Rick: Welcome to this presentation. You’ve probably all heard the Buddhist Heart Sutra, form is emptiness, emptiness is form. That’s the topic of this, well actually the second part of that is the topic of this presentation and the reason our speakers wanted to cover that topic is that usually the first part of that little phrase is emphasized. There’s a sort of an imbalance between the first part and the second part, so we’re going to discuss that. And I’m not going to spend a long time on introductions because you probably know these people and they can elaborate a little bit on who they are if they want to. So, we’ll go through that quickly and then get started. So, to my left is Loch Kelly. Loch is a psychotherapist, lives in Manhattan and that’s just one of his hats. He’s a non-dual teacher, author of Shift into Freedom, the Science and Practice of Open-Hearted Awareness. To his left is Mukti. Mukti is a spiritual teacher who lives in this area. Adyashanti has the good fortune of being her husband. And to her left is Francis Bennett. Francis spent decades in Trappist and Cistercian monasteries, practiced a lot of Zen and Buddhist practices in addition to his Christian practices and three, four years ago left the monastery and has been picking up more and more steam as a spiritual teacher. So, thank you all. And who would like to start? Each of the speakers is gonna just sort of make a little opening statement for a few minutes and then we’ll get it rolling. Oh, I’m sorry. My name is Rick Archer and I am the founder and host of an interview show called Buddha at the Gas Pump. Yes.
Francis: Well, back in my Zen days in the ’80s when I was a young monk, we used to chant the Heart Sutra during all of our sessions, our Zen retreats. And at the end of the Heart Sutra, it says, “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Form is none other than emptiness and emptiness is none other than form.” And I think Rick’s right. There’s a kind of full circle to that insight, that form is emptiness, but emptiness is also form. And the Buddha was really good about that, I think, about balancing out truth, that truth was not a kind of linear black and white thing, but that truth is this very subtle, nuanced reality that has many different dimensions to it, like facets on a diamond, you know, and they’re all necessary to make the full, beautiful diamond. So, we all know each other and we have all, I think, had a sense that this is something that needs to be seen a little more clearly in the lives of seekers and in our own lives. So, I think we just thought it would be an interesting topic.
Mukti: – Going in order, yes, okay. Well, I think that when we contemplate the sense of who and what we are, there can be a sense that any one leaning just doesn’t quite capture what we essentially are. And so, we could say that fundamentally we are truly a mystery. But often our experience and our attention goes to more of our individual personality and our personal human experience. And often spirituality is sought after as a way to somehow answer as to the sense of what we are that’s so much greater than our human experience. And often we’re called by some mysterious movement of life or movement within us that calls us to that. And it can feel sometimes that, you know, as a human being, we might want to have a spiritual experiences or enlightenment or spiritual awakening, but there’s also that which is calling us, which doesn’t quite feel so personal sometimes and yet affects us deeply on a personal level. And that movement of consciousness, we could say might be the counterpart to our human experience, our divine nature, some might say. And so, these two expressions can sometimes be felt to be seeking to join one another and to come to know one another. And so, they need each other. We as human beings are often feeling separate or divided or in suffering when we are without the divine. And the divine is seeking to take up residence in this world and express in our humanity and know itself in this manifest world of form. And so, I’m hoping that we can further this union or this coming together in expression of oneness through this dialogue together today.
Loch: – Thank you. Yes, so yeah, in the spirit of spirituality and science, science being talking about what we see and what we directly experience. In that sense, I think having seen many people now over the last 20 years kind of go through an awakening process and being both involved with psychology and spirituality, I’ve been very interested in how does this unfold and what is the many unique ways, but what are some of the principles of the unfolding of awakening? And certainly, there seems to be an initial, big, important awakening kind of from the small sense of self, like a little mini me that’s made of thought and our small mind, to a kind of freedom from that, which at first can be like a gap of not ego and not thought, and then the discovery of kind of an emptiness that’s awake, kind of this pure awareness or pure consciousness that you’ve heard of. And sometimes people who come to me as now a counselor working with people who are in this awakening is they are in this place of transcendence, which is lovely in that it’s free of pain. And when I was, I went through this myself about 20 years ago, where I kind of had an awakening that was in the shift into this freedom from, kind of like a sky, big sky, awareness with everything was moving through it. And then my wife said, “Hello. Anybody home? (audience laughing) Come on down to earth.” (audience laughing)
Francis: That’s what wives are for.
