Here, we continue our journey into the wisdom of the Heart Sutra, a sutra many believe was written by the Buddha. All the comments and interpretations in this writing are my own, gleaned from chanting the sutra many times during ceremonies, where, each time I chant it, new wisdom is revealed.
I hope you find as great a value in this as I have. Part 3 will continue in the next newsletter.
Part 2:
Without the awareness of the reality of Emptiness and the enslavement to thoughts and feelings, there is only what the mind's chatter and the body's physiological responses continually tell us. It is the voice in the head giving a running commentary on everything. It takes away peace, and it blocks compassion for self and others. It can make real love nearly impossible to experience.
Avalokiteśvara, as an embodiment of compassion and wisdom, sees everything in this human experience with eyes of love, understanding, and compassion. He shows us, as do all great teachers, what we can be, what we already truly are beyond the veils of the illusions of thought and judgment.
“The body is nothing more than emptiness, and emptiness is nothing more than body.”
“The body is exactly empty. And emptiness is exactly body. The other four aspects of human existence, feeling, thought, will, and consciousness, are likewise nothing more than emptiness, and emptiness is nothing more than they.”
What does it mean for the body to be ‘empty’?
First, we must consider what emptiness means. Obviously, the body is not empty of matter; it is full of internal organs, blood, lymphatic fluids, muscles, and bones. We have our feelings and emotions, our thoughts, our will and consciousness, our awareness of self, and who we believe we are. How can all of that be emptiness?
To understand this, I look at the Heart Sutra not as a statement of facts (which it also is) but as guidance for meditation. I also see it as a valuable instruction for meeting the universes that plant medicines open.
There is a philosophical concept that nothing is real. In this view, even the chair or couch you are sitting on now is not real. In a way, this is true. We know we are made of atoms and that atoms are made of a great many subatomic particles. If we go deep enough into this, the sub-atomic particles are made of vibrating strings of energy. This is the realm of quantum physics, a vast field studied in particle accelerators and innumerable blackboards and computers. If you go small enough in this theory, nothing exists other than energy vibrating in multiple dimensions[1].
But the more personal aspect of this is the idea that your relationship to the traumas of the body, your thoughts, memories, emotions, and even the idea of “I” is all part of an illusory world that doesn’t exist when there is the experience of emptiness.
The idea of emptiness that our thoughts, memories, and emotions are not real may seem exactly the opposite of what we think makes us who we are: our thoughts, judgments, and feelings, our will, our desire to create, our consciousness, our sense of who we are. What is Avalokiteśvara talking about if there is no mind and no will?
This is an instruction pointing to an experience that is reachable. It doesn’t have to be a scary experience. It can become instruction for deep contemplation, leading to deep healing and awakening. Accept the observer's role, let go of that role, and be in only pure experience. Who is the one doing the experiencing? That is a question the mind asks that the mind is incapable of answering. The experience is itself the answer to that question.
When a person sits in meditation or in a deep ceremony, the first stage is usually a sigh of relief that there is nothing to do. For some, it feels great. Letting go. Relaxing. The experience of time elongates. It seems so easy.
Then, the thoughts arise. This can be quite comical. Suddenly, there are important phone calls to make. A stove that might be on. A refrigerator door that is open. Thoughts will come about the strangest things. Memories percolate up from the distant past. But these are, in truth, ‘empty.’ They do not exist other than in the small and vast space between the ears.
We are advised to sit. Just to sit. To allow the thoughts to be there without the need to hold onto them or understand what they mean or what they tell you. Just to sit, allowing any discomfort or emotions to rise and fall away. Just to sit, feeling the physical pains in the knees, back, or neck, or wherever they may be. Just to sit with no story, no explanations, no goal, and no desire. Until you experience that all these things are not real, that they are in the greater reality, nothing more than emptiness. You allow them to vanish into the unreality that they came from.
“All things are empty, nothing is born, nothing dies, nothing is pure,
nothing is stained, nothing increases, nothing decreases.”
These are the dualities that make up the world of the mind. These are the guilts, rules, ideologies, and fears inherent in most religious and societal traditions and practices. In the beginning, Sitting becomes an exercise in letting go. Letting go of everything.
