Excursions in Buddhist Emptiness
Mindfulness is the tag that gets attached to all manner of Buddhist technique—never mind the Buddha’s insistence on emptiness. By now such terms as mindfulness, awareness, awakening, enlightenment and so on, have gathered all of the revenant unthought assumptions of any philosophical cliché. Cliché seems to dominate this most subtle and ineffable of the ecstasies because, well, it’s just not that effable; I mean it is difficult, if not impossible, to talk about. Which is also what makes it so profound.
After some five years of sitting meditation, where I sit in the lotus position for twenty minutes to focus on breathing a few times a week, I have come to the conclusion that mindful may be a misleading descriptor of the essential weirdness of this experience. At some point in the course of this sit, the parasympathetic nervous system shifts into an altogether different state than how my body/mind normally functions. Heart-rate slows, the mind goes liquid and the body is suffuse with a subtle euphoria. It is expansive, but also amorphous, resulting in a weird body dysmorphia and more to the point, rather difficult to put into language. My corporeal limits go all wonky and can blow up to enormous size, as if my body were a an expanding balloon. Past a threshold one proceeds beyond thought and thinking and way out into the realm of perception-consciousness—a space of no memory and no desire; this much can be found in the reports of many a meditation guide: the so-called awake awareness.
What remains peculiar, to me, is that past a certain perceptual limit, exactly what one is perceiving empties out into… and here I am left without adequate language. Suffice to say that experience at this point becomes strange. It feels like the symbolic is being suspended; that is the mundane structures of language and identity that organize my world lift away as if they were on a clutch. In this moment perception becomes more disorganized and weird the more I pay attention to it. I would not say that what I have arrived at is necessarily empty, but I can well imagine that were one to persist in this state long enough emptiness may be the best word for it; insufficient, less mindful than mindless, where mind has been emptied of language and has itself been emptied into undifferentiated phenomena.
The term emptiness no doubt avoids the status of cliché because it is so counterintuitive to sense; how, on god’s green earth, can reality be empty? But one only has to go there long enough to find out.
Enlichenment
