Compassion, Emptiness, and the Imaginal

The Two Arrows

Being human is a challenge. We all face times when things just don’t go our way or we are treated unfairly. Sometimes even getting our basic needs met can become a struggle. We experience periods of sadness, regret, shame, and anger over things that have happened to us. Then there is the fear of an uncertain future that we know will involve sickness, loss, and finally death.

“It is sometimes said that a quarter of the suffering we experience is born of uncontrollable events, and three-quarters is born of trying to avoid the first quarter.”
Christina Feldman

Resilience (the ability to adapt), courage, and inner-strength are key resources that help us face the challenges that come our way in life. We can easily tap into these resources when we feel sufficiently supported and encouraged. Some of this support and encouragement may come from the outside, from family and friends, but the most critical source is from within ourselves. We refer to this as self-compassion.

The problem that many of us face is that when things go wrong, instead of being nurtured by self-compassion, our mind is doing something else. The Buddha explained this situation using the parable of the two arrows.

Imagine you are walking through a forest, when out of nowhere, you are struck by an arrow. Here the arrow represents all of the unfavorable events that can happen to us. The best thing to do here would be to get to safety and tend to our wound, but this isn’t what often happens. Instead, our mind focuses on other things such as:

How unfair it is that we have been hit by an arrow – how it shouldn’t have happened.
Blaming ourselves for not avoiding the arrow.
Obsessively telling ourselves stories about what has happened.
Denying what has happened because we can’t deal with it.
Pretending we don’t care.

The Buddha described the above reactions as being similar to getting hit by a second arrow. At times when we could be comforted and strengthened by self-compassion, instead we are doing something that is increasing our pain and making it harder to deal with the situation. The first arrow is unavoidable (life won’t always go our way), but the second arrow is avoidable. Inthis post, we will look at how this second arrow is empty and that by gaining insight into this emptiness we can avoid it.

What is compassion?

“Compassion is the natural response of the heart to suffering when the heart is not preoccupied with self-interest… or if it’s to our own suffering, it’s the natural response of the heart when we’re not entangled in some kind of negative self-view, negative self-belief. And that natural response of the heart, when it comes into contact with the pain of the world, it wants to heal, it wants to alleviate, to soothe, to ease that suffering.”
Rob Burbea

The word ‘compassion’ is related to the Latin word ‘compati’ which can be translated as ‘suffer with’ or ‘be with suffering’. It means that when we are faced with discomfort, we turn fully towards it rather than turning away. Compassion should never be confused with pity which when directed towards others is condescending (e.g. ‘poor you’) or when directed towards ourselves is a type of avoidance (e.g. ‘this should not be happening to me’).

The words ‘compassion’ and ‘empathy’ are sometimes used interchangeably, but it is important to distinguish between them. We could say that compassion involves empathy, but it also involves other important elements such as wisdom. In fact, empathy without wisdom can cause harm.

Some people are described as empaths, and these individuals are so sensitive to other people’s emotions that their mood can instantly change depending on how other people are feeling. This means that if somebody is feeling bad, the empath can start to feel bad too, and so there is a doubling of the amount of suffering. The compassion we are talking about here doesn’t increase suffering, but instead is always a balm to suffering.

Compassion that causes harm isn’t real compassion. If our attempts at compassion are causing us harm, it means we have somehow gone off track. Remember, compassion doesn’t increase suffering, and there is no real compassion without self-compassion.

The development of compassion has been likened to a skill that you get better at by doing it. The risk is when we try to do too much too soon. If we were to suddenly try to face everything that we have spent years avoiding, it would likely cause us harm – we would be overwhelmed. This would be like going into a gym for the first time and going straight for the heaviest weights.

Why is compassion important?

It is compassion that gives us the ability to face the challenges that life throws our way. It allows us to connect deeply with our own pain, and by doing so, it soothes us and gives us the strength to move forward.

Self-compassion is the foundation for compassion towards other people. Difficulties arise when we try to express compassion without sufficient self-compassion. This can cause us harm and it can mean our efforts are ineffective. We will never know exactly what it is like to be another human being, but when we face our own pain, we develop a deep sense of what the other person is dealing with. It is this that distinguishes compassion from pity.

Compassion greatly increases our capacity to cope with things. Imagine adding a teaspoon of salt to a cup of water, it would taste salty, wouldn’t it? But what would happen if we added that same teaspoon to a bath full of water, or a lake full of water, it would become less and less of an issue. This is what happens with compassion, our pain lessens as our capacity to hold it increases.

