Seeing That Frees

Rob Burbea has written my favorite meditation book yet.  His Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising (as the subtitle has it) span the entire length of the path, from simple exercises that provide basic self-help, to the mystical deep end where even emptiness is empty.  

Because he starts all the way at the beginning, and writes in such clear, plain, and logical language, I think almost anyone would find the first three parts of the book an accessible introduction to both the principles of meditation and what one may hope to gain from it.  Burbea begins by defining slippery terms like insight and emptiness clearly and with examples drawn from daily life.  Insight is the feeling of seeing how we fabricate some (inherently empty) aspect of experience.  While these preliminary definitions are refined as the book progresses, starting at a more conventional psychological level makes the path feel much less esoteric.  And instead of presenting progress on the path as a series of stages that bring us closer to some 'ultimate reality', Burbea presents every new stage as simply a new "way of seeing" -- as in "take a look from this perspective and see what's there".  

As the water deepens, this idea allows him to present anicca, dukkha, and anatta, as ways of looking at objects that let us relax their grip on us, rather than as metaphysical marks of existence. In other words, these are subsumed as ways of experiencing the emptiness of self and world.  Gradually, other complementary ways of seeing are introduced beyond these three, all of which are meant to help us achieve a more thorough experience of the simple thesis: everything is empty.  One of the most intriguing ideas in this section is that the formless jhanas can be interpreted as steps in a spectrum of what Burbea calls the "fading of perception".  As the name suggests, we begin the sequence of formless jhanas by leaving behind forms to experience 'empty' space.  Burbea sees the jhana of infinite space not as some 'direct' experience of emptiness itself (which is not possible), but as a way of seeing that the forms we usually imagine filling space are empty; all that's really there is space.  Likewise, by progressing to the jhana of infinite consciousness, we see that the experience of infinite space we were just having was itself just another empty appearance.  Etc ...  This has the potential to change the way I look at the 'object' that defines each jhana.  instead of trying to concentrate on successively more abstract objects like space or consciousness or nothing or neither perception nor non-percetion (whatever that is), perhaps each new jhana is accessed by seeing the emptiness of the previous level.  When forms become empty, space appears.  When space is seen as empty, consciousness naturally replaces it as a more subtle object of fabrication.   

Finally, the end of the book takes us into territory that's easy to follow conceptually, but above my pay grade experientially.  Intellectually, the idea that even foundational concepts -- like the links of dependent origination, or space or time or emptiness itself -- are empty is already implicit in Burbea's logic.  Experiencing this emptiness fully is another matter entirely.  I'll have to be sure to reread these latter parts in the years to come.

#reread