Emptiness in a Christmas bauble

What's in a Christmas bauble?

Probably not much!

Christmas tree baubles are usually empty (unless you've got one of those edible ones filled with chocolately niceness!). But what does "empty" mean? It's not really completely empty – it's filled with vibrating air molecules zipping about bouncing off the walls of the bauble. But even if we were to empty it of air (assuming the bauble would be strong enough to stay up against the vacuum), would it really be empty? No, the vacuum would still be full of electromagnetic radiation (granted there would be no visible light, but there would be plenty of radio waves). The emptiness is really a living, vibrant emptiness full of change and potential. What it's truly empty of is anything fixed or permanent.

Now being, going to nothing

If you've got an old metal bauble, then you might begin to notice some rusting or discolouration from age. If it's glass then it might be a little more hardy, but (sorry to be pessimistic) chances are one day it's going to get smashed... Plastic ones are perhaps the hardiest of all, but even those will be slowly changing and degrading (due to heat, light, or chemicals such as acids or alkalis from your skin).

The point is no matter how strong or well-made it is, it's always going to be changing. As a Zen teacher of mine likes to say "now being, going to nothing" – given a long enough time, there will be absolutely nothing left of the thing we now call the "bauble". Really, the bauble is better thought of as a process rather than a thing.

Your bauble contains the entire Universe

If you've got one of those shiny baubles, then it'll reflect everything around it. And if your tree is covered in shiny baubles, then they'll all be reflecting each other. The whole of your living room will be there in each bauble, and each bauble in each other bauble! This is kind of how reality is. The whole is present in even the tiniest little part.

In a single grain of salt you might rub into your Christmas turkey there are millions of sodium and chlorine atoms bonded together, each atom made of energy in the form of protons, neutrons and electrons – just like every other atom in the entire Universe. And those sodium and chlorine atoms were most likely formed inside a star aeons ago, and wouldn't ever have come into existence if it wasn't for the precise conditions of the early Universe.

So the Universe is made up of a vast interconnected web, or, in the words of the great physicist Heisenberg, "a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine." William Blake knew this when he wrote:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

Which is very similar to a verse from the Avatamsaka Sutra (pointed out by Mattieu Riccard in his book The Quantum and the Lotus)

As in one atom,
So in all atoms,
All worlds enter therein—
So inconceivable is it.

Enso - the symbol of Zen

Hanging up in the ZenYoga studio in Camberwell where I teach is a large painting of a circle. In Japanese it's called an enso, and is one of the most distinct symbols of Zen. In a way, it's very much like our bauble: vibrantly empty, slowly disintegrating, and containing the entire Universe.

The enso hanging in the ZenYoga studio in Camberwell

Śūnyatā is the Sanskrit/Buddhist word for emptiness (śūnya means zero or nothing), and is studied at great length in the Madhyamaka school of Buddhist philosophy, which was developed around a few hundred CE. To them, sunyata represents the flow of dynamic processes in the Universe, ordered by the laws of nature and by past actions (karma), where everything is interconnected, interrelated, and interpenetrating.

I am a member of the Zenways sangha led by Zen master Daizan Roshi, and I teach meditation, mindfulness and yoga at the ZenYoga studio in Camberwell, London. See my website for further details.

I'd love to hear from you

How many more nuggets of wisdom can you find on your Christmas tree? I'd love to hear from you! Leave a comment below, join the discussion.

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Transforming our ego the Yogacara way

Not so long ago a friend of mind had just gone through a difficult breakup and was in need of someone to talk to. We met up for a cup of tea and chatted. She was really hurting, so I did my best to listen patiently and sensitively.

At some point she mentioned how she'd like to go away for a short break to get away from it all. For some reason I took this as an opportunity to mention I'd been to Japan back in the summer, and proceeded to wax lyrical about the trip. Ten minutes later I realised this wasn't helping...!

On reflection I saw I'd been boasting. I had taken this utterly inappropriate moment to talk about myself and how wonderful my life is (bit like I'm doing now...), and had forgotten about my friend and her pain.

To understand why I did this (insensitive bugger that I am) – and why we all have a tendency to do this – let's take another look at the philosophical system I was discussing last week: Yogacara.

Remember, Yogacara is about a 1500 year-old Buddhist philosophy that describes a structure of the mind to rival any modern psychology (beautifully laid out in Thich Nhat Hanh's book "Understanding our Mind"). Yogacara says we have a total of eight types of consciousness:

• The 5 sense-consciousnesses associated with seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling
• Mind consciousness (meaning how the mind perceives the information gathered by our senses). These 6 consciousnesses we discussed last week.
• Manas (which can be translated as something like self-consciousness)
• Storehouse-consciousness

Storehouse consciousness - our seed bank

The primary function of the storehouse-consciousness is to store and preserve all of what in Yogacara are called our "seeds". Seeds are our perceptions, memories, experiences, and habits, but also our potentials, possibilities, and plans. They are things that have the capacity to manifest, and can have positive or negative qualities (like compassion, joy, hope, sorrow, fear, or anger). Our thoughts, words and actions all plant new seeds in the field of our consciousness, and what these seeds generate, so Yogacara says, become the substance of our life.

Manas

Manas is our coordinating function – a bit like the air traffic control desk at a busy airport. It's there trying to make sense of all this data flooding in from our senses and perceptions, and all these potentials, plans and memories arising from our store consciousness.

As we grow up, develop, and begin to take responsibility for ourselves, Yogacara would say manas falls in love with a part of the store consciousness. It sees it as a separate entity, a "self" and grasps onto it firmly, a bit like how a small child would cling to her parent's leg! Manas is more or less equivalent to Freud's term "ego".