“The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.”
Thomas Merton

If avoiding suffering worked, conditions such as alcoholism would be viewed as a skill rather than an affliction. Carl Jung, the famous psychiatrist and psychotherapist, once described how all neurosis is created by our attempts to avoid legitimate pain. The problem with trying to escape our problems isn’t simply that it doesn’t work but that it makes things so much worse. Compassion gives us the strength to not only face our own problems but also the issues facing all of humanity. If we fail to develop compassion , life will always be a struggle, and this means not only increased pain for ourselves but also for other people too.

Compassion is the noblest of all human qualities (although we need to be careful about limiting compassion to something just we humans experience as there are plenty of examples of animals exhibiting a similar capacity). To feel compassionate is to feel good. One of the most wonderful things about this ability is it allows us to feel deeply connected to others, and this is something our hearts yearn for. It means we no longer feel so alone.

”So much of the time, we’re enclosed in self-interest, in being concerned for ourselves. And when the heart moves out to hold, to touch, to support, to heal another, we’re actually breaking out of that prison of self-interest. And it’s a huge relief, a huge relief.”
Rob Burbea

Compassion for others also means we get a break from our own concerns. When we are preoccupied with our own stuff, we are like passengers on an aircraft who insist on flapping their hands to keep the plane moving. Such useless activity becomes tiring, and the same can be said for the constant judgments and predictions our mind is making about our life. By focusing our attention on another person, there can be an incredible sense of release.

The benefits of developing compassion would include:

Obstacles to Compassion – The Second Arrow

It would be hard to deny that compassion is an incredibly powerful ally to have in life, so why is it that we don’t make more use of it? Why do we not always show ourselves compassion? Why can experiencing compassion for other people be so difficult at times?

We have already mentioned the second arrow, and it is this that not only increases our difficulties but also acts as an obstacle to compassion. It does this by putting us in a state of resistance towards what is happening – it is not possible to show compassion towards something we are resisting.

The second arrow works as an obstacle to compassion in a number of ways such as:

We have a story about how life should be, and when this story is challenged, we feel threatened, unbalanced, and fearful. We may even experience a sense of outrage (this shouldn’t have happened).
We have a story about how we should be, and when we don’t live up to these expectations, we feel shame, guilt and self-loathing.
We have a story about how other people should be, and when they don’t live up to our expectations, we can feel resentment, anger, and disgust.

“Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination.”

Yuval Noah Harari

In his book, ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind’ the historian Yuval Noah Harari talks about ‘imagined realities’. He describes how so much of our thinking is based on things that only exist in the human mind (e.g. try explaining to a bear in Yellowstone Park that it lives in the United States). These imagined realities have made it possible for humans to cooperate on a huge scale (e.g. millions of soldiers become willing to fight for their country), and it is this that has allowed us to be so successful at taking over the planet.

We humans have an amazing ability to create stories and find meaning in things. This gives us a map that we can use to navigate our life. Things start to go wrong when we mistake this map of reality for reality itself. This creates a world that is in conflict with the world we inhabit and a ‘me’ that is in conflict with the experience of being me. Resistance arises when we insist that it is our story (our map) about what is happening that is right rather than what is actually happening.

We have become so hypnotized by our stories that we are now a prisoner to them – or as the poet William Blake once described, these stories have become mind-forged manacles. It can feel like our own mind is working against us because rather than receiving comfort when things get hard, we get overwhelmed and plagued by negativity, doubt, and denial. We become disconnected from life, so it feels like we are all alone and overwhelmed.

The first step of escaping prison is to realize that we are in one. Next we need to understand the nature of this prison, so we can plan our escape. The way we do this when it comes to the prison of the second arrow is to gain insight into emptiness.

What is emptiness?

Emptiness is a way of looking that alleviates the suffering caused by the second arrow. It does this by showing us how our conditioned way of relating to life (our stories) means we are not seeing things clearly. We start to notice how we have been deluded by the second arrow, and this makes it possible to wake up (awakening) from this disillusion. The word ‘Buddha’ means ‘awake’.

We have a tendency to view ourselves and the world in a rigid way (e.g. ‘it’s just the way I am’ or ‘people just don’t like me’), but when we investigate our experience, we see this rigidity is created by the conditioned mind (the story-telling mind) rather than the nature of things. In other words, the problem isn’t so much life but with our habitual way of relating to life.