Loch: Yeah. And so, my wife, Paige, called me back to look within, to realize that this was only the first stage. So important first stage, waking up from, waking to the awake awareness, to the emptiness, but then discovering that emptiness or awareness is form, is consciousness, is this aliveness. From that embracing open-hearted awareness, there’s kind of an inclusion and actually more of a support and more of a dynamic vitality to be more fully human once we come back and include. So, if we just stay within the kind of battery of our body or try to operate from the small ego that’s trying to deal with our emotions and everything, I’ve seen that the small ego cannot live a fully intimate human life. It cannot bear emotions. Emotions are stronger than the ego. So even those who develop a strong ego center, the best possible people, accomplished, very psychological, spiritual egos. So, it almost requires a transcendence to discover this second operating system of awake awareness, but then you can’t live from there, at least that’s my experience. It seems that that awake awareness has to discover it’s never been other than form and that there’s a dynamic, embodied, continuous field of openness and aliveness of interconnectedness and interrelatedness with others from which you can be creative and from which you don’t have to live in your head, but you feel like you’re living from this great heart.
Rick: Obviously, most people in the world feel like, this is what I am, this thing. And also, its likes and its dislikes and its job and its political orientation and whatever else. And then it seems like many spiritual people swing the pendulum to the other extreme and say, “you are not a person, there are no persons. As a matter of fact, there’s nothing, nothing exists, nothing ever happened.” I’ve been listening to Adi’s course on the falling away of the sense of self. And in the third lesson of it, he said something which for me, it really jumped out. It was that, after all, we’re multidimensional beings and we have the capacity to live in paradoxically different realities simultaneously. So, it’s kind of like a bigger basket which can contain all the extremes and everything in between them. I think that if you can do that, both in your understanding and your experience, it resolves a lot of these paradoxes and arguments that people carry on with.
Francis: On Facebook.
Rick: On Facebook, on YouTube, in hallways. Anyone wanna comment on that?
Francis: I’ve been thinking a lot lately in terms of context and content. So, context I would call, the Buddha also, I, just to put in a little, few props for the Buddha. The Buddha has great understanding that life is made up of kind of two sides of a coin, two dimensions, the relative and the absolute, the ultimate and the kind of more imminent kind of ordinary phenomenal world. And he has really insight into both of those realms. And he understood very clearly that both of those realms have to be integrated because they make up together what we call a human life. And that there’s a bigger context of the absolute or pure consciousness, God, if you will, you could call it a lot of things or call it nothing, whatever you like. But there’s this big context. But then there’s content. So, the context is like the sky and the content is the clouds and the birds and the planes and whatever, the rainbows in the sky. But in order to have a full experience of the sky, we need both, don’t we? We need the spacious kind of open quality of context, but we also have content and that they’re not really separate at all. That’s where that saying from the Heart Sutra really is illustrated in that, that form is emptiness, emptiness is form. They’re none other than each other. They’re not separate at all. And I think you’re right, at the beginning of our awakening, we’re kind of way on this kind of extreme of form and we think, okay, all there is is this body, this personality, the phenomenal world and all the things in it. And then we kind of understand context. We’re kind of caught up in content. Then the pendulum swings over into context. And for a while, we think context is all that matters. The spacious emptiness, no self, nothingness, whatever, the void. But then eventually life, like a wife or a dog or a job or whatever, tends to pull you back down and go, hey, remember me? I’m the content of your life. And then we have to come back and we have to find, we have to find a middle path, like the Buddha said. We have to find, we have to let the pendulum kind of swing and we tend to, remember that old Billy Joel song, “Why Do I Go to Extremes?” There was a song by Billy Joel. And that’s the human thing, isn’t it? It’s a human dance. We just tend to go to extremes. So, we go from form all the way over into emptiness. But then eventually the pendulum, life, whatever, pulls us back toward form. And then we might go into form a little bit again, play in that a little bit, but then we go, well, yeah, that’s not all it’s cracked up to be either. And then we swing back, but eventually we find a middle path. And that to me is the comprehensive awakening. Neither one of those things taken independently is really even true, ultimately, but together they’re both true. They’re opposite sides of a coin. That’s my sense of it, yeah.
