Francis Bennett, Loch Kelly, and Mukti in panel discussion:: “Emptiness is also Form” at the SAND Conference

Summary

The speakers examine the Heart Sutra’s teaching that emptiness and form are inseparable, challenging the tendency to emphasize only transcendence. They discuss awakening as an ongoing integration of spacious awareness with emotions, relationships, embodiment, and ordinary human life.

Questions This Interview Explores

• What does “form is emptiness, emptiness is form” mean in everyday life?
• How can spiritual awakening be integrated with emotions, relationships, and ordinary responsibilities?
• How can I recognize the awareness that is present beneath thoughts and feelings?
• Why can awakening involve extremes, and how can those extremes become balanced?
• What is the relationship between the absolute and the relative in spiritual practice?

Key takeaways

• Emptiness and form are two inseparable aspects of one reality.
• Awakening is not an escape from human life but a fuller participation in it.
• Open-hearted awareness can hold strong emotions without being overwhelmed by them.
• Integration can unfold throughout the spiritual path, not only after a dramatic awakening.
• Awareness can be noticed by allowing experience to be as it is and recognizing what knows it.
• The absolute gives human activity greater freedom, presence, and skill.

Transcript

Form and emptiness

Rick: Welcome to this presentation. You’ve probably all heard the Buddhist Heart Sutra: “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” That’s the topic—well, actually, the second part of that is the topic of this presentation. 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 imbalance between the first part and the second part, so we’re going to discuss that.

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. To my left is Loch Kelly. Loch is a psychotherapist who lives in Manhattan, and that’s just one of his hats. He’s a non-dual teacher and 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, doing a lot of Zen and Buddhist practices in addition to his Christian practices. Three or four years ago, he left the monastery and has been picking up more and more steam as a spiritual teacher.

So, thank you all. Who would like to start? Each of the speakers is going to 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.

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 and our Zen retreats. 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.”

I think Rick’s right. There’s a kind of full circle to that insight: form is emptiness, but emptiness is also form. I think the Buddha was really good about balancing out truth, understanding 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. They’re all necessary to make the full, beautiful diamond.

We all know each other, and I think we have all 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, we 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. So, we could say that fundamentally, we are truly a mystery.

But often our experience and our attention go more toward our individual personality and our personal human experience. Often spirituality is sought as a way to somehow answer the question of what we are, which seems so much greater than our human experience. Often we’re called by some mysterious movement of life, or a movement within us, that calls us to that.

It can sometimes feel that, as human beings, we might want to have spiritual experiences, enlightenment, or spiritual awakening. But there’s also that which is calling us, which doesn’t feel so personal and yet affects us deeply on a personal level. That movement of consciousness, we could say, might be the counterpart to our human experience—to our divine nature, some might say.

These two expressions can sometimes be felt to be seeking to join one another and to come to know one another. So, they need each other. We, as human beings, often feel separate or divided, or experience suffering, when we are without the divine. And the divine is seeking to take up residence in this world and express itself in our humanity, and to know itself in this manifest world of form.

They need each other.

I’m hoping that through this dialogue today, together we can further this union, or this coming together, in an expression of oneness.

Loch: Thank you. In the spirit of spirituality and science, science is talking about what we see and what we directly experience. In that sense, having seen many people over the last 20 years go through an awakening process, and being involved with both psychology and spirituality, I’ve been very interested in asking not only how this unfolds and what the many unique ways are, but also what some of the principles of the unfolding of awakening might be.

Certainly, there seems to be an initial, big, important awakening from the small sense of self—from a little mini-me that’s made of thought and our small mind—coming to a kind of freedom from that. At first, it can be like a gap of no ego and no thought. Then there is the discovery of an emptiness that is awake, a kind of pure awareness or pure consciousness that you’ve heard of.

