Chapter 5: Emptiness

Emptiness Nothing Not

When I first came to Swamiji’s ashram, he constantly made jokes – all in good fun – about my being a proponent of “the void.” I told him in all honesty that I had never heard the term “void” used at the gonpa by anyone. They did, however, talk a lot about “emptiness.” Many agree that this is an unfortunate choice of words to describe something so full, radiant and divine.

Chagdud Rinpoche was famous for his forceful comment, “Emptiness nothing not!!” Since I had studied Kashmir Shaivism with Baba, the concept of the formless absolute or Shiva, was not new. I understood the eternal oneness of form and formlessness, Shiva and Shakti.

The first time I heard, years ago, the famous lines of the Prajnaparamita - “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Form is not other than emptiness and emptiness is not other than form.” - I was thrilled. This resonated deeply as the “Truth.” It is the same as the non dual union of Shiva and Shakti.

Baba was a shakta, a worshipper of the goddess, a lover of the form side, a tantric. This too conformed to the teachings I found with the Buddhists. Vajrayana is a tantric path and dzogchen is a purely nondual teaching.

I Want To Taste Sugar

I loved the story of Ramakrishna and Tota Puri. Ramakrishna was a 19th century holy man and saint who was noted for his ecstatic trances and devotion to Kali, the Divine Mother. His position was that he didn’t want to be sugar, but to taste sugar. This is the bhakta’s, or devotee’s, position. When Ramakrishna would experience union with his beloved Kali, she would tell him to come down from the plane of non-duality for the good of the world. So he stayed in a state of dual consciousness, where he enjoyed the worship of God as the Mother.

One day Tota Puri, a naked ascetic and yogi, arrived. He was a proponent of the non-dual path of the formless aspect of the divine - which the Buddhists would call emptiness - and spent long hours in nirvikalpa samadhi which is absorption in the thought free state. He saw that Ramakrishna was a worthy candidate for what he deemed to be the highest path and wanted to initiate him.

As was his practice, Ramakrishna was eager to try a new path, but told Tota Puri that he first had to ask the Mother for permission. It was granted and Tota Puri began to instruct the saintly bhakta. When he had a firm and steady vision of the Mother, Tota Puri told him to cut her in two in his imagination and rise above to the plane of non-duality. Ramakrishna could not do this at first and only succeeded when Tota Puri struck his third eye with a sharp object.

With this push, Ramakrishna was catapulted into nirvikalpa samadhi where he remained for several days. Thus Tota Puri was successful in initiating Ramakrishna into the experience of emptiness. The unforeseen result was that Ramakrishna was also successful in spontaneously initiating the yogi into devotion to the Mother.

Tota Puri began to have experiences of the divine shakti, the Divine Mother, and was filled with devotion. For the first time he experienced the bliss and the truth of the path of form, and he saw that the form and the formless are one and the same.

Who Am I

I once heard Adyashanti say that when a novice or spiritually unsophisticated person is asked to look inside and ask “Who am I?” they will find nothing. It is said that this is because there is nothing there. The novice might then think he has to find an acceptable answer and will begin to manufacture responses, but the initial answer to the question is just emptiness.

I was struck by this because it was exactly the experience I had when first read Ramana Maharshi during our trip to India back in 1970. I tried out his “Who am I?” technique and just didn’t get it at all. It made me feel inadequate for a long time because I didn’t know what the Self was. I just got a blank when I asked the question.

Much later I realized that I had experienced emptiness, the absence of a personal self, but at the time I didn’t think this was the right answer and went on looking for something divine inside me, some special thing or presence that was different from my ordinary sense of myself.

Years later, after hearing teachings on emptiness and contemplating them according to the prescribed methods, I tried Ramana’s technique again. I closed my eyes, went inside and asked the question, “Who Am I?” When I followed the nothingness that inevitably ensued, it led to a wonderful state of peace and awareness.

The true experience of emptiness opens to an experience of fullness, or as the Mahayanists might say, “the vast array of innate purity.” Baba called this sahaj samadhi or the natural state. Even if one is not able to use contemplation on emptiness to achieve this state, still the teachings on emptiness serve as an antidote to attachment, to materialism, to the force of delusion.

Crazy Wisdom was Too Crazy for Me

Although the focus on emptiness and the formless side was a bit dry, I felt that it provided a balance for me. The practices laid out by the mahayana and vajrayana Buddhists are psychologically sound tools for producing balanced, kind, and compassionate human beings who can live in society in a beneficial way. It is certainly not the only way, but its sanity uplifted me. It was the perfect healing for me after the intensity of life in Siddha Yoga with a crazy wisdom guru.

The crazy wisdom method was exciting and fascinating, but it didn’t totally resonate with my heart. I am enormously captivated by it and love to read the tales of crazy wisdom gurus, but in practice, it often bruised my psyche.

When I have been around people who are worshippers of the shakti side or goddess side, which is the side of form, I have sometimes been disturbed by the lack of wisdom and the attachment which is often present. There is a great difference between the shakti side which contains the awareness of oneness with the formless or Shiva - and the shakti side which is unenlightened and is reveling in mere form.