Loch: – And so like you’re saying, using that metaphor, almost like we’re in content of a cloud and we feel like we’re a stormy cloud and we’re trying to clean up the cloud and fix all the contents. And then we realize at some point, oh, we’re the sky. And then we realize, oh, the sky is inherent within the cloud. The cloud is made of the sky and the storm has never hurt the sky. But now there’s this huge, vast support of spaciousness and embodiment that are both held by that which is bigger than ourselves and allows us to be simply the cloud, fluffy or not so fluffy that we are.
Rick: Want to say anything about any of this?
Mukti: Well, I’d just like to say that whether a person senses that they’ve had an awakening, there are many, many different kinds of awakenings. And in one way to speak to your intro to this segment about the sense of layers, there’s many different types of awakening. But even if I were to set awakening aside, there are ways that in most any human beings’ experience that there is some sense of the whole gamut of who and what we are at any point in life. And with just even some simple pointing that maybe you’re seeing when people appear moving their hands, the sense of context and content, or even just in your own everyday life observations, there can be a way that there’s a sense of these various expressions. And it seems that a lot of the process of, I think what you were calling integration, Francis, is something that doesn’t necessarily need to be on the back end of awakening, so to speak, that many people are on what we might call progressive paths where a lot of integration of their deep wisdom and heartfulness, and some of what I was speaking of earlier as the divine, some of our divine qualities are coming forward and being integrated into our lives, into our human expression and our human experience all throughout our journey of life. And so, it also seems that with this topic of embodiment, some of that embodiment in a mysterious way may be taking place even prior to some of the various awakening experiences that maybe you’ve been hearing about in this conference. But there’s something about certain types of awakening that really accelerate this process of integration. And in particular, types of awakenings that are really predicated on a deep sense of stopping within ourselves, stopping the momentum of who we take ourselves to be and opening to a kind of shift. And it seems that somehow when that sense of stopping comes online in a very deeply known way, that even as this pendulum is swinging from one side to another and finding its way back to the middle, that there’s some sense from that awakening that what we essentially are is essentially and paradoxically ever unchanging and infinitely present, excuse me, eternally present and unconditionally present. And yet it’s a paradox ’cause in our human experience that you’re describing of this swing and all these things that might happen in embodiment, there’s also some deep, deep knowing that what we are and what life is is mysteriously also in a sense, unchanging as it also is changing. And that deep sense is something that creates a whole different paradigm of being that really throws a wrench into the prior constructs of a more experience of separate self or egoic self that’s really organized around a sense of time, a sense of space, a sense of “I’m here locally inside.” So much can shift in that sense of our nature as the eternal or infinite with respect to these patterns of referencing our ideas of ourself, our ideas of space and time, and not only ourself but also other. So, a whole bunch of things get shifted. And because of those shifts that we come to through our own direct experience, there’s a knowingness that is present for this whole process that we’re talking about. And I would say that that knowingness is available at any time in our spiritual path, whether there’s a real full, bright clarity of that knowingness that may be experienced with awakening and post-awakening. But even if it’s not in that bright, like turn up the volume, fully online type expression, it’s often experienced all along the way even beforehand.
