The World as Emptiness II, Part 6: Consider Death Now

The more clear your image of God, the less powerful it is, because you’re clinging to it; the more it’s an idol. But voiding it completely isn’t going to turn it into what you think of as void. What would you think of as void? Being lost in a fog, so that it’s white all around, and you can’t see in any direction. Being in the darkness. Or the color of your head as perceived by your eyes. That’s probably the best illustration that we would think of as a void; because it isn’t black, it isn’t white, it isn’t anything. But that’s still not the void. Take the lesson from the head. How does your head look to your eyes? Well, I tell you: it looks like what you see out in front of you, because all that you see out in front of you is how you feel inside your head. So it’s the same with this.

And so, for this reason, the great sixth patriarch, Huineng, in China, said it was a great mistake for those who are practicing Buddhist meditation to try to make their minds empty. And a lot of people tried to do that. They sat down and tried to have no thoughts whatever in their minds. Not only no thoughts, but no sense experiences, so they’d close their eyes, they’d plug up their ears, and generally go in for sensory deprivation. Well, sensory deprivation, if you know how to handle it, can be quite interesting. It’ll have the same sort of results as taking LSD, or something like that, and there are special labs made nowdays where you can be sensorily deprived to an amazing degree.

But if you’re a good yogi this doesn’t bother you at all. Sends some people crazy. But if you dig this world, you can have a marvelous time in a sensory deprivation scene. Also, especially, if they get you into a condition of weightlessness. Skin divers, going down below a certain number of feet—I don’t know exactly how far it is—get a sense of weightlessness, and at the same time this deprives them of every sense of responsibility. They become alarmingly happy, and they have been known to simply take off their masks and offer them to a fish. And of course they then drown. So if you skin dive, you have to keep your eye on the time. You have to have a water watch or a friend who’s got a string attached to you. If you go down that far, and at a certain specific time you know you have got to get back, however happy you feel, and however much inclined to say, Survival? Survival? What the hell’s the point of that? And this is happening to the men who go out into space. They increasingly find that they have to have automatic controls to bring them back. Quite aside that they can’t change in any way from the spaceship. Now isn’t that interesting?

Can you become weightless here? I said a little while ago that the person who really accepts transience begins to feel weightless. When Suzuki was asked, What is it like to have experienced satori— enlightenment—he said, It’s just like ordinary everyday experience, but about two inches off the ground. Zhuang Zhou, the Taoist, said, It is easy enough to stand still, the difficulty is to walk without touching the ground. Now why do you feel so heavy? It isn’t just a matter of gravitation and weight. It is that you feel that you are carrying your body around. So there is a kōan in Zen Buddhism: Who is it that carries this corpse around? Common speech expresses this all of the time: life is a drag. I feel like I’m just dragging myself around. My body is a burden to me. To whom? To whom? That’s the question, you see? And when there is nobody left for whom the body can be a burden, the body isn’t a burden. But so long as you fight it, it is.

So then, when there is nobody left to resist the thing that we call change—which is simply another word for life—and when we dispel the illusion that we think our thoughts, instead of being just a stream of thoughts, and that we feel our feelings, instead of being just feelings; it’s like saying, you know, to feel the feelings is a redundant expression. It’s like saying, Actually, I hear sounds, for there are no sounds which are not heard. Hearing is sound. Seeing is sight. You don’t see sights. Sight-seeing is a ridiculous word! You could say just either ‘sighting,’ or ‘seeing,’ one or the other, but sightseeing is nonsense!

So we keep doubling our words, and this doubling is comparable to oscillation in an electrical system where there’s too much feedback. Where, you remember, in the old-fashioned telephone—where the receiver was separate from the mouthpiece, the transmitter—if you wanted to annoy someone who was abusing you on the telephone, you could make them listen to themselves by putting the receiver to the mouthpiece. But it actually didn’t have that effect; it set up oscillation. It started a howl that could be very, very hard on the ears. Same way if you turn a television camera at the monitor—hat is to say, the television set in the studio—the whole thing will start to jiggle. The visual picture will be of oscillation. And the same thing happens here. When you get to think that you think your thoughts, the ‘you’ standing aside the thoughts has the same sort of consequence as seeing double, and then you think, Can I observe the thinker thinking the thoughts? Or, I am worried, and I ought not to worry. But because I can’t stop worrying, I’m worried because I worry. And you see where that could lead to. It leads to exactly the same situation that happens in the telephone, and that is what we call anxiety; trembling.

But his discipline that we’re talking about, of Nagarjuna’s, abolishes anxiety because you discover that no amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that’s going to happen. In other words, from the first standpoint, the worst is going to happen: you’re all going to die. And don’t just put it off in the back of your mind and say, I’ll consider that later. It’s the most important thing to consider now, because it is the mercy of nature, because it’s going to enable you to let go and not defend yourself all the time,; waste all energies in self-defense.