Baba’s lavish and sumptuous surroundings and his uninhibited and free behavior could be a distraction and could, I felt, mislead seekers. It is a difficult task for novices on the path to discern the truth in the midst of tantric display.

There is a story that makes this point. A siddha with a group of his disciples is sitting by the sea. He catches a fish, eats it and later, vomits up the live fish and returns it to the sea. The disciples follow suit and eat fish, but instead of vomiting up live fish, they were only able to regurgitate half digested dead fish. The point, of course, is that one cannot safely emulate the behavior of an accomplished master.

Baba’s worship of the Shakti was sublime. In spite of the fact that it was often invisible to me, I had the faith that he was anchored in his absorption in Shiva. Even with the intellectual grasp of the idea of the oneness of Shiva and Shakti, or form and emptiness, still, a lot of my experience at Baba’s ashram was over my head at the time. It was like being thrown into the deep end of the pool as a way to teach one to swim. Basically, I was so busy trying not to drown or trying to get to the end of the pool first that I didn’t really learn to swim properly.

Ultimately, I suppose, it doesn’t really matter. An austere environment is no greater an impetus to realization than comfort and excitement. Without my experience with Baba, I am certain that I would not have been able to receive what I did from the Buddhists. Life around Baba could be incredibly exciting, but the atmosphere often seemed mayic to me. This was because I was immersed in the maya of my own ego.

I wanted something to pull me out of it. After 22 years in the ashram, I knew that I was not finished. I wanted more. I wanted the experience of sahaj samadhi, the immersion in awareness or rigpa, in the midst of the display or appearance of the world.

Dark Night of the Soul

In working with people who are depressed, I have discovered that often a large part of it is the self-hatred at not being able to live up to some image they have adopted due to conditioning from parents, teachers and/or the society in which they live. There is a dissonance between the expectation and the reality – the reality being an experience of emptiness, of lack, of nothingness.

This very common experience of negative emotion is usually dealt with by the ego in a variety of ways. It is almost universally rejected, either by rationalization, escape, distraction, or projection onto others. It can, however, be used as a way to access the big Emptiness, with a capital E, which is one with the big Bliss, with a capital B. The union of Emptiness and Bliss is, again, the union of Shiva and Shakti.

During one retreat I was reading a book by A.H.Almaas, who is a psychologist and guru. In it he describes the reaction of the ego when faced with the reality of emptiness, of lack, of darkness. This experience moves the ego to pull out all its tricks. It launches into egoic activity which may include planning the future, or throwing oneself at the feet of the guru, or analyzing compulsively, or hysteria, or seeking distraction in all the numerous ways we can distract ourselves. The ego is terrified of this experience of emptiness and will do anything and everything to shield itself from facing it.

His solution is to sit with the feeling of lack, of depression, of emptiness, of psychic pain, of darkness and to feel it fully. If one can do this 100 percent and not merely 99.9 percent, Almaas claimed, then the emptiness will automatically morph into Emptiness/Bliss. As I read this, I sensed its truth and decided to try it the next time I felt a negative feeling.

I didn’t have to wait long. I had a mild negative feeling and decided that I would sit with it and feel it 100 percent. As I sat with this intention, it brought up many other bad feelings from my past going all the way back to my earliest memories. The overwhelming urge was to stop the practice. My mind objected, saying that I no longer indulged those feelings of negativity. I was grown up, in control, mature, together, unneurotic. I didn’t go there. This was my stance.

I had to summon a deep resolve in the face of these arguments of my ego and force myself to continue. As I did it got worse and worse. Everything was dark, bleak, meaningless, futile. I was a totally bad, unworthy failure. I stuck with it. It filled me completely. It was a dark night of the soul, truly horrific, though it only lasted a few minutes at most. Then it slowly opened up and morphed into an experience of wonderful peace, happiness, fulfillment, light and spaciousness - a very powerful experience of rigpa.

I saw that it really did work and decided to do it again. I was never able to do it again with the same intensity, but it showed me the truth about darkness and light, about the nature of suffering. The truth of emptiness was now deeply imprinted on me. It is very hard to understand this without experiencing it. The Christians speak of the dark night of the soul as a precursor to divine union, to divine grace. It is, however, a very difficult path because no one wants to go into such an intense darkness willingly.

One danger is that in embracing emptiness, one may fall into nihilism, which is the flaw of denigrating the world or relative reality. One has to go all the way, so that the negative experience of emptiness morphs into the supreme reality which is the union of emptiness and compassion. To only go part way is truly hellish.

The path of going all the way can be gradual and without trauma or horrific experiences. It really depends on the karma and psychology of the individual. Some lamas are said to have made the contemplation of emptiness their main teaching. Their students practice year after year with no further teachings. Slowly, this practice reveals the highest wisdom. Both the way of emptiness and the way of compassion lead to the same place.