Rick: I think that’s a great point. I’ve talked to people for whom awakenings were quite incapacitating for quite some time. And I remember Scott Kiloby saying to me a couple years ago that he’s encountered people whom he felt were kind of psychologically unhinged by having had some sort of awakening and really needed some help. But I think ideally it would be possible, and it is possible through the right procedures, for the pendulum swing not to be an extreme thing from hedonism to monasticism, but to integrate, for the pendulum swings to go many times a day as it were, and to integrate at every step of the way so that you find that the non-dual awareness grows commensurately with an enhancement of the relative practical aspects of your life.
Loch: Yeah. So that small kind of, small glimpses many times, that small ways of touching back into the awakeness that’s here that Mukti was talking about, that’s never not here. Even as crazy and agitated and whatever strong emotion, some sense that it’s never not here, that there’s something that’s always already awake and that’s not something we need to create or develop. And yet, because of the almost like a foreground, background shift, we either have to stop, as Mukti says, or we have to step out, or just shift from the perception or point of view. So, for instance, right now, if you were just to become aware of sensations, thoughts and feelings, and that knowing of them, yeah? So just whatever’s happening with your body or your head, mind, and just not changing them, just allow them to be just as they are. And just notice that you’re, you notice that there’s a knowing of them. Notice that awareness of content. And then see if you can just turn the awareness to be interested in the awareness itself. So rather than being aware of content, just rest back. Or find that awareness that’s aware of itself, that isn’t coming and going. It’s always, does it feel like it’s always here and unchanging while it’s knowing? That it’s already stopped while there’s something else moving? You feel that? And then do you also feel in some ways that that, which is unchanging and that which is changing are really not two things? That there’s some kind of fabric of dancing, pervasive, alive, that the awareness and the movement are not two things but are inseparable, are kind of a unity, are kind of a, just alive, just this. Yeah, anyone wanna say anything, notice that? Yeah. Yeah.
Rick: Do we have someone with a mic or is that my mic that the audience would need to use? There’s a fellow right here that wanted to make a comment.
Loch: Okay, here comes one. (Audience)- You asked, did anyone have experiences from what you just led us through? And I was fortunate to be at your talk a little bit earlier. And yes, it brings to the forefront a greater connection and accessing of that space, of that sense that it’s there and that it isn’t, you don’t have to reach for it so much. It’s a matter of just sort of letting things be as they are and being there. So, I just love the exercise.
Loch: – Yeah, beautiful.
Francis: The sense I have is that awakening or enlightenment or spiritual maturity or whatever name you wanna give it is really all about coming to see who we really are on every level. Like I think a lot of times it’s looked upon as, okay, to awaken or to come into that awareness or that spaciousness, that’s awakening. It’s like, yeah, that’s awakening, that’s part of awakening. But also, part of awakening is just being a human being with a particular personality and particular roles and functions. And it’s a seamless kind of thing. It’s not either or. I remember just growing up, my dad used to have this thing he would say where he was an engineer and he worked as an engineer with Boeing, but he also had all kinds of hobbies. He restored cars, he fixed bikes, he did all these things. And he would tell people, well, I wear a lot of hats. I wear a lot of hats in this world. Sometimes I’m an engineer, sometimes I’m a husband, sometimes I’m a father, sometimes I’m this and that. But he just sort of would go from one thing to the next and do this and change hats. And it’s kind of like, I think awakening is like that. We awaken to who we are on this absolute level so that we can move more skillfully through the relative level. And we just change hats. And I know my friend Jerry Freeman, who’s here, he talks a lot in some of his teachings and in writing about that the absolute and the relative are not, we don’t just like, it’s like now we’re in the relative so the pendulum’s over here. Then we awaken to the absolute and we’re over here. It’s more like in an ordinary day, we wear all these different hats. We flow into the absolute when we need to respond to something from that level. And then sometimes we need to respond to something from a very human, personal level. You know, when our little kid cuts their finger or whatever, you don’t need the absolute consciousness to deal with that. You know, you need mommy or daddy to deal with that. And that doesn’t mean that the context isn’t still the absolute consciousness flowing through mommy. But mommy’s the vehicle for that at that moment. And it’s beautiful. It’s just like this dance. It’s the Lila, you know, as they say. It’s just the dance of God, just seamless.