Because it becomes attached to the idea of self, it always acts to preserve the self. It is our survival instinct, and for this we have to be very grateful. It's what keeps us alive. If someone tries to hit us, we avoid it – that self-protective response is manas.

The problem is manas is blind. It can easily take us in the wrong direction in its blind pursuit of protecting the self. We can end up throwing the baby out with the bath water, destroying ourselves in order to make the other person suffer.

"Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else. You are the only one who ends up getting burned" – Some Wise Person

So in my example, I digressed into harping on about my own fantastic holiday. My deluded manas sensed an opportunity to reassure me that I'm ok, that my life is better than my friend's, etc, etc., and to generally bolster my ego.

So it was my manas's fault...

But it would be short-sighted to see manas (ego) as the enemy that must be fought until completely destroyed. Without it, who would be controlling all the take-offs and landings at our busy airport? Instead, we should work on transforming manas.

Transforming manas

Problems come when we end up clinging to things we learn or feel as the absolute truth. I feel angry turns into "I am an angry person", or I want some love turns into "I am an unloved person". Like water that freezes and prevents flow, these beliefs become obstacles. Like climbing a ladder, the more we cling to our current knowledge, our current rung, the harder it gets to climb to the next rung.


Through our meditation and yoga practice we begin to realise that, first, these obstacles exist, and that our belief in them creates them. Slowly, slowly we begin to let go of these beliefs and thus the obstacles begin to melt or transform. In our practice we investigate the true nature of the things that manifest from our seeds and start seeing them not as real entities (i.e. things that we cling to and fix into 'absolute truths') but simply as concepts, notions, metaphors, or labels. Eventually (through a lot of practice) our deep-seated belief in a separate "self" is completely released.

Before, manas was the energy of grasping and discriminating. Now it becomes a wisdom that can perceive the true interrelated and interconnected nature of things. As Thich Nhat Hanh says "the capacity to live according to this nature of no discrimination between self and non-self is the wisdom of equality."

I am a member of the Zenways sangha and teach meditation and mindfulness in Camberwell, London. See my website for further details.

I'd love to hear from you

Have you had problems with your ego recently? Do you see it as the enemy or just as a frightened, blind little animal that needs the right guidance? I'd love to hear from you! Leave a comment below, join the discussion.

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Rainbows, consciousness and yogacara

What is a rainbow? Have you ever wondered that?

Scientifically speaking, rainbows are caused by light being refracted (bent) upon entering a droplet of water, reflected on the back of the droplet, and refracted upon leaving the droplet. This double refraction splits up the light since red light is refracted less than blue light.

So for a rainbow to exist we need sunshine and raindrops... but we need one more very crucial thing – a spectator. Unless someone is present at just the right spot, then there's no such thing as a rainbow. It's just light rays hitting the earth – business as usual! Rainbows are therefore phenomena that require an instrument of sense perception – like a person with an eye, or a camera.

Radical externalism

So what is a rainbow? It's not just sunshine or just raindrops, or indeed the combination of sunshine and raindrops. And it's not sunshine, raindrops and a person – because what if that person was looking the other way...?

In this fantastic article, writer Tim Parks interviews Riccardo Manzotti, an Italian psychology teacher who has a very interesting view on what a rainbow is. Parks describes Manzotti as a "radical externalist" – someone who believes "consciousness is a process shared between various otherwise distinct processes which, for convenience’s sake, we [call] subject and object."

So in his view, a rainbow is what happens when a person perceives light being refracted and reflected like this. Of this event of perception, he says "consciousness is spread between the sunlight, the raindrops, and the visual cortex, creating a unique, transitory new whole – the rainbow experience."

This is what makes him an "externalist" – he sees consciousness as being something that transcends the brain, being shared between the things being perceived (object) and the perceiver (subject). This is in contrast to what might be seen as a more orthodox view, where consciousness is seen as being confined within the brain.

Yogacara

It turns out there's a Buddhist philosophical and psychological system called Yogacara that might help us understand this a little more. Although it's a philosophy, the system comes out of actual practice – people doing yoga meditation over a period of centuries ("cara" means practice).

Everyone knows we have five senses: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching, and in order to have these senses we need our sense organs: eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin.

Yogacara says that the combination of, for example, our eyes and looking at a rainbow, creates "eye-consciousness" (and the same thing for the other senses). Sound familiar? Yogacara also says we have "mind-consciousness", which is what comes about when the mind perceives something external (so in this example, perceiving the rainbow), or starts thinking and imagining.

So our guy Manzotti, without knowing it, is really a yogacarain. He's re-discovered a philosophy that has been around for about 1500 years! But I'm not sure he would be too happy with this since when asked by Parks if he was aware of Buddhist principles he got irritated, saying he tries "to avoid like the plague being mixed up with anything that smells New Age."! New age... pah!

According to Yogacara, consciousness is what arises when we bring the subject and object of perception together. These are really just two aspects of same reality, and, of course, both subject to constant change. Let's think about this for a moment... the subject (that's you, the perceiver) is subject to constant change. We're not (as my Zen teacher likes to say) solid snooker balls bouncing across the table of life. As Manzotti rightly points out, by thinking consciousness is not just confined to the brain, then we see that we are not separate from the world around us. We are subject to constant change. Our consciousness cannot be separate from the world and cannot survive outside the world.

The Buddha is reputed to have said (something like) "Your life is the creation of your mind."
Yogacara (sometimes called the "mind-only" school) gives us a structure to see how we create our life and how we create our sense of who we are.

Next week I'll continue on this theme and talk about how yogacara sees our ego and our (false) sense of self.

I am a member of the Zenways sangha and teach meditation and mindfulness in Camberwell, London. See my website for further details.

I'd love to hear from you

Are you a radical externalist? Do you agree with our consciousness being something created in partnership with what we perceive? I'd love to hear from you! Leave a comment below, join the discussion.

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