Get Your Own Emptiness
Get Your Own Emptiness
For You Are Your Only Teacher
When I was a Christian, I heard this apologetical joke and told it myself a few times:
One day, a conference of scientists seeks an audience with god, to explain to him why he’s no longer needed by mankind.
“We’ve triumphed over nature and shape our destiny as we wish. You’ve done jolly good getting the ball rolling, but we’ll take it from here.”
God smiles and says, “Thank you for pausing to let me know. As one last request, would you please indulge a retiring deity in a friendly competition, so I can see your amazing abilities firsthand?”
“We’d be glad to, sir. It’s the least we can do to show how far we’ve come in dispensing with you,” say the scientists.
“Alright, let’s have a contest to make a man.”
“Excellent!” the scientists agree. “That’s just the thing we’ve been doing—making better and better humans!”
So, the scientists set up their lab after securing funding from their donors, patents, corporations, and governments.
Meanwhile, God scoops some dirt and fashions it into a form. Lab facilities ready, the scientists stand poised at their computers, cyclotrons, Petry dishes, and DNA sequencers, while their lead biochemist goes to grab some dirt to use as raw material.
God halts them in their tracks. “Hey, now! Go get your own dirt.”
The punchline is predicated on the idea that humankind must have raw materials—something, some existent source—to do our science-y thing. God is the only one who creates out of nothing, and that includes dirt.
No Cause for Fear
The “Get your own dirt” argument crumbles through our fingers once we realize we need no prime mover, no cause which itself is not caused. Lacking an uncaused causer is no “cause” for fear. Nor is it an expression of nihilism or infinite regression. For the cause-and-effect, chicken-and-egg game is itself just that—a game. “Step right up, folks, for the all-out, devil’s-reasoning, winner-take-all contest of something vs. nothing.” Ah, we just can’t get enough of that addictive binary!
Something vs. nothing? Hah! Nothingness is itself something. It exists as an abstraction, a metaphor for absence, which absence is itself something:
We are certain that “something” exists. We are certain that if you take away the particles and antiparticles and photons and quanta in a region of space, that empty space will still exist. If you move far away from any sources of mass or energy and clear the space of all external electric, magnetic, and gravitational fields, and prevent any photons or gravitational waves from entering that space, that “physical nothingness” will still exist in that region. And in that region, certain things cannot be removed:
there will still be quantum fields in the vacuum of that empty space,
the fundamental constants and underlying laws of physics will still exist in that empty space,
and there will still be a “zero-point energy” inherent to that space, and it will still possess a finite, positive, and non-zero value.
As far as we can tell, that’s as close to nothing as we can get within our Universe.
You might be able to imagine, in your mind, a state of pure nothingness that’s even more “nothing-like” than this, but that doesn’t represent anything physically real. There’s no experiment you can design that can create such a condition. The best we can say—assuming that we’re sticking to science and not moving into the realm of theology, philosophy, or pure imagination—is that the reason there’s something rather than nothing is that “nothing” cannot compatibly exist within our Universe. Of course, that leads back to the original question: why? And for that, dissatisfying though it is, science has no answer. The Universe is the way it is, and though we strive to understand it as best we can, we are compelled to be humble before the great cosmic unknown. The only advice I can give you is this: beware of anyone who claims to “know” the unknown. They may or may not be fooling themselves, but you certainly shouldn’t allow them to fool you.[1]
Zero
The advent of zero has been for the last two millennia the most prominent abstraction to advance humankind. We conjecture that it came from the ancient Indian civilization or Meso-America. No matter. What’s revolutionary about zero is that it helps us measure what we don’t have (as good a definition of the bastardization of desire as I can come up with). Papa-Culture desire is all about defining what we don’t already possess and filling that zero.
From the moment of our discovery of a mathematical abstraction for emptiness, nothing has been our operative concept, and we’ve been trying to plug the chasm in our hearts ever since, as if to know we’re here. You can feel it deep in your roots when you think of it in the terms my dad put to seven-year-old me when I asked, “And what came before god?”
“Nothing came before god. He was just there.”
Try it. Try to think of some god, some being, some something just being there, without beginning or end. Or try to think of nothing rather than something. You can’t. That you’re here to attempt the abstraction shows that nothing is unreal. Zero is an abstract tool to measure the future, something always out of our grasp—the gap, the hole, the abyss, the nothing we intend to fill with something.
For what is empty is not reality itself but all that seems to block its light. To name or symbolize the joyous content of this emptiness is always to say too much, to put, as they say in Zen, legs upon the snake. For in Buddhist philosophy, emptiness (sunyata) denotes the most solid and basic reality, though it is called empty because it never becomes an object of knowledge. This is because, being common to all related terms—figure and ground, solid and space, motion and rest—it is never seen in contrast with anything else and thus is never seen as an object.[2]
Even the scientific theory of the Big Bang can’t vouch for there being nothing before there was something:
One of the biggest questions—perhaps the biggest question of all—that we can ask about our Universe is where, if we go all the way back, it came from. Before the stars and galaxies, before the emergence of atoms, before the very first moment of time ever passed-and-elapsed, how did it all begin? It’s a question that many of us wonder about, and a question that, despite our best efforts, science still doesn’t have a convincing, compelling answer for that’s supported by actual, measurable data … As much as I’d love to give you an answer to the question of a “first cause” for existence, the truth is that we don’t yet (and may never) know how, or even if, things truly began. This is science at the frontiers.[3]
Nothing, Beyond the Concept
Yet, we can, in a way, get beyond nothingness as a mere concept, for nothingness, emptiness, is. Of course, that sounds like an oxymoron, and it is. And an oxymoron is itself another concept, a fusion (or confusion) of self-contradictory concepts. To get beyond the utter bizarrity of trying to think about “nothing” as something, we must live the magik of nothing itself being, well, itself.