Sometimes people who come to me now, as a counselor working with people who are in this awakening, are in this place of transcendence, which is lovely in that it is free of pain. I went through this myself about 20 years ago, when I had an awakening that was a shift into this freedom, like a sky—a big sky of awareness with everything moving through it. Then my wife said, “Hello. Anybody home?” (Audience laughter.) “Come on down to earth.” (Audience laughter.)

Francis: That’s what wives are for.

Loch: Yes. My wife, Paige, called me back to look within, to realize that this was only the first stage. It was an important first stage: waking from the small self and waking to the awake awareness, to the emptiness. But then there was the discovery that emptiness, or awareness, is form, is consciousness, is this aliveness.

From that embracing, open-hearted awareness, there’s an inclusion, and actually more support and more dynamic vitality to be more fully human once we come back and include. If we just stay within the boundary of our body or try to operate from the small ego, which is 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.

That applies even for those who develop a strong ego center—for the best possible people, accomplished, very psychological and 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 this awake awareness has to discover that it has never been other than form, and that there is a dynamic, embodied, continuous field of openness and aliveness, of interconnectedness and interrelatedness with others, from which you can be creative. You don’t have to live in your head; you feel like you’re living from this great heart.

Integrating the absolute and the relative

Rick: Obviously, most people in the world feel like, “This is what I am”—this thing, along with its likes and dislikes, its job, its political orientation, and whatever else. Then it seems as if 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 is nothing. Nothing exists. Nothing ever happened.”

I’ve been listening to Adi’s course on the falling away of the sense of self. In the third lesson, he said something that really jumped out at me. 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 that 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 want to comment on that?

Francis: I’ve been thinking a lot lately in terms of context and content. Context, I would call it—and the Buddha also, just to put in a few props for the Buddha—the Buddha had a great understanding that life is made up of two sides of a coin, two dimensions: the relative and the absolute, the ultimate and the more immanent, ordinary phenomenal world. He really had insight into both of those realms.

He understood very clearly that both of those realms have to be integrated because together they make up what we call a human life. 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. So, there is this big context.

But then there is content. The context is like the sky, and the content is composed of the clouds and the birds and the planes and whatever else—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, open quality of context, but we also have content, and the fact is that they are not really separate at all.

Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. They’re none other than each other.

That is where that saying from the Heart Sutra really is illustrated: “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” They’re none other than each other. They’re not separate at all.

I think you’re right. At the beginning of our awakening, we are way on the extreme of form, and we think, “All there is is this body, this personality, the phenomenal world, and all the things in it.” Then we understand context. We’re kind of caught up in content, and then the pendulum swings over into context. For a while, we think context is all that matters: the spacious emptiness, no self, nothingness, whatever—the void.

But eventually life, like a wife or a dog or a job or whatever, tends to pull you back down and say, “Hey, remember me? I’m the content of your life.” Then we have to come back and find a middle path, as the Buddha said. We have to let the pendulum swing.

Do we remember that old Billy Joel song, “Why Do I Go to Extremes?” That was a song by Billy Joel. And that is 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 eventually the pendulum—life, whatever—pulls us back toward form.

We might go into form a little bit again and play in that for a while, but then we go, “Well, yeah, that’s not all it’s cracked up to be either.” Then we swing back, but eventually we find a middle path. That, to me, is the comprehensive awakening.

Taken independently, neither one of those things is really even true, ultimately, but together they’re both true. They’re opposite sides of a coin. That’s my sense of it.

Loch: As you’re saying, using that metaphor, it is almost as if we’re in the content of a cloud, and we feel like we are a stormy cloud and we’re trying to clean up the cloud and fix all the contents. Then we realize at some point, “Oh, we’re the sky.”

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, both held by that which is bigger than ourselves, allowing us to be simply the cloud that we are—fluffy or not so fluffy.

Rick: Want to say anything about any of this?

Mukti: Well, I’d just like to say that whether or not 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 are many different types of awakenings.

But even if I were to set awakening aside, there are ways in most any human being’s experience that there is some sense of the whole gamut of who and what we are at any point in life. And even with just 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 is a sense of these various expressions.