The duality melts into oneness when you sit long enough to get to clarity or travel deeply into a plant medicine journey. The thoughts, memories, ideologies, and rules become meaningless artifacts. Curiosities are to be called upon in times of need or to tell a story, but they are no longer the rulers of life. This takes focus, patience, and time. Or it can happen in an instant. You enter the path of liberating yourself from enslavement to thoughts, memories, feelings, emotions, and false ideas. Every moment is the first moment of existence. There is no real goal. No destination. Only tuning more and more into the eternal moment of Now. This is a path for the courageous.
In deep meditation and in deep medicine work, the opportunity can arise to return to that formless One that has existed eternally. A being can temporarily leave the world of dualities and enter a state of the Perfection of Wisdom, entering perfect peace.
“There is . . . no path to follow”
In Amazonian shamanism, they talk about el camino, the way or the path. In Taoism, they talk about the Tao, which loosely means way or path, though there is no exact English translation. But Avalokiteśvara says that there is no path to follow. What does that mean? What is the path? In reality and with true wisdom, it can be seen that it’s just another of the multitudinous machinations of the mind. When I say “path,” I have my own ideas of what it means. When you hear “path,” you have your ideas. It is trying to put an idea upon that which is beyond all ideas. When one sits in one place long enough, all thoughts vanish into the non-existence from which they came.
There is no attainment of wisdom and no wisdom to attain.
How much of what we call spirituality is based on attaining wisdom? More importantly, what is wisdom? How does it differ from knowledge? Does reading hundreds of books about wisdom make a person wise? Attending endless self-growth seminars? Reading the sacred scriptures of your religion or any other religion so many times that you can quote verbatim by chapter and verse and expound upon their vast meanings by quoting and analyzing multiple scholars of the past? The Heart Sutra points out that this is not possible. In our human attempts to learn wisdom, no matter how sincere, there is no wisdom to be found and no wisdom to attain.
“The Bodhisattvas rely on the Perfection of Wisdom,
and so, with no delusions, they feel no fear
and have Nirvana here and now.”
In the next line, though, Avalokiteśvara speaks about relying on the Perfection of Wisdom. When I first saw this, I was baffled. There is no wisdom to attain, yet the Bodhisattvas rely on the Perfection of Wisdom.
Centuries after the Heart Sutra was first spoken, Rumi spoke to this:
There are two kinds of intelligence:
one acquired, as a child in school, memorizes facts and concepts from books and
from what the teacher says, collecting information . . .
There is another kind of tablet, one already completed and preserved inside you.
A spring overflowing its springbox.
A freshness in the center of the chest.
This other intelligence does not turn yellow or stagnate.
It’s fluid, and it doesn’t move from outside to inside through conduits of plumbing-learning.
This second knowing is a fountainhead from within you, moving out[2].
This is such an eloquent explanation for the acquired knowledge that is mistaken for wisdom. From this, we can see that Wisdom is something different. It is the natural state of our being. It is already there, inside of us. It needs no learning, no scriptures, no philosophies, no rules, and no requirements for experiencing it.
When I strip away everything that I know and think I know, there is still something that remains. A deep understanding, a deep experience that is, in itself, pure Wisdom. What is part of the unified eternal is what I am versus everything I have learned, experienced, and remembered from this life, perhaps all other lives. This cannot be put into words any more than I could learn what a mango tastes like by listening to you tell me of your experience of a mango or reading infinite scholarly studies of the chemistry, composition, uses, and growing techniques of mangoes.
When there is wisdom, there is no delusion, an idiosyncratic belief or impression maintained despite being contradicted by reality or a rational argument. I see delusional thinking daily in so many places. It is closely related to cognitive dissonance in that the deluded person cannot be convinced that their beliefs or perceptions are not reality-based. Yet, we all carry some delusional thinking. It may manifest in thinking someone you know is thinking or feeling something about or towards you. You may have a clear memory of something that happened differently than your memory tells you. It may be the delusions of lack of self-worth. It is the delusion of not knowing you are loved.
These delusions have two things in common. First, they almost always create fear; second, they destroy the ability to perceive reality just as it is. This veil of illusory thinking and perception is the gist of what illusory thinking leads to. Typically, these are on the continuum of mental illness, which is common, if not nearly universal.
End of Part 2 of Beyond the Beyond
[1] Apologies to quantum physicists for this overly simplistic explanation.
[2] Rumi. "Two Kinds of Intelligence." In Poems of Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks. Threshold Books.
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