The root of the ancient philosophic abstraction called samsara is a viciously cyclic “wandering,” turning oneself in circles around the utter inconceivability of nothingness. It’s no accident that the same culture that generated zero also pointed to samsara. Children are born with samsara, which is not in itself to be avoided. Nor is it to be plumbed. Yet, we try to fill it with anything but wandering, turning in futile circles around … what? As an infant grows, we fill them with tasks (rolling over, crawling, walking, potty-training). We fill them with words, then talk, talk, talk, followed by learning, conforming to the social contract, forging a life of something to flee from the dread of … nothing. All the while, we miss that all of us, not only children, are creatures of play. Even the “business” of surviving against the natural world, outrunning or outwitting predators, dodging pain, diving into pleasure, and crafting meaning—all of these are themselves play, a lively, serious vocation. Until that tragic moment for each of us, when we forget that all of it is play. That we are play itself, the cosmos doing what she does best: being. Play does not fill emptiness but welcomes it.
Many people are confused about emptiness, but it is not such a difficult subject when seen from the point of view of figure and ground. Emptiness is the ground, and interdependent manifestation; samsara is the figure imposed on the ground. In this way, emptiness becomes the reason why anything is possible. It is the ground or space on which anything might be created and is created: it makes the existence of samsara possible and the attainment of enlightenment possible. The improvement of sentient beings is possible because of emptiness, and so is the activity of buddhas and bodhisattvas. Because everything is interdependent, when all the conditions are correct, anything can happen. Emptiness makes it possible for a sentient being who is suffering in samsara to also be a Buddha by nature. When that being purifies the relative samsaric obscuration that binds it, then it is possible for it to become enlightened. None of this could be done without emptiness. If everything in existence were substantial and permanent, no one could grow old or learn anything; nothing could change, either for better or for worse; nothing could be improved, because there would be no room for it. This is common sense if you see emptiness simply. Emptiness provides the questions and the answers to all the questions, because it allows for movement and change. It allows for insight and realization. [emphases mine][4]
Let me repeat Tai Situ Rinpoche’s key pronouncement:
Without emptiness, “nothing could change, either for better or for worse; nothing could be improved, because there would be no room for it.”
Did you get that? Beyond the double entendre, the swirling mind-fucks, and the words, words, words, “emptiness” allows nothing to change, improve, and take up room!
Nothing is. It’s not “nothing.” Anything can happen. Anything.
Your Own Teacher
All of us grow tired at one time or another of samsariffically following teachers, teachers, teachers. I’m a witch, not a teacher. The words, buddha and bodhisattva, conjure exoticism, mystery, and enlightened attainment, yet they’re anything but. The true bodhisattva doesn’t know they’re buddha. My words here are fictions about fiction. If you really want to know what I have to say (as if it matters), read my fiction. You’re the teacher. Read that fiction, and teach yourself, without trying to teach anyone or anything.
The Nonfiction Worlds of Fiction
In his fabulously audacious The Pursuit of the Pankera and The Number of the Beast, Robert A. Heinlein crafts a fictitious universe in which his characters navigate a universe where every planet, every dimension really houses fictions that’ve been written. They travel to a realm of Oz and experience the never-ending picnic basket. Heinlein gets even more meta by having his travelers meet Heinlein’s other fictitious universes and characters. It’s the Marvel multiverse before the comics were brought to the silver screen.
I used to believe that notion in a guilty-pleasure way. Of course, it couldn’t be “real” that Robinson Crusoe and Friday really do exist somewhere on a desert island. That Pip really is enjoying life having gotten the great expectation of his one true love. That Hamlet still lives and chases ghosts. That the Shire is a place we really visit and pass an hour smoking after two seed cakes with Bilbo Baggins.
I’ve come to realize as I write novel after novel that either:
I create these universes and they exist; or
I discover them and present them to you (giving credence to my professor, Dr. Eugene Curtsinger’s pronouncement that “If Melville hadn’t written Moby Dick, someone else would have”). They’re already existent; I just need be empty enough to teach myself that they aren’t nothing, but rather, a very real something and somewhere I and all of us visit, embrace, and break bread with.
Now, I truly believe they do exist. For they’re never nothing. The empty ground about them and us never lets that be.
[1] Ethan Siegel. “Why is there something instead of nothing?” Medium, 24 Nov 2023.
[2] Alan Watts. Nature, Man and Woman. Pantheon Books, 1958.
[3] Ethan Siegel. “How Did the Universe Truly Begin?” Medium, 3 Nov 2023.
[4] Tai Situ Rinpoche. Awakening the Sleeping Buddha. Shambhala, 1996.