Rick: There’s a line in the Gita which goes, yogaḥ karmasu kauṥhalam, which means yoga is skill in action. And by yoga, it’s not meant asanas, but union, you know, unity, or unified awareness.
Francis: Yeah, yoga.
Rick: And so it’s not like you have to put on the unified hat and then take it off and put on the mommy hat.
Francis: No.
Rick: But you can wear both hats at once. And by virtue of having the absolute hat, the relative hat is enhanced. And, you know, one can be more skillful in action. Mukti? You haven’t talked in a while. I thought I’d get you to say something.
Mukti: Okay, well, when you were describing that, Francis, it reminds me of an analogy that sometimes I like to use where there can be a sense sometimes that we’re almost functioning like a camera lens. You know, where here we have this sense of directing our attention. And we could say that could be a way of shining the light of our awareness in a more focused way. And sometimes it can feel like we’re a camera lens, really zoomed in on the human experience. And then sometimes, you know, when the child cuts its finger or whatever it is that we all do in our human experience, all the roles we engage in and activities. But then there can also be a sense sometimes of like panning back, camera panning back and having a greater, like a greater lived experience of that context that you’re mentioning. And yet, you know, the camera, even though the lens functions in different ways, it’s all a shining of a light of a kind of consciousness. And sometimes that consciousness feels more like my human consciousness that’s in this personal experience. And when the sense of context, when that wakes up to itself, by coming to know itself through entering a human lifestream more wakefully, then that sense of the light of awareness can feel perhaps more empty of the personal or more formless or it can feel more like that context that you’re mentioning. But it’s all different expressions of awareness, which is sometimes called, you know, used synonymously with consciousness. There’s our human consciousness, and then there’s sometimes consciousness with a capital C that can be a very wakeful consciousness when it unites with a sense of human form. (audience chattering)
Rick: Everybody’s mic still working?
Mukti: Yeah. Yeah, didn’t that like just pull us right in, right? To the human experience?
Francis: It was a glimpse practice.
Rick: It would have been interesting to see what had happened to our galvanic skin responses when that happened. See how much people reacted or not. They do tests like that on meditators where they shock them with loud noises and see how much reaction there is.
Francis: Nobody jumped, so.
Rick: So, we’re all cool. Did you get to finish your point, Mukti? That was like rather.
Mukti: I did. Yeah, I guess I kept talking through the whole thing.
Rick: Perhaps we should take another audience question at this point, then wait till you get the mic, okay? They’ll bring a mic around.
Loch: Yeah, maybe just to say that there’s, one of the studies they’ve done with long-term meditators similar to what you said is that they took meditators and gave them a shock response. This is Richie Davidson at University of Wisconsin. And then they would say, “Okay, we’re gonna give you another one.” And then say, “Okay, get ready. In a few minutes, we’re gonna give you another one.” And so, people who weren’t trained started doing anticipatory anxiety. And then they had the spike of the pain and then after effect association of the feeling to past associations of past associations. Whereas people who were in kind of awake who had done, Tibetans who were in like 10,000 hours, there was almost no anticipation. And then they would have equal or more feeling, but then have very immediately returned to baseline. So, it’s almost the lack of suffering about pain that goes, not the human pain. So, the human experience, you jump, fine. Then just you come back, where do you come back to? To associating about fear from a fearful part of your brain, maybe. But then there’s also the learned kind of familiarization to come back to, kind of a loving presence.
Rick: You need to jump if your hand’s on the stove or a bus is coming or something like that.
Mukti: Also, I think some of that capacity to be open to that kind of pain or suffering, really comes by way of embracing it a lot. So, it’s like, oh, that was kind of alarming when that happened, right? So just like including that human experience and taking care and acknowledging it and bringing it into the fold of our experience is typically the way to become comfortable with pain and suffering in a way. That we know it so intimately that it’s not as shocking.