And it seems that a lot of the process of what you were calling integration, Francis, is something that doesn’t necessarily need to be on the back end of awakening, so to speak. 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, in a mysterious way, some of that embodiment 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 is something about certain types of awakening that really accelerate this process of integration. In particular, types of awakenings that are really predicated upon a deep sense of stopping within ourselves—stopping the momentum of who we take ourselves to be and opening to a kind of shift.

It seems that somehow, when that sense of stopping comes online in a very deeply known way, even as this pendulum is swinging from one side to another and finding its way back to the middle, there is 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, because in our human experience that you’re describing of this swing and all these things that might happen in embodiment, there is also some deep, deep knowing that what we are and what life mysteriously is, also in a sense, is 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 separate-self or egoic-self experience that is 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 this knowingness is available at any time on our spiritual path, whether there is 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, turn-up-the-volume, fully-online type of 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 of years ago that he’d 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 nondual awareness grows commensurately with an enhancement of the relative, practical aspects of your life.

✨ Awareness in everyday experience

Loch: Yeah. So, those small glimpses many times, those small ways of touching back into the awakeness that’s here that Mukti was talking about, that is never not here. Even as crazy and agitated as things may be, and whatever strong emotions occur, there is some sense that it’s never not here—that there is something that is always already awake, and that is not something we need to create or develop.

And yet, because it is 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 is 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 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.

Does it feel like it’s always here and unchanging while it is knowing? That it has already stopped while there is 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 is 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 just alive, just this. Yeah, anyone want to say anything, notice that? 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 who wanted to make a comment.

Loch: Okay, here comes one.

Audience Member: You asked if anyone had 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 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: I have the sense that awakening or enlightenment or spiritual maturity, or whatever name you want to give it, is really all about coming to see who we really are on every level.

I think a lot of times it is looked upon as, to awaken or to come into that awareness or that spaciousness, that is 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. 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 would just sort of 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 my friend Jerry Freeman, who’s here, talks a lot in some of his teachings and in his writing about how the absolute and the relative are. It is not as if now we’re in the relative, so the pendulum’s over here. Then we awaken to the absolute and we’re over there. 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 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 is 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 is a line in the Gita which goes, yogaḥ karmasu kauśalam, which means, “Yoga is skill in action.” And by yoga, it does not mean asanas, but union, you know, unity, or unified awareness.

Francis: Yeah, yoga.

Rick: And so, it is not as if 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 reminded me of an analogy that 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 are 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 and activities we engage in.

But then there can also be a sense sometimes of panning back, like a camera panning back and having a greater lived experience of that context that you’re mentioning.

And yet, 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 is in this personal experience.

And when the sense of context wakes up to itself, by coming to know itself through entering a human life stream more wakefully, then that sense of the light of awareness can perhaps feel more empty of the personal or more formless, or it can feel more like that context that you’re mentioning.

But these are all different expressions of awareness, which are sometimes called, or used synonymously with, consciousness. There is our human consciousness, and then there is sometimes Consciousness with a capital C that can be a very wakeful consciousness when it unites—

Francis:(A loud noise happens.)

Mukti: —with a sense of human form.

Rick: Everybody’s mic still working?

Mukti: Yeah. Yeah, didn’t that 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 happened to our galvanic skin responses when that happened, to 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.

Rick: So, we’re all cool. Did you get to finish your point, Mukti?

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 I could just say, 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 was Richie Davidson at the University of Wisconsin. Then they would say, “Okay, we’re going to give you another one.” And then say, “Okay, get ready. In a few minutes, we’re going to give you another one.”

People who weren’t trained started doing anticipatory anxiety. Then they had the spike of the pain, and afterward, the association of the feeling to past associations, and past associations. Whereas people who were kind of awake—Tibetans who had done around 10,000 hours—had almost no anticipation. Then they would have equal or more feeling, but would very immediately return 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 you just come back. Where do you come back to? To associating fear from a fearful part of your brain, maybe. But then there’s also the learned kind of familiarization to come back to, a kind of loving presence.

