On a recent retreat I went through a process I’ve now come to understand as “dying to emptiness.” But before I get to far ahead of myself, I should first say that before dying to emptiness one must first come to be able to see or access the recognition of emptiness in a fairly significant way. For me that more substantial recognition of emptiness began a little over halfway through a two-month vipassana retreat in early 2007. Toward the end of that retreat and for a few months afterward I was effortlessly perceiving the empty nature of phenomena, simply upon reflecting on reality. It was in many ways, quite profound, and also somewhat natural.
I thought perhaps that the recognition of emptiness would just become more and more pervasive until a sudden transformation would happen in the midst of seeing emptiness and then I’d be done. What does done mean? Well, I had some models for it, but I really wasn’t sure. It seems that I never know what the next step of the journey will be, until it actually happens. And in this case, what ended up happening instead was that the easy recognition of emptiness faded a bit (not vanishing completely, just faded or changed). I rationalized that it was because I hadn’t been on retreat for a while and that once my concentration and focus got stronger it would be just as obvious (whoa, hadn’t I learned that the phases of the practice couldn’t be predicted very easily already!?).
It turned out though, almost as soon as I started this latest two-week self-retreat that I wasn’t going to make my way back to emptiness, that in some ways it was gone. And that’s how it felt, like a loss of something that had once been “attained.” For almost a week I practiced, and battled, with fear, confusion, doubt and difficulty. At one point I walked into a teacher-interview and told her that I simply didn’t buy the Buddha’s teachings on liberation. Ok, I was more then a little pissed, and for some reason I thought emptiness would be a final refuge. Shit, I must have missed that whole teaching on “nothing can be clung to as me or mine.” And so, I found this identity I had solidified around the “experience” of emptiness being torn away, and being replaced with what felt like nothing.
At some point though, after being thoroughly pummeled by this most recent death, it hit me that perhaps emptiness wasn’t gone, but was actually so pervasive as if to seem completely gone. In other words, emptiness was something much more natural and ordinary then I had originally been making it, and this death of “self as emptiness” was really about the death of yet another layer of identity, not the loss of emptiness. Emptiness is inconceivable (to the mind) and so if it became more and more pervasive who is to say that one could (at least at first) even recognize it? There really isn’t a reference point in emptiness anyway, so this might be difficult. As one of my teachers on this retreat said to me while I was going through this period, “non-duality is an acquired taste.”
Eventually, over the last week of the retreat I started to surrender more and more to the possibility that I couldn’t hold on to anything, including emptiness, and something emerged that I began to trust, some sense of “I am”, that was not dependent on the cycles of insight, or on any particular state of experience. And so I gave up any particular form of practice at this point, and simply walked, sat, ate, and so on. I began to see something more simple than simple, that things just are. Every state has the same taste, as they say in the Tibetan tradition, One Taste. This taste is nothing special, is completely ordinary, and just is. Really, I had heard that before, but that’s exactly how it is…
And so I just trusted this, this and only this, because there is nothing else to trust, nowhere else to go, and no one else to become. What this led to, right at the end of the retreat, was yet another shift in perspective, which much like earlier shifts that have happened, felt like a dropping away of something in the mind. It was as though some pattern of energy and activity were there, and then “BAM” the next moment it wasn’t. I don’t know what was dropped, but since it left I haven’t been able to find it, and really what I’ve been left with is a much more ordinary, down-to-earth, view of what this whole thing is about, which is simply being right here. There is nothing to attain, nowhere to go, and nothing to become.
That being said, I still see that in terms of the mental model this understanding can’t simply be arrived out without a lot of what comes before it, and so I would never suggest that someone just “get this”, though I suppose it’s possible that some people could. I also recognize that things change, and so this current understanding (if it is that) could, and probably will, change. Though what is being seen at this point doesn’t really seem related to change, but rather about something that is true of everything. Somehow, it seems to be this very uncertainty (of not knowing how things will unfold) coupled in a deep trust of what is, that characterizes wisdom.