Rick: This fellow here. (Audience) I have a, thank you for sharing those perspectives on form and emptiness. And I can see we talked about context and content and pendulum swings and foreground, background. It seems to me that there is also this sense that form and emptiness is an identity. That they were never separate to begin with. So, the foreground is not the background and the background is not the foreground. They’re just called as such. So, in that sense, nirvana and samsara and transcendental phenomenal, these are empty terms to begin with. We are using them, but my understanding of this sutra is that the two are really empty to begin with. And the reason for the sutra is to point to that total emptiness from the absolute point of view. So, the absolute and relative exist only in a relative sense. Outside of the relative, there is no absolute and there is no relative.
Loch: Yes, I think we would agree in, but also on the relative sense, it’s relatively real. So again, it’s the ultimate and the relative.
Francis: Well, it’s like that’s true and yet there’s no problem either with the terms or their experience of relative and absolute. Yeah, on an absolute level, there’s no such thing as relative and absolute. But on a relative level, there is. And since the relative is included, then that’s okay too. You know? So, yeah.
Rick: None of us are physicists, but it’s worth reminding us all that we’ve all heard talks by physicists in which they actually illustrate this “form is emptiness, emptiness is form” statement by telling us how empty form actually is and how the form we see is in a way comprised of emptiness, you know, made up of it. I don’t know if anyone wants to comment on that, but I always like sort of, and it’s the theme of this conference, how modern science and some of its principles can be an adjunct or an aid to spirituality and clarify a lot of things.
Loch: I mean, just toward embodiment, just saying emptiness in some ways is empty like space, but another definition of emptiness from the root word, Svi means, they often say, it’s the invisible life force within a seed that helps it grow into a tree. So invisible, but dynamic, not empty meaning vacuum.
Rick: And there too, science says that at the subtle levels, there’s incredible dynamism, you know, I mean, in a cubic centimeter of empty space, there’s more latent energy than there is in the entire manifest universe at a certain level.
Loch: Yeah, and then the other definition of emptiness is means interconnected, meaning there’s no thing in itself that is an entity in itself that’s independent, which means that a tree is not independent of sun, water, that it can’t exist, no thing exists in itself. That emptiness in some ways, which we’ve associated with vacuum in the West, means interdependent, means we’re all interrelated, interconnected. So, it also ultimately points to everything is empty means everything is interconnected and one has a unity about it, a dynamic unity is what emptiness means.
Rick: Mic to one of these guys. (audience) Hi, thanks. We’re talking about a high class problem about getting from enlightenment back down to the humanity, but I don’t have that high class problem. So, I heard Loch elegantly answer this in another session. So, I’m gonna ask this to Mukti and Frances. For someone who wanted to maximize the probabilities of getting to enlightenment, what would be some steps and processes you would suggest?
Mukti: Well, I would suggest to be really true to your nature, meaning there’s a tendency, like earlier Loch mentioned something about how I referred to stopping and then he proceeded to do an exercise that was kind of a, would you say like stepping back or moving out?
Loch: Until you find something that stopped, yeah.
Mukti: Yeah, until you find something that’s already stopped. But I think essentially, this is a kind of a mechanical way of answering it, but there’s a way of this subject-object relationship that we experience often, and especially prior to awakening, that’s more predominant. And so, one would be like a path of, you could say stepping forward or maybe forward and down or something that would be perhaps thought of more as a path of union, of like really offering our lens of awareness through our attention into a sense of a path of union. There can also be a kind of stepping back or out and just growing the sense of our self that feels at the center of experience, growing our attention in a very global way and an opening to a sense of awareness that is in a way like bridging our sense of subject with this world of objects. It’s just opening our awareness. And so that could be maybe thought of as a different path as opposed to a path of union. You know, maybe it would be a path of, you know, a kind of contemplation of this. It could be a stepping of unhooking, stepping back could involve a lot of unhooking concepts of minds or more of the neti-neti approach. So, some people would be more drawn to that. Some people would be more drawn to the union path, whether it’s, you know, giving their concentration and their heart and their being to a sense of the presence of the mystery of what we are. And then, as I had mentioned, there can be a kind of stopping. And either that stopping, you know, just is right, right, independent of stepping out or in or some kind of movement of our consciousness. It could just be independent or it could be somehow connected with. Like when Loch said you can like open out till you sense what is already stopped, then there’s the point of stopping. Or maybe through a path of union, there’s a way of entering, offering your human consciousness to something so completely until that offering unites with whatever is the object of its interest, whether it be, you know, a sense of presence or divine or a prayer or whatever it might be. But then there’s a kind of stopping because the joining is complete. So those are kind of like really big, broad strokes of trying to speak to your question. But then there could maybe be something more particular as well.