Rick: You need to jump if your hand is 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? Just including that human experience, taking care, 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 way, we know it so intimately that it’s not as shocking.

Emptiness and interconnectedness

Rick: This fellow here.

Audience Member: Thank you for sharing those perspectives on form and emptiness. I can see that we talked about context and content, pendulum swings, and foreground and background. It seems to me that there is also this sense that form and emptiness are 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 such. In that sense, nirvana and samsara, and transcendental and phenomenal, 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.

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, but also, on the relative level, it’s relatively real. So, again, it’s the ultimate and the relative.

Francis: Well, that is true, and yet there is no problem either with the terms or with their experience of relative and absolute. On an absolute level, there is 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?

Rick: None of us are physicists, but it is worth reminding us all that we’ve 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—made up of it. I don’t know if anyone wants to comment on that. It is the theme of this conference, but I always like 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, you could say emptiness is, in some ways, empty like space. But another definition of emptiness, from the root word svi, means—they often say—it is the invisible life force within a seed that helps it grow into a tree. So, invisible, but dynamic; not empty in the sense of a vacuum.

Rick: And there too, science says that at the subtle levels, there is incredible dynamism. In a cubic centimeter of empty space, there is more latent energy than there is in the entire manifest universe, at a certain level.

Loch: Yeah, and then the other definition of emptiness means interconnectedness—meaning there is no thing in itself, an entity in itself that is independent. A tree is not independent of the sun and water; it can’t exist by itself. So, no thing exists in itself.

No thing exists in itself.

That emptiness, which we’ve associated with a vacuum in the West, means interdependent. It means we’re all interrelated and interconnected. So, it also ultimately points to “everything is empty,” meaning everything is interconnected, and that there is a unity about it. A dynamic unity is what emptiness means.

Rick: Mic to one of these guys.

Audience Member: Hi, thanks. We’re talking about a high-class problem—getting from enlightenment back down to humanity—but I don’t have that high-class problem. I heard Loch elegantly answer this in another session, so I’m going to ask Mukti and

Francis: For someone who wanted to maximize the probability of getting to enlightenment, what would be some steps and processes you would suggest?

🧘 Practices for awakening

Mukti: Well, I would suggest being really true to your nature. There is a tendency—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—stepping back or moving out?

Loch: Until you find something that stopped, yeah.

Mukti: Yeah, until you find something that has already stopped. But I think, essentially, this is a kind of mechanical way of answering it. There is a way of this subject-object relationship that we often experience, and especially prior to awakening, that is more predominant.

One path would be, you could say, stepping forward, or maybe forward and down, something that would perhaps be thought of more as a path of union—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, just growing the sense of our self that feels it is at the center of experience, growing our attention in a very global way, and opening to a sense of awareness that is like bridging our sense of subject with this world of objects. It is just opening our awareness.

Maybe that could be thought of as a different path, as opposed to a path of union. It could be a path of contemplation. A stepping of unhooking—stepping back—could involve a lot of unhooking concepts of mind, or more of the neti-neti approach. Some people would be more drawn to that.

Some people would be more drawn to the union path, whether it’s giving their concentration, their heart, and their being to a sense of the presence of the mystery of what we are.

As I had mentioned, there can be a kind of stopping. Either that stopping is just right, independent of stepping out or in, or some kind of movement of our consciousness, or it could be somehow connected with it.

When Loch said you can open out until you sense what has already stopped, then there’s the point of stopping. Or maybe, through a path of union, there is a way of entering and offering your human consciousness to something so completely that the offering unites with whatever is the object of its interest, whether it be a sense of presence, the divine, a prayer, or whatever it might be. Then there’s a kind of stopping because the joining is complete.

So, those are really big, broad strokes of trying to speak to your question. But there could perhaps be something more particular as well.

Francis: Well, what I hear you saying, basically, is that you find a path of spiritual practice. That is what it boils down to.

