Emptiness & Compassion
How cutting edge quantum physics helps me understand a 3000 year old Buddhist concept
One of the trickiest concepts (for me at least) to understand from Buddhist teachings is what’s commonly called emptiness, or voidness, or shunyata in Sanskrit. Emptiness is the true nature of reality. Our suffering arises because we completely misunderstand that nature, and have false conceptions about who and what we are. If we just understood what reality was and how it worked, none of the ways we suffer would make sense anymore.
So what the heck is emptiness? In Buddhism, there are several competing ways to try to explain it:
Emptiness is a mode of perception where we bring no stories or preconceptions to what we experience. So, for example, if we get shoved on a subway, instead of telling ourselves some story about how we were wronged, and why the person did it, we just experience the qualities of being shoved, and the qualities of our emotional reactions to it. Just allowing ourselves to have a pure experience. The root of suffering is the story we tell, not the actual experience we have.
Or emptiness is the idea that nothing has an intrinsic, individual nature. We aren’t a solid self or thing, we are the momentary result of all the relative causes and conditions that came before us, and are contributing to all that will come after. A rose isn’t a rose, rather it contains the rain, sun, seed, etc. that came before, and also the wilt, rot, death, birth of all that comes after.
Or that the dualistic view of reality we experience where there’s a self and an object (a me and a you, or a me and a that) is just an illusion. We are all basically aspects of one thing, completely inseparable from that oneness, perhaps pretending to be separate individual things for some purpose. I like the way Rudy Rucker (one of my favorite authors) puts it: we are the eyes god grows to see itself.
Crystal clear, right? Sometimes I think I understand, and then, poof, that understanding dissipates like smoke. But I want to understand. I never fully will with just my intellect. All Buddhist teachings have this dynamic embedded in them—you can only go so far with thinking and concepts. To experience a sessation of suffering you need real knowing, which comes from a non-conceptual experience of what the teaching means. Meditation can help you get to non-conceptual understanding. But no matter how much I meditate, emptiness still feels slippery to me.
Interestingly, the latest from the world of physics is helping me grok (intuitively understand) this incredibly slippery concept—My grandfather was a Nobel prize winning physicist. I’m decidedly not, but I guess the apple doesn’t fall so far from the tree, as I still find comfort in the security blankie of science.
The latest Nobel prize awarded for the experimental confirmation of a phenomena called quantum entanglement (strangely also to someone I’m related to… my mom’s cousin John Clauser) seems to imply that everything in the universe is part of a single, unified whole. Entanglement, what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance,” basically shows that you can connect up 2 particles (for want of a better way to put it), separate them by an enormous distance (light years even), measure something about them—the way they spin, or whatever—and they’ll magically show the same result, as if they’re communicating with each other instantaneously, even though the speed of light would require that communication to take years. It’s pretty (expletive deleted) mind blowing if you ask me.
Thinking about entanglement is helping physicists explore the idea that we might have the whole nature of reality dead wrong. Space and time isn’t this giant preexisting background in which we individual beings and things play out our little dramas, but rather we’re all just one big thing, entangled together—space and time, and our individuality an illusion of perception. Basically we exist in a state of oneness. (see all that beautiful Buddhist stuff about “emptiness” above.)
To put a fine point on it:
As philosopher of science Rasmus Jaksland points out, this eventually implies that there are no individual objects in the universe anymore; that everything is connected with everything else: “Adopting entanglement as the world making relation comes at the price of giving up separability. But those who are ready to take this step should perhaps look to entanglement for the fundamental relation with which to constitute this world (and perhaps all the other possible ones).” Thus, when space and time disappear, a unified One emerges.
Look at that, 3000 years later science is starting to catch up to something the Buddah experienced through sitting quietly and meditating. I love this.
So why is this important? What does it have to do with my practice? I’m not 100% sure I can explain it, but my burgeoning understanding of entanglement and emptiness has a lot to do with my work of witnessing, holding space, and being present for another as they go through the journey of their own discoveries.
In Mahayana Buddhism emptiness fills us with compassion. In fact, in Mahayana Buddhism emptiness and compassion are inseparable. Bodhichitta, aka the mind of awakening, is the aspiration to bring about the welfare of all sentient beings and to attain buddhahood for their sake. It has 2 aspects. Absolute Bodhichitta is emptiness. Relative Bodhcitta compassion. In meditation practice you work on both—growing your capacity for compassion for all beings, and meditating on the nature of reality—oneness.
To me, having an understanding of the that oneness requires me to be compassionate. If we are all one, then the suffering experienced by an aspect of that one is my suffering too. If we are all one, the joys experienced by an aspect of that one is my joy too. If we are all one, the healing experienced by an aspect of that one is my healing too. From the perspective of oneness, compassion is beautifully selfish. We heal ourselves through healing others. We make ourselves more joyful through helping others fell and express joy. We end our suffering through helping someone else realize the truth and therefore end their own.
What could be better and more of service than that? Welcome to the emptiness.
