Love of Wisdom

“Before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half the world. This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality. We aren’t going to have peace on Earth until we recognize the basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.”
~Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“In this multicultural world emptiness is in the air. Physics tells us that matter isn’t as solid as we thought. We see widely diverging views from different cultures on TV news programs. The Sunday newspapers inform us that, according to neuroscience, no such thing as a self can be found in the brain. We think that studying emptiness will come naturally to most readers. It doesn’t require that you subscribe to any particular religious or spiritual viewpoint. You don’t have to become a Buddhist. You don’t even have to be particularly “spiritual” to benefit from these teachings. Many of the Western thinkers whose material we use certainly haven’t considered themselves to be spiritual…

Irony is life lived with no landing, no foundations. As in poetry, your thoughts, words and language take on a new meaning, which is different from the literal and habitual interpretation. Held in emptiness, even common human predicaments, such as current suffering, worries about the future and death, are not the same anymore. The openness and non-solidity of phenomena give rise to hope, because you know deeply that bad things are never intrinsically so, and they don’t have to stay the way they currently are. They can change, and very often you can make things better. Joyful irony is thus an antidote to helplessness, hopelessness and the victim mentality. Joyful irony is certainly not non-dual quietism, passivity or escape…

An empty world is neither dull nor bleak. On the contrary, it is experientially rich, full of meaning(s) and a source of continuous wonder and beneficial activity. Love and Compassion Studying emptiness is never just about you. It radiates outwards, to others. Actively cultivating an attitude of love and compassion is an important part of any successful emptiness study project, whether you are using a traditional approach or looking at the way we present it here. The more love and compassion you develop, the easier and more joyful will be your emptiness realizations. It’s as simple as that. And when the illusory walls that kept you trapped inside your skin dissolve, then your heart will naturally open towards other living beings with a greater sense of caring, benevolence, love and compassion. In a significant way they are you, and you are them.

For most people, the times when they are deeply filled with love are high points. Similarly, a major source for the joy of the joyful ironist is the love and care you feel. Realizing emptiness multiplies this. You realize that a better life is not just a possibility for you, but, at least in principle, for all other people. And it is often a highly practical, achievable possibility. In many cases, you will not just contemplate positive change, but also be sincerely motivated to act on it. Joyful irony is thus open, loving and engaged…

One of the most important insights along this Western path is to realize the emptiness and ultimate unfoundedness of your own most cherished beliefs. The hallmark of a joyful ironist doesn’t consist of seeing that other people’s views are not ultimately grounded in the nature of things. Rather, it is a global insight about emptiness that sees through the structures that make inherent, objective truth and falsity seem possible in the first place. The most radical and meaningful effect of this realization comes about when you see that even your own beliefs are not objectively grounded. They function, but they are empty of inherent existence and truth. This realization is another way that love and compassion are fostered by the emptiness teachings.

You realize that you do not occupy a position any closer to the absolute truth of the universe than anyone else. There is a great tenderness and humility that comes with realizing how similar we all are in this respect. Being an ironist about your own views tends to work wonders as a self-correcting device.
The stoic philosopher, Epictetus, observed that, “People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.” Thus when emptiness meditations open up the rigid notions of fixed meaning, everything else in your life and world experience opens up with it!

“Liberating Yourself from Rigid Beliefs” targets beliefs – those attitudes and statements that we cling to, defend or staunchly refute. The insights apply to any belief whatsoever, but we have chosen to focus on beliefs about spiritual teachings, for instance: “The highest teaching is emptiness,” or “I am (am not) enlightened”. These beliefs are often unnoticed, and yet at the same time, they carry a strong charge for people. Clinging to statements like these prevents a global realization of emptiness.

The method inspired by the Ancient Greek school of Pyrrhonism, also known as skepticism, is one of the greatest Western examples of philosophy used for human freedom. In “Living a Joyfully Empty Life,” the last chapter of the book, we discuss what life is like after you have done many emptiness meditations. Where does the emptiness journey go? What are the results and benefits? How does it affect your ordinary life? What new possibilities open up?

We say more about joyful ironism, the fruition of these teachings, and present a range of examples for empty lives, such as being a regular person, or an artist, a mystic, a Buddhist, a social activist, or spiritual teacher. Such vignettes are meant to inspire, rather than to privilege any one particular way to be. The emptiness teachings, at least as we are construing them, do depend on a compassionate frame of mind. But beyond that, they do not require a commitment to Buddhism or to any other particular notion of the good life. To grasp this is one way of realizing that the good life is itself empty, open-textured and not universally agreed-upon.

This has many sources, among them the writings of the astonishing anti-essentialists Martin Heidegger and Richard Rorty, as well as the English mystical poet Thomas Traherne. Do All Our Sources Agree with Each Other? We are using a wide variety of approaches to what we’re calling emptiness. Although they have something important in common – a challenge to certain notions of inherent existence – we don’t mean to imply that they agree on everything else. If you look more deeply into the approaches presented here, you’ll find differences as well as similarities. You’ll find that social construction, neurophilosophy, deconstruction, modern Western analytic philosophy or ancient Pyrrhonism don’t all talk about the same things, and where they do, they might disagree…

This is perfectly fine. In fact, diversity and variety are part of the openness that one finds in any facet of human inquiry. We are not suggesting that you settle on a view presented here. Rather, we are offering an open-ended toolkit that may be helpful in dispelling certain fixed and rigid views. You may already have an approach to inquiry that these sources can help with. Or you may grow fond of the sources presented here. In fact, we think that this exploratory aspect is part of the fun.”

~ Greg Goode, Emptiness and Joyful Freedom
Greg Goode is known for a unique combination of penetrating insight, comfort with both Eastern and Western sources, and a down-to-earth sense of humor.