Things Seen
Emptiness Games #2
Desperate challenges are like
Angels on white horses
Pain, fear, depression, hopelessness,
Will carry us above the clouds
To purity and Emptiness
If we stare at the agony
Directly, relentlessly
And let it scour our egotism.
Repeat many many times:
There is nothing that ever is
There is nothing that ever was
There’s nothing that ever will be
Neuroscientists Reveal First Photographic Image of the Human Ego — The Inner Self Is Now Visible!
Still from “Men in Black”, 1997 Columbia Pictures
Introduction
First, realizing the Emptiness of realthings seen, is more difficult than realizing the Emptiness of realthings touched. But if we’re looking at simple stuff like clouds or spoons, it’s still an easy practice.
Second, we consider half-closed eyes. They are very very powerful.
Finally, the ‘Heart Sutra’ says that eyes, visible forms, and the realm of the eye, are all Empty delusions. They’re stories. We made ‘em up. I present two games on this subject: ‘The Eyeball’ and ‘The Tiny Dude in Your Head’.
Review
Every realthing (every thing or situation in the real world) is a story.
Our inner Goddess Samsara learned or created these stories, in order to help us meet Basic Human Needs.
We cling desperately to these stories. This clinging, is the essence of what it means to be ‘real’. If we say a thing is ‘real’, then we are desperately clinging to its story.
We emptify a realthing (in other words, we realize a thing or situation’s Emptiness) when we accept that the realthing is only a story, and we stop clinging to that story.
(If these items don’t make sense, please check out the ‘Samsara the Goddess’ essays.)
Avoid the G.R.U.N.GE. Five ways to WRECK Emptiness:
G-rasping: believing there is a thing called Emptiness, reaching for it, and craving to possess it.
R-emembering: grasping for a remembered experience or practice, instead of practicing in the present moment.
U-nderstanding: understanding a practice without actually doing it. Understanding is useless at this point. You’ve got to LOOK! Again and again and again.
N-egativity: abusing yourself because you’re not feeling successful at a practice.
G-igantic E-go: big egos beware. These games ARE DESIGNED to shrink your ego down to the size of a grain of sand.
Things Seen
The last post discussed Emptifying realthings we touch. Emptifying realthings that we SEE, is more difficult. Eyesight is deeply bound to Samsara. When we lift our eyelids the Goddess grabs on to our psyche and won’t let go.
I know of two ways to ease her grip. One is to half-close the eyes, making everything a bit blurry and indistinct. The other is to pretend we’re in a dream (or maybe realize that we’re in one).
Emptifying realthings seen, is extra challenging if we’re looking at a thing we crave or hate (or both). In these cases we’ve got karma stories, judgment stories, craving stories and aversion stories to emptify, before we get down to emptifying the realthing we see. We’ll leave all these complications for a future post.
For now, we emptify bland simple objects, like a chair or a stick
The Game
To emptify a realthing that you SEE:
Concentrate on the realthing with fully open eyes
Half close the eyes. As the image blurs, let the fuzzy visual sensations, colors and shapes, lose their identity.
Go back and forth: eyes open, eyes half-closed, eyes open, eyes half-closed’…
It’s fun to do in dim light like at night. Now for the dream technique.
Concentrate on the realthing with fully open eyes.
Pretend you’re in a dream. :)
Go back and forth: realthing awake, it’s a dream, realthing awake, it’s a dream…
These little games seem ridiculously simple, but actually they’re the real deal..
The Magic of Half-Closed Eyes
To discern the real world with depth and clarity Half-close your eyes until it all goes blurry
Half-closing the eyes, making everything a little blurry, causes Samsara to loosen her fierce grip. It quiets the mind. Alternately, one can focus on the sharp division between the half-closed upper eyelid and the visible panorama.
Almost every single Buddha statue in the world has half-closed eyes. (Exceptions include Padmasambhava, who is so fierce that his eyes are popping out of his head, and Kuan Yin meditating with eyes half-closed, but sitting a bug-eyed lion. Hotei-Budai, the Laughing Buddha, is laughing too hard to worry about it.)
In my years of studying with Mahayana Buddhists, no one has ever mentioned Buddhas with half-closed eyes. Sometimes lessons are being yelled at the top of their lungs, from every direction, and no one hears them. Crazy!
It’s weird how powerful half-closing the eyes can be. IT EVEN WORKS IN THE DARK! When you’re trying to achieve Shamatha-like focus on whatever, EVEN IF IT’S NOT VISUAL, half closing the eyes helps wrap us in a quiet grounded presence. Maybe it’s a metaphor for the Middle Way.