Please note that emptiness is not a claim that things do not exist, but that they don’t exist in the way that our minds tend to view them. It is also worth mentioning that emptiness is intended as a remedy to a problem rather than as a philosophy to be argued about or for us to adopt it as a belief system. In fact, Nagurjuna (who is considered the second-most influential person within Buddhism) wrote:

“The victorious ones have said

That emptiness is the relinquishing of all views.

For whomever emptiness is a view,

That one has accomplished nothing.”

Emptiness is a way of looking at things. It is therefore not recommended that we grasp onto it as The Absolute Truth, but more as a tool to make life easier. If working with emptiness doesn’t reduce suffering, there is absolutely no value in wasting time on it. Emptiness is an incredibly deep and profound teaching, but we don’t need to fully comprehend what others have said about it in order to benefit. It’s just like a hammer, you don’t need to know all about the history of hammers, the philosophy of hammers, or the mechanics of hammers in order to make use of this tool.

Once we have gained sufficient insight into emptiness, we can let go of this teaching because otherwise it just becomes another belief. Treat it as a medicine that we take for a limited time period until our ailment is cured. The Buddha described his path as like a raft that we use to get from one bank of the river to the other side. Once we reach the other side, we don’t need to take the raft with us because it can soon become a burden. Or, as they say in Zen, ‘if you see the Buddha on the road, kill him’ (i.e. don’t become attached).

To say that something is empty means that it lacks inherent existence. We divide the world up into objects such as trees, cars, buildings, dogs, plants, and so on, but none of these things can exist independent of other things. A tree depends on soil, air, water, and gravity just for starters. As the famous astronomer Carl Sagan once described, “If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe”.

Show Me a Tree

If I asked you to imagine a tree, what would you see? Do all trees look like this one in your imagination? In fact, the word ‘tree’ refers to a huge range of possibilities, yet we can identify them with just this one word. Then of course is the fact that a tree isn’t a static thing but a constantly changing one from seed to sapling, and on to mature trees. Our word ‘tree’ is actually just a mind-created category for a process that exists within a much larger process. This means that without the human mind, there is no tree – therefor the word ‘tree’ is empty.

Our ability to carve the world up creates dualities that don’t exist outside of our mind. For example, our concept of ‘long’ depends on the concept ‘short’ – you can’t have one without the other. Imagine we lived in a world where there was only one possible temperature, what would happen to the words ‘hot’ and ‘cold’? Would they still exist? If not, where would they go to? Hot can’t exist without cold and cold can’t exist without hot so both of these concepts are empty of an inherent existence.

So far, this might all sound like pointless philosophizing, but the point is that our certainties about life, all of our stories, are built on shaky ground. If we can begin to see this, we can then develop a more fluid relationship with reality so that real and lasting well-being becomes a viable option.

Here is the most important point, everything we experience is dependent on the mind. This is not to say that things don’t exist outside of the mind (an argument which has been debated in philosophy for thousands of years and may never be settled), but that we only get to experience our mind’s interpretation of what is there. The fact that the objects of our experience depend on our mind for existence means they are empty of inherent existence. We suffer because we treat our interpretations (our stories or maps) as if they were real.

“Things appear to exist from their own side, without depending upon our mind.”
Geshe Kelsang

Emptiness of Self

We act as if there is a self that is separate from what we are experiencing and that this self has the power to control what we are experiencing. When this separate self fails to control what is happening, we experience shame and fear.

We view our thoughts as being created by this self that is separate from experience, but this becomes a source of suffering when we notice that these thoughts are often in conflict with one another (e.g. we want to eat less chocolate yet have an urge to go eat a chocolate bar). This belief in a separate self means we become troubled by the different agendas playing out in our minds (in psychology this is referred to as cognitive dissonance).

One of the key insights of the Buddha is that there is no evidence for a self that is separate from experience. This is important because it is our belief in this ‘I’ separate from experience that creates a sense of resistance or attachment to what is going on (e.g. this shouldn’t be happening).

One of the ways the Buddha demonstrated the emptiness of the self is his teachings on the five aggregates. The word ‘aggregate’ can be defined as ‘element’, and the five aggregates are a way of dividing our experience of reality into five elements (or five kinds of stuff).

The five aggregates include:

To give you an idea of how this all works, imagine you are blindfolded and you allow a friend to put a piece of food in your mouth. As the food (form) enters your mouth, you become aware of it (consciousness). You then notice a pleasant taste (feeling), as the food is identified as a strawberry (perception). You start remembering how your grandmother used to make tasty strawberry cake (mental formation).