Francis: Well, like what I hear you saying, basically is you find a path of spiritual practice. I mean, that’s what it boils down to. And I, you know, and I often, I think I’m a very, very practice-oriented teacher, which isn’t always the most popular thing. I think all of us actually are. But my sense is that I’ve boiled down practice to three like primary practices. And the way I boiled it down was I just reflected on my own path and my own life and what worked for me and what brought me to a sense of clarity. And that was the path of meditation, some form of meditation, the path of surrender and the path of service. And I think much like a fitness program, you know, when we wanna get fit, when we wanna get in shape to run a marathon or, you know, compete in the Olympics or whatever we’re doing, we often take a kind of multi-dimensional approach. So, you get like, you know, nourishment, you get proper nourishment, so you get diet, you get aerobic exercise and you get anaerobic exercise. You know, you try to build up the muscular system and skeletal system, and you try to pare it down and get it sleek and slim and fit. And then you also put food into that. So, there’s like three-prong approach to bringing out what’s already here, that kind of wholeness or fullness or optimum health, which is already intrinsically within us. And I think awakening is very similar. It’s already here. We’re already really, in one sense, we’re already all awake, but we need to kind of bring that potential out. And I think spiritual practice helps us, like Loch’s practices are, I think, kind of crystallized or boiled down, essential what spiritual practice is, which is just touching in to our true nature, touching into it again and again, briefly, just touching and touching and touching until we finally get, oh, this has always been here. And then that’s awakening. But I think we go a little bit off-kelter when we start thinking of awakening or enlightenment is something I don’t now have, and then I need to do all these things to get what I don’t have, when really, it’s about discovering. And I think, like Mukti said, there’s all these different approaches at different seasons in our lives, different people are karmically different, different ages, different maturity levels. So, it’s something you have to kind of find your way with. But I would say like, a one phrase answer to your question is, and it’s again, not always popular, but we need to live a life of focused spiritual practice.
Rick: Yeah, and I think you have to be careful with that thing about “we already have enlightenment,” because a lot of people hear that phrase and think, oh, great, check that off my bucket list.
Francis: Let’s crack a beer and watch football. (laughing)
Rick: And their experience may be a far cry from what’s possible.
Francis: Well, that’s why I said, that’s true on one level. And I think it’s important to understand that we don’t lack it really, but we do need to do things to bring out what’s the potential that’s there.
Rick: It’s like we all have, we’re all multimillionaires, and we all have this bank account, and most of us have forgotten that it exists, and we don’t know how to access it. But somebody comes along and say, hey, you’re a multimillionaire. It’s not enough to say, yeah, great, I’m a multimillionaire. You have to figure out how to access the bank account and begin withdrawing money from it, so to speak.
Loch: What’s the number?
Rick: I’ll tell you later. I don’t want you going at mine.
Francis: What’s that pin number again?
Rick: I wanna throw a monkey wrench in the work and call into question the whole use of the term emptiness. Many of you have heard that Upanishadic saying of Pῡrṇamadaḥ, Pῡrṇamidaṃ, Pῡrṇāt Pῡrṇamudacyate. It means this is full, that is full, taking fullness from fullness, fullness remains. And I think science corroborates it in a way when every little bit of creation is just full of energy and intelligence. That can be examined in a number of different ways. So, I guess it’s maybe just a way of, a matter of how you look at it, but in my feeling and understanding, I tend to think of everything as, and if we wanna term it in terms of God, everything is just permeated by divine intelligence and there’s no gap or hole in that anywhere.