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 practice down to three primary practices. The way I boiled it down was that I just reflected on my own path and my own life, and what worked for me and brought me to a sense of clarity. That was the path of meditation—some form of meditation—the path of surrender, and the path of service.

I think, much like a fitness program, when we want to get fit, when we want to get in shape to run a marathon or compete in the Olympics, or whatever we’re doing, we often take a multidimensional approach.

So, you get nourishment and proper nutrition. You get aerobic exercise and anaerobic exercise. You try to build up the muscular and skeletal systems, and you try to pare them down and get sleek, slim, and fit. Then you also put food into that.

So, there is a three-pronged approach to bringing out what’s already here—that kind of wholeness, fullness, or optimum health, which is already intrinsically within us. I think awakening is very similar. It’s already here. In one sense, we’re already all awake, but we need to bring that potential out.

I think spiritual practice helps us. Loch’s practices are crystallized, or boiled down, to essentially what spiritual practice is: touching into 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-kilter when we start thinking of awakening or enlightenment as something I don’t have now, and then I need to do all these things to get what I don’t have, when really it’s about discovering.

As Mukti said, there are all these different approaches. At different seasons in our lives, different people are karmically different, at different ages and different maturity levels. So, it’s something you have to find your way with.

We need to live a life of focused spiritual practice.

But I would say, as a one-phrase answer to your question—and it’s again, not always popular—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 it’s true on one level. I think it’s important to understand that we don’t really lack it, but we do need to do things to bring out the potential that is there.

Rick: It is as if we are all multimillionaires, and we all have this bank account, but most of us have forgotten that it exists, and we don’t know how to access it. Somebody comes along and says, “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?

From emptiness to fullness

Rick: I want to throw a monkey wrench into the works and call into question the whole use of the term emptiness. Many of you have heard that Upanishadic saying, Pūrṇamadaḥ, Pūrṇamidaṃ, Pūrṇāt Pūrṇamudacyate. It means, “This is full, that is full; taking fullness from fullness, fullness remains.”

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 matter of how you look at it, but in my feeling and understanding, I tend to think of everything as if we could define it in terms of God—as if everything is just permeated by divine intelligence, and there’s no gap or hole in that anywhere.

Loch: I’m going to 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 as if—I don’t know if I can say this right—but most of us currently are full of shit. [laughing] In other words, we’re full of it; we’re full of our own attempt to get free.

And then it is almost in discovering emptiness that we discover the fullness. So, the fullness is almost the form. 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, it is almost like the metaphor I was using today of a parasympathetic awareness that’s already aware. Just as 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 that there’s a way, I think, that terms often begin to collapse on each other. If you think of times in your life when maybe something happened and you thought, “Oh, that was bad,” and then later you realize, “Oh, that was good.” 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 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. So, what I love about these kinds of dialogues is that there are things that don’t get answered. The kind of question like, “What actually is emptiness?” If it’s not an idea of something inert or flat or vacuous, what actually is it?

What’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. 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. He came in one day during a retreat and he said, “If you say that you have a self, you’re deluded.” Everybody responded, “Yeah, okay.”

And then he said, “And if you say you have no self, you’re deluded.” [laughing] And everybody was confused: “What?” Then he 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 balance it. It’s a constant little dance on the tightrope to stay on the tightrope.”

There’s no self and there’s a self. You have to balance it.

And I think that, for me, sums up the emptiness-in-form dilemma, if I may call it that. 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. It’s a 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, because I would love to come to your presentation. Do you have anything else scheduled, Loch?

Loch: Not out here, but please feel welcome to look at my website. I have practices. In particular, I have a book out, but I also have an audio, which is basically just these glimpse practices, which can be downloaded.

Rick: And I’ve interviewed all these folks, and you’ll find their interviews on batgap.com, along with links to their websites, links to their books, and all that stuff. So, thank you very much.

Mukti: Thank you so much.

Loch: Thank you.