The Buddha made two important observations about the 5 aggregates:

We have never experienced anything beyond these 5 aggregates.
These five aggregates are automatic processes.

If what the Buddha observed is true, where is the self (separate from experience) in all of this? If all of these five elements of experience happen automatically, what would be the function of a separate self? If we look at our experience and can’t find a separate self, why are we so sure it exists? This is an important question because it is our belief in this separate self that creates the sense of what we ‘should’ and ‘shouldn’t’ be doing, and it is our failure to live up to the standards of this separate self that leads to shame and other negative beliefs about ourselves. It is this separate self that determines if we are worthy of compassion or not.

“Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself—and there isn’t one.”
Wei Wu Wei

Our usual sense of self depends on the five aggregates. If those five aggregates were to disappear, what would happen to this sense of self? In other words, our sense of self is empty of inherent existence, and is therefore an illusion created by the mind. Important – this is not to say that we don’t exist, but that we don’t exist in the way we usually think we do.

In order to navigate life, our mind creates the sense of a separate self, but this distinction between ‘me’ and everything else only exists in the mind. We experience the world as the five aggregates but rather than being separate from these aggregates, we are these five aggregates because without them we would be nothing.

“Buddhism views excessive self-centeredness as the primary source of suffering, causing us to act in ways that harm ourselves and others, from infidelity and dishonesty to murder, terrorism, and war. The habit of self-concern creates pain in our closest relationships, gives rise to greed and hatred, and torments our hearts on a daily basis. There is no way to a true and lasting happiness without seeing into and eventually overcoming this force.”
Guy Armstrong

The most common reason for why we withhold self-compassion when things go wrong is that we are too busy blaming ourselves for what has happened. We feel undeserving of self-compassion because we have failed to live up to our story of who we should be. This is a huge problem because we are trying to live up to the standards of a mirage. There is no ‘who we should be’, there is only who we are.

Sometimes we don’t see things clearly. We make mistakes – maybe even terrible mistakes that will have huge consequences for our life. When we are overwhelmed by a situation, or we are in physical or emotional pain, we are more likely to do things we later regret. We do have to accept the consequences of our actions, but it is cruel to withhold self-compassion because we have failed to live up to the standards of a self that only exists in our imagination. When we understand this about ourselves, it becomes much easier to feel compassion towards other people.

What happens to children who never receive support and comfort from their caregivers? What happens to the adult who doesn’t receive support and comfort from within? Could it be that our failure to provide self-compassion means we more easily become overwhelmed by life and therefore more likely to behave in ways that we later regret? For example, the person who eats for comfort, but feels full of shame about being overweight, is highly likely to turn to food for comfort in response to feeling bad.

The Three Characteristics of Existence

Another important emptiness teaching involves insight into the three characteristics of existence. Once again, this looks at how our ideas about life are in conflict with what we are actually experiencing. We start to see how the deluded mind goes into resistance against what is happening with thoughts such as ‘this should not be happening’.

These three characteristics are impermanence, non-self, and the nature of suffering. We have already examined non-self when we looked at the five aggregates, so let’s examine the other two.

Impermanence

Remember before when we talked about trees, and we described how a tree is more like a process than a solid thing. The same can be said about everything we experience. It is all changing, yet our minds create the sense of solidity and permanence, so we try to grasp onto things as if they were solid and unchanging.

One way this works against us is that we have our ideas about the way the world needs to be in order for us to be happy. We try to find lasting satisfaction in conditions that are always changing. Maybe we will be lucky enough so that one day everything falls into place and we can be happy, but this is only ever going to be a temporary situation. Things are going to change, and if we depend too much on things remaining the same, we are going to suffer. It is like we spend our lives building sandcastles close to the water’s edge and keep on feeling disappointment when our hard work gets washed away.

Our inner-stories create expectations about the way things ‘should be’, and we are constantly troubled because things rarely go the way we expect. Life refuses to conform to our map. Often this discomfort is minor enough that we can simply ignore it (e.g. a friend fails to compliment us on our new dress). It helps if we are in a good mood. At other times, the conflict between our stories and reality are so great that we start to feel overwhelmed and upset.

Our failure to see impermanence also means we give way too much significance to what is going on right now. So, when we feel bad, it can seem that it is going to be this way forever. We fail to see that our thoughts, our feelings, our body sensations, and our mood are like the weather and are always changing. If we try to attach to any particular mood, sensation, feeling, or way of thinking, we will suffer. If we try to resist any particular mood, sensation, feeling, or way of thinking, we will also suffer.