Loch: I’m gonna just say one quick thing, which is I think that’s how it ends up. It ends up as emptiness is fullness, fullness is emptiness, but it ends up very full and open-hearted. But it’s almost like, I don’t know if I can say this right, but most of us currently are full of shit. [laughing] So, in other words, we’re full of it, we’re full of our own attempt to get free, and then there’s almost in discovering emptiness that then we discover the fullness. So, the fullness is almost the form. So, the form as its constricted small lens of the camera that’s trying to find freedom and looking with a seeker and a doer that can never find fullness, steps out being free of that, and that’s kind of a classical awakening from, and then there’s a discovery of something greater than ourself that’s already awake. So almost like I was using the metaphor today of a parasympathetic awareness that’s already aware. So just like your breath is happening by itself, is there also an awareness that’s happening by itself? And when that awareness experiences your body and this world, it feels full. So, it seems like form is emptiness, emptiness is fullness.
Rick: Just aside from your experience, I kind of feel like reality is full. Yeah, Mukti.
Mukti: I’m super excited about this. [laughing] I would love to make two points. One is there’s a way I think that often terms begin to collapse on each other. And if you think of times in your life where maybe something happened and you thought like, oh, that was bad. And then later you realize, oh, that was good. And when you live enough of life, you start to see how a lot of what you thought were opposites end up being harder and harder to land on those opposites, because things start to come together. And to the point of when you point to direct experience of emptiness, you can sense that it’s vital and dynamic, alive. But it may take a while to kind of register all those things through direct experience. And the other point I wanted to make when I heard you bring it up is along the lines of direct experience and along the lines of practices, I’ve been very much a proponent of inquiry. And so, what I love about these kind of dialogues is the things that don’t get answered. The kind of question of like, what actually is emptiness? If it’s not an idea of something inert or flat or vacuous, what actually is it? And that’s exciting to me is to live with that question and let it reveal itself and reveal itself and not answer it in thought, not answer it in concept.
Rick: Yeah, that’s great.
Francis: And I was thinking when you said that–
Rick: One minute? Oh, okay.
Francis: I think I can say this in 30 seconds or so. That my old teacher in the Theravadan tradition, I ordained for a year and a half in the Theravadan monastic tradition, and Bhante Gunaratana was my teacher and preceptor. And he came in one day in a retreat and he said, “If you say that you have a self, you’re deluded.” And everybody was like, “Yeah, okay.” And then he said, “And if you say you have no self, you’re deluded.” (laughing) And everybody was like, “What?” And then he’s talked about walking on a tightrope. He said, “It’s like walking on a tightrope. There’s no self and there’s a self. And just like the tightrope, you can’t just lean one way. You have to kind of balance it. It’s a constant little dance on the tightrope to stay on the tightrope.” And I think that kind of, for me, sums up the emptiness in form dilemma, so-called. It’s not really a dilemma.
Rick: Well, thank you, everybody. I’m sorry we didn’t take more questions and all. Just to put in a plug, Francis and I will both be giving presentations tomorrow at 11. Dueling banjos kind of situation in different rooms.
Francis: You’re my competitor.
Rick: Yeah, come to one or the other. I wish they weren’t conflicting ’cause I would love to come to your presentation. Do you have anything else scheduled, Loch?
Loch: Not out here, but just please, welcome to look at my website. I have practices, particularly I have a book out, but I also have an audio, which is basically just these glimpse practices, which is really, can be downloaded.
Rick: And I’ve interviewed all these folks and you’ll find their interviews on batgap.com and links to their websites and links to their books and all that stuff, so thank you very much.
Mukti: Thank you so much.
Loch: Thank you.