Post #103: Bubbles in the Stream

22 March 2024

“So you should view this fleeting world—

A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,

A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,

A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream."

—Diamond Sutra, section 32

     The world tends to look remarkably solid to us, its robust reality beyond reasonable doubt. We may have heard what scientists tell us about the vast empty space they posit inside atoms, or rumors of mysterious fillers in our theories of the universe that are said to make of 95 percent of the show but are otherwise known only by their names (Mister X, a.k.a. Dark Matter, and Miz Y, a.k.a. Dark Energy). Various aspects of quantum weirdness don’t sit too well with how we commonly see the world, but these echoes of arcane science usually reach us at such a remove from everyday experience that they don’t much affect our intuitive conviction that the world is, despite everything, solid enough for our purposes.

     With our thoughts we make the world, the opening verse of the Dhammapada reminds us. This can sound strange to worldly ears, but upon a little reflection, it looks quite unanswerable. Just consider for a minute how we construct the past from highly unreliable and selective memories; how we imagine the future, try as we may to get it right, as it never in fact ends up happening; and how we experience even the present, running through our fingers like sand, in the fleeting light of our ever-changing interpretations of the moment. What is all this but bubbles, now appearing out of nowhere, now inflating, we know not how, now bursting, we know not when?

     Evident as it may be when we pause to consider it, such reflection, like science, does little to shake our everyday conviction that the world as we perceive it is real and robust. We cannot even be said to go wrong when we live by this naïve trust in our senses; our cognitive apparatus was clearly shaped by the evolutionary process for meeting the demands of survival, not for full insight into the nature of things, and it would not serve us well to interact with brick walls or baseball bats as if their solidity were in doubt.

     Still, at a deeper level, the troubling question persist: what are we to make of a world in which our dreams and dreads alike turn out, upon closer inspection, to be bubbles, the past no less than the future, and even the present, with its undeniable currency in the passing moment, never quite what it appears to be. Does it have to be disconcerting, alarming, or even terrifying to contemplate just how insubstantial all this may turn out to be underneath the seemingly robust façades, how devoid of a core or essence, how lacking in a self—how ultimately empty, as the Mahayana Buddhist like to put it? Does it have to loom above our heads like a dark cloud or a sword of Damocles, or can it be liberating too, as the votaries of emptiness like to tell us?

     One could get heavily doctrinal on this point, since it is such a central tenet for the devotees of the Diamond Sutra, in particular. But I do not feel called to walk, or even to stumble, in the footsteps of Mu Soeng or Thich Nhat Hanh.* I have no ultimate truths to elucidate, only a few personal experiences and reflections to share, and these I need to preface, in this case, by saying that for almost twenty years on the Path, I have been steering clear of emptiness talk because it seems to me, perhaps more than any other aspect of the Teaching, to be liable to the gravest misunderstandings. Whereof one cannot speak with insight, in such difficult terrain, thereof one should remain silent. I like to stick to the aspects of the Dhamma that make practical sense to me; that is challenge enough. I may venture forth speculatively here and there, but such occasional forays aside (#56, #70), I will gladly leave the high mysteries of emptiness and liberation to the saints and sages.

     What I realized a few days ago, however, is that I have been giving emptiness such a wide berth for another, less creditable reason. It remains as true as before that I would not wish, with a deep bow to Meister Eckhart, to yelp about high truths beyond my comprehension (be it emptiness or God), but that is by no means all there is to my reluctance. I have also been unwilling to deal with the matter as something profoundly disturbing to me. Wherever I have encountered references to such an eerie substratum of nothingness beneath everything, it has given me the heebie-jeebies—not only in spiritual contexts, but also in its more scientific instantiations, such as the first chapter of Peter Atkins’ On Being, where he makes a haunting case for universal nothingness that is not easily forgotten. Right or wrong, one does not need to be able to speak with understanding of such reckonings to shudder at them instinctively.

     That the self feels hideously threatened by hints at its own insubstantiality is no wonder, if we may assume (for the sake of argument at least) that it is not an abiding entity at all, but just another passing phenomenon of the moment. The harder question to answer is just how much, upon a little deeper contemplation, we really need these elusive selves: how much should I even want to be the kind of imperishable self that we commonly take ourselves to be? For make no mistake: such a self would have to be defended in all directions, at all times, at a terrible cost. Is that really necessary and desirable, or can we perhaps do without, possibly even do better without? It is not a question, I think, of accepting or even welcoming destruction in some fit of self-loathing, or in the throes of some psychic death wish, but more a question of how lightly we are (or are not) willing and able to wear what we keep dressing ourselves with as a matter of course. Can our selves be like the casual clothes we change all the time without thinking much about it (even as we may prefer to stick to a unifying style) or does there have to be some kind of imperishable mannequin for each of us to hang it all on?

     The question took on more urgency for me the other day (or night, rather), when I was beset by dark thoughts about the slide towards irrelevance in various directions. It dawned on me, as I was envisaging the many ways one can become superseded and sidelined in the world, that behind my dread was probably something I had never explored, but only shrunk from in horror—the Void, for lack of a better word, that we must all face alone (as I put it to a friend in a passing comment at the time). What happened next was that this thought somehow precipitated a move quite contrary to my usual recoiling, a move forward, so to speak, not away from the Void but further into it. I don’t want to make it sound like a great epiphany: it was a glimpse only, a mere intimation not a revelation, but for the first time the Void seemed not so much menacing as soothing when I entered consciously upon its precincts for a little while. I don’t mean to say that I experienced any kind of liberation, only that there was a sense of relief at being able to leave the self behind for a bit, and precisely not the terror of loss and separation that I would normally have expected from such an encounter.

     Moments of no-self are quite common in meditation, whether we recognize them as such or not (see #86). But this was something different. Not, I repeat, something I would mistake for enlightenment or redemption, but only a strange sense—not merely conceived intellectually but accessible to experience for a short spell—that the Void is not such a menace as it appears, not something that would swallow you up as if to destroy you. To be sure it did not feel benign either, at least not in the way we commonly imagine the divine source of things as a radiant goodness (in the manner of Plato’s Sun), if we are willing to countenance such an idea at all. What it seemed to me, for lack of more fitting terms, was a kind of neutral home ground that need not be feared, though one would not normally seek it out.

     This mood of reconciliation with the Void, not so much intellectually as exploratively, so to speak, lasted no more than a few minutes, and nothing spectacular followed from it. I did not, afterwards, feel any more lastingly reconciled to the terms of our existence, nor do I feel so now. But it has left me with an impression that I am quite sure is new to my life: that the Void, which I have been shunning and resisting all the days of my life, may not be so terrible after all. It remains on my mind as a lingering thought, no more. For now we see through a glass, dimly; but one day, we may get to see more, perhaps even face-to-face, and maybe that day is not so much to be dreaded as we commonly imagine.

*Two especially high-octane commentators on the Diamond Sutra, see The Diamond Sutra: Transforming the Way We Perceive the World (Wisdom Publications, 2000) and The Diamond That Cuts through Illusion (Parallax Press, 2010), respectively.