The Nature of Suffering

The third characteristic of existence is suffering. To put it simply, we suffer because we treat what is impermanent as if it were permanent, and what is non-self as if it were self. This causes us to cling onto these things in a way that causes us harm – it creates resistance to what is happening. The Buddha discovered that when we stop treating what is impermanent as permanent and non-self as self, we escape suffering. This is something that we can start to see for ourselves in meditation.

“We will realize that all phenomena are only deceptions; nothing is stable or permanent, but rather everything is ceaselessly changing and has the characteristics of impermanence, suffering, and not-self.”
Ajahn Chah

How Vipassana Meditation Leads to Insight into Emptiness

Knowing about emptiness, or believing in it, is unlikely to have much of an impact in our lives. It is only by developing insight into emptiness that things begin to change for us. This word ‘insight’ is a special type of knowing that leads to a permanent shift in how we relate to life. A useful definition of insight comes from Rob Burbea when he refers to it as ‘seeing that frees’.

Vipassana meditation is a tool for gaining insight into emptiness. It does this by allowing us to clearly see how our experience of the world is created. There are different ways of doing Vipassana, but here we will be looking at the Mahasi noting approach.

Simple Mahasi Vipassana Technique

Begin by noticing the rise and fall of the breath in the abdomen.
Keep your attention on the rise and fall of the breath in the abdomen (if you find it useful, you can silently repeat the words ‘rising’ and ‘falling’.
When your mind wanders away from the rise and fall of the breath, label the distraction as either thinking, seeing, touching*, smelling, hearing, or tasting.
Keep returning to the rise and fall of the breath in the abdomen.

*’Touching’ includes all physical sensation and movement. Please note that our emotions are physical sensations that are being labelled in a certain way.

As you practice this Vipassana technique, you will start to notice that your experience is constantly changing. Your mind may return to an object like thinking or hearing many times over the course of the meditation, but each time is completely unique and never to be repeated. This is what it means to see impermanence in action. As you continue to observe, you will notice how impossible it is for the mind to pin down what is happening into any kind of story.

Another thing you will notice while engaging with this technique is how each of the six objects (thinking, seeing, touching, smelling, hearing, and tasting) all just arise within your awareness – there is no ‘I’ separate from the experience consciously controlling things.

Finally, you will also begin to notice how suffering arises and ceases. When you are able to just watch the passing show without attachment or resistance, there is no suffering. It is only when the mind gets hooked onto one of these objects (e.g. by creating a story) or tries to resist one of these objects that suffering occurs.

As well as doing the Vipassana practice in formal meditation, it is also important to look for examples of impermanence, non-self, and suffering as you go about your day. The more you are able to do it, the sooner the mind will be able to resist the second arrow. For example, if you are walking to your car, notice all of the sights, sounds, thoughts, smells etc. that grab your attention. You will see that what you experience is unique and never to be repeated, and there is no way you could capture it with words such as ‘I walked to the car’.

Imaginal Practices to Gain Insight Into Emptiness

Imagine four people and a dog walking down the same street at the exact same time in New York. One of the four is a criminal, one is a tourist, one is a local person, and one is homeless. Would each of these individuals be having the exact same experience/perception of this New York street? Would the dog be having the exact same experience/perception as the other four? If all five are having different perceptions, who is having the right perception of the street? Is there a right perception or are they all empty?

The fact that there is no right way of perceiving a situation means we are free to perceive in different ways. We can’t change what is happening, but we can certainly change the way we relate to what is happening. In fact, this is how compassion works. We start to see that when things aren’t going our way, but we respond with self-compassion, we experience something very different than what would have happened if we had responded with resistance and self-blame.

We can use our imagination to change our perception. This is what we mean by imaginal practices. Tonglen (this can be translated as giving and receiving) is a practice that comes from Tibet and is another useful technique for developing compassion.

Tonglen

Use your imagination to create the sense that you are pulling things into your heart as you breathe in and sending things out of your heart as you breathe out. Now choose a time in your life when you felt overwhelmed by things, and visualize this situation as best you can. Imagine that as you breathe in, you are willingly taking that pain into your heart, and as you breathe out, you are sending this old you comfort. You can visualize this old you being soothed as you do this . After you have worked in this way for a few minutes (as long as it feels helpful), consider the fact that right now there are maybe millions of people experiencing a similar type of pain. Imagine as you breathe in, you are willingly taking on some of this pain out of compassion, and you are sending these people comfort as you breathe out.