam dunk. I prefer to go to a Lakers game. I visited my friend Lynne at Thanksgiving. She lives on Siesta Key, a beautiful island near Sarasota, Florida. We walked on that amazingly white beach and spent many hours talking and “catching up” with so many stories, insights, wins and losses that have not had an opportunity to be shared in recent years due to our very busy lives. Among many of her abilities, Lynne is an excellent psychotherapist who has practiced in both California and Florida for over 30 years. I was very interested in hearing how she has grown as a therapist and how her perspective and technique have changed. She was also interested in hearing my observations about psychotherapy.

What I said about my changing perspective surprised even me. I said that I have come to believe that our greatest obstacle to true change, be it in therapy or through meditation, is a profound, bottomless fear of isolation and loneliness. We cannot tolerate the pain of it long enough to work through it. Just that. We run from the core existential truth that, when you get right down to it, we are alone. I have heard more than one person say, “I am not that afraid of dying, I just don’t want to die alone” Well good luck to all of us! We run from the truth of emptiness like the plague.

We held our first Long Beach Meditation weekend retreat, some fourteen years ago, in a home near the high Sierras – a stunning place that still lingers in memory. We were no more than eight meditators, and it was a real adventure for all of us. Later, one of the meditators confided, “I was so afraid of being alone that I took a pillow, went to the bathroom with my cellphone and called my wife, muffling my voice by talking into the pillow. During the talking circle, another person said that he was reduced to a quivering, palpable child. They both came close to a deep feeling of emptiness and isolation while sitting, eating and sleeping near eight other people! I remember a time when one of my dearest friends was attending a seminar in New York, alone for the first time in what can be an overwhelming and utterly impersonal city. Suddenly, my friend – so self assured and confident – experienced a terrifying panic attack. It had far reaching consequences in her life. I believe that a corefear of isolation and emptiness broke through what had been impenetrable ego defenses, probably for the first time in her life. She was reduced to “that quivering, palpable child,” a primal baby terrified of being alone and powerless, the same fear the two meditators experienced at our first retreat.

Why do we run from feelings of emptiness? Why do we stay in loveless marriages for decades, preferring that to living alone? My favorite line describing that sad situation is from the movie “Alfie” when an older man speaking of his wife who had recently passed away, tells Alfie, “We lived together and took vacations together for 50 years, but we never really liked each other.”

Why do we cling to parents long after we were supposed to have flown free, and they were also supposed to get on with the rest of their lives? Why do we cling to pot or booze or books or TV or yoga or meditation or political ideologies? Why do we cling to preachers who become substitute fathers or mothers, telling us how to be good boys and girls? Why do we cling to an idea that God is basically a good daddy or mama sitting benignly upstairs watching over us each night as we go to sleep? If we are good, bad things wont happen to us. As Dr. Phil famously asks, “And how is that working for you?”

I do not know the answer to these questions, but I do know that most of us come into this world and leave it without ever facing our deepest existential fears. We can hide in anything! It’s amazing. We can hide in that precious pet that we love unconditionally. We can hide in our religious beliefs. I hid in all my friendships up until my 40th year. Ask anyone in New York City about VB and the first thing they would have said was that he had more friends that anyone they knew.

One caveat to add here. Maybe most of us are not “supposed” to face the stark terror of our basic aloneness. After all, Noah’s Ark was built for couples. Truly. And there is no question, as Krishnamurti reminds us, that we see ourselves through the reflection of relationship. So the question is not whether or not we are supposed to live alone, but whether we can avoid using relationship as a place to hide from the fear of emptiness.

The thing is, life is not “either or,” black nor white, where, if you are unable to take a three month meditation retreat (or go to Burma and join a monastery), you might as well give up on the idea of being serious about your own inner process. Going from the unreal to the Real does not demand that you reject being part of two, of letting go of your children, partner, precious pet, religion or philosophy. Zen master Dogen said that we don’t have to leave home and travel the dusty roads to find the Truth that resides in our own heart. Leaving home has nothing to do with geography, instead it is symbolic. Leaving home is a metaphor. When you are totally you, you are able to be part of two.

It occurs to me that we have made a terrific mistake in translating “sunyata” as a “void,” and calling it “emptiness.” When Sengcan urges us not to get stuck in the feeling of inner emptiness – he is obviously not talking about a void, an absence or a deficit, he is talking about an experience that is so amazing, we can get stuck in it. In fact, what could possibly be so seductive about “emptiness” that the Ch’an teachers warned against indulging in it? They warned their students against becoming so completely absorbed that they shunned this world, leaving it behind like so much dust on their sandals.

I have come to believe that what Sengcan means by emptiness is “Presence.” Gurdjief would probably call it “Being.” Just that. Presence is what I felt when I was 5 years old and knew that I would be alone in this life. Of course I “forgot” it growing up, watching my friends fall madly in love, getting married, having children and slipping into the safety of the known. Later, I felt envy, but not when I was very young. It was just “what is” to use Krishnamurti’s expression. Presence is what I tenuously rediscovered in Crete when I was 36 years old, after three months of feeling so utterly alone it seemed unbearable.

Finally, at some point just before I left Crete, heading for Egypt, I realized something that at the time was astounding: I saw that there was an amazing upside to being alone. Being along meant that i was able to travel to Crete and live by the Mediterranean sea for three months and read religious books and do yoga each day, and, yes, cry into my pillow every night. Being alone meant that I got to sit down three days before leaving Crete and write a letter “to whom it may concern.” that signaled some amazing shift in my being. It meant that I got to pack my few belongings and go to Egypt for one month, merely because that was where the sun rose, and it looked a hell of a lot warmer than Crete in December 1977. Being alone meant that i could then travel on to Beirut, Istanbul, Tehran, Kabul, Lahore, and spend five months of studying yoga in India. In the years between 36 and now, I rediscovered what the 5 year old already knew, an abiding Presence that is beyond all knowing, definingor describing. It is That Which Stays; it is a fullness residing in emptiness. It resides behind and beyond all words, thoughts and concepts.

Experienced as separation from one’s own heart, Presence feels like emptiness – it can be a pain so deep, a wound that hurts so profoundly that we endlessly run from it. Like Narcissus we desperately seek our reflection in others, in lovers, in food, in books, in every addiction or distraction imaginable.

Felt from within, Emptiness is nothing but Presence. How could we possibly feel lonely when we live within our own dear Self? In that place, we live abiding in eternal Presence.

Blessings,

VB