The dreaming method of emptifying realthings seen, works, but I find it difficult. Half-closing the eyes is effortless and instant.
I live beside a 70-foot-tall stupa, and near the top there are two gigantic half-closed eyes. We are being watched! Are we?
Do Eyes Even Exist?
Imagine you’re holding a Camera
Suppose you’re holding a camera. Could that camera take a picture of itself?
If you pointed the camera at a mirror it could photograph it’s reflection. But can it take a DIRECT picture of itself? No camera, even if it had some kind of weird contortionist ability, could directly photograph itself.
Suppose the camera wanted to determine it’s own nature, or even to verify that it truly existed. As far as directly understanding itself, and verifying it’s own existence, a camera is BLIND.
Now imagine there’s an Eyeball rolling around in your hand.
Can that eyeball, or any eyeball, look DIRECTLY at itself? No. No eyeball can see itself. No eyeball can see it’s own nature. No eyeball can verify that it exists.
Now imagine that you are AN AWARENESS.
Just like the Camera and Eyeball, an awareness can not DIRECTLY be aware of itself.
You are an awareness, an awareness which watches and sees and looks. But you can’t see yourself seeing. You can not watch yourself watching.
Or can you? Look at yourself looking. DO IT RIGHT NOW!
I can see, but do I see myself seeing? Well, I can’t see my self seeing, but what other explanation is there for this flood of visual information. Ahh, so ‘seeing’ is an explanation, a story, a realthing! Could awareness also be a story, a realthing?
OK. Let’s take a breath and suppose that we CAN’T be directly aware of our own awareness. In that case, if we want to verify that our awareness exists, we need a second awareness to be aware of the first awareness. But how could we tell if the second awareness exists? We’d need a third awareness, and then a fourth…
And now imagine you’re a dang Mindfulness Meditator
Consider your standard Mindfulness meditation instructions. Remember that business where we have TWO awareness’s. The first is the awareness of the object of concentration (usually the breath). The second awareness watches the first awareness to make sure it doesn’t get distracted. But to verify that this second awareness isn’t pure bullsh@t, we need a THIRD awareness who’s watching the second… and so on.
Finally, imagine that YOU ARE A DELUSION! A dumb story
YOU are the thing which sees the universe. You are at the center, on the receiving end of all that awareness. Therefore, you cannot VERIFY THAT YOU EXIST, because you cannot see yourself seeing the universe!!! Could this be why we can not find our SELF?
(If you haven’t looked for your SELF already, better get busy.)
So where did this idea of a SELF which is the center of awareness (not to mention the center of the Universe) come from?
YOU MADE IT UP!
(And what does the poor eyeball see as it sweats blood trying to observe it’s own true nature? EMPTINESS!!!)
This Game is simple but super important
You’re clearly and obviously in the real world looking around. Right?
Well then, look at yourself looking! Watch yourself watching. Can you see yourself seeing?
DO IT, AND PROVE I’M FULL OF EMPTINESS BULLSH@T!
Try your best to see yourself seeing. Please don’t give up!!!
The Little Dude in My Head
My personal deluded story of ME, is of a little being inside my head. He hears through my ears, sees through my eyes, and speaks through my mouth. I think his name is ‘my mind’.
Where is ‘my mind’, the one that sees things? Is he in my eye? Of course not. Is he in my optic nerves? Nope. Is he in my brain? Maybe.
So there’s a tiny dude in my brain who sees. I presume he’s naked, like a fetus. It’s probably warm in there. And it must get complicated receiving all that information and controlling all those feelings and muscles. Does ‘my mind’ have inner eyes, so that he can look through the my physical eyes, which are windows to the world?
This practice is best done while walking. It’s the bomb.
The Game
(Repeat these words slowly.)
“MY MIND”
(Focus on the your self which sits inside of your head perceiving everything. Don’t worry if it’s a delusion.)
“LOOKS THROUGH MY EYES”
(Focus on your eyes as windows. )
“AND SEES THE WORLD”
(Focus on the big wide world. Repeat the whole thing four or five times, or until it feels really solid.)
“MY MIND LOOKS THROUGH MY EYES AND SEES THE WORLD”
(Now switch gears. Repeat the following, four or five times, or until it feels really solid.)
“NO MIND — NO EYES — NO WORLD”
(Go back to step 1. Keep circling and repeating the process, back and forth.)
Conclusion
The next Emptiness post is about ways to visualize Emptiness. Is that possible? Ha!
Hope this helps. Thanks for reading.