On Self-Emptying

The Art of Letting Go

Today I intended to write about a current political issue that may be better understood when viewed through a legal lens, and I still may do so another time. But the recent coincidence of two events is leading me to a clearer understanding of how to live a better life, and I wanted to share those revelations with you.

The first event was an episode of one of my favorite podcasts, “On Being,” by Krista Tippett. On Thursday, Tippett featured her interview of Buddhist writer and scholar Stephen Batchelor. She interviewed him about his recent book, “The Art of Solitude.”

Well into the interview, Batchelor commented on the Buddhist concept of nirvana (no, not the rock band). Although not a Buddhist myself, I’ve always had a rudimentary understanding of nirvana, one that I would have defined incorrectly as a state of nothingness. Searching online, I learned that nirvana is a Sanskrit word literally meaning “the blowing out,” and is characterized by “the cessation of desire and hence the end of suffering.” Batchelor describes nirvana as the absence of negative traits, and the process of self-emptying that leads to it:

Batchelor: . . . Nirvana is not some Buddhist heaven somewhere, someplace you go to after you die or some deep mystical experience you might, if you’re lucky, land in, one day. But nirvana as the Buddha defined it is simply the absence of greed, absence of dislike, and absence of egoism. In other words, it is described as a kind of — it’s a solitude in which you’re not being crowded out by your attachments and your fears and your egoistic confusions. That’s what you’re solitary from.

You see, in Tibetan and some of these Asian languages, you can use “solitude” as a verb. You could say, “I’m solitary of anger,” which means, I’m empty of anger. If you look it up, “solitude,” look it up in a Tibetan dictionary, it gives as a synonym, “emptiness.”

Tippett: That’s really interesting, too, because to me, the language of “to be solitary of,” as opposed to how the word “emptiness” strikes me in English, is that to be solitary — it has more agency, solitariness. It’s not a nothingness.

Batchelor: No, not at all.

Tippett: It has agency, and it has sovereignty.

Batchelor: That’s right. Exactly. And when I first started studying Buddhism, when I was a young man, the point that my teachers made again and again and again and again was, when we talk about emptiness, we don’t just mean a sort of a void. Emptiness is only meaningful as an emptiness of something. It’s a relative term. It’s not an absolute term. You are empty of attachment, let’s say, or empty of a particular opinion.

And so perhaps a better way to render that in English would be to talk of this as a process of emptying — to think of it as a verb. In other words, we empty our minds of our greed and our hatred and our attachment; we don’t empty our minds of generosity and love and wisdom. You have to differentiate, in solitude, what it is that you are letting go of and what it is you are allowing the space for. The problem with anger and hatred and fear and so on is not that they are uncomfortable, unpleasant, and often cause a lot of grief. The other problem is they block us from doing anything else. They literally crowd our minds to such a point that we can’t really even conceive, in that moment, of an alternative response.

I must admit that I was listening to the podcast while trying to multitask, and I had to go back and listen to parts of it again. But even on the first hearing, the repetition of the words “emptiness” and “emptying” struck a chord with me, and when I went back, the discussion of emptying ourselves of the bad to make more room for the good opened my eyes to a new (or, at least, renewed) way of seeing how to be a better person.

The second shoe dropped on Saturday, this time from a Western religious tradition. I subscribe to e-mailed daily meditations from Franciscan Richard Rohr of the Center for Action and Contemplation. I read the offerings most days, and on Saturdays review the list of the past week’s meditations to learn about the ones I missed. The summary of the Friday meditation read: “Could the crazy notion of self-emptying, a notion found in different forms in many religious traditions, be a clue to what is wrong with our way of being in the world as well as a suggestion of how we might live differently?”

The Friday installment quotes at length from the late Sallie McFague, author of “Blessed are the Consumers: Climate Change and the Practice of Restraint.” The meditation describes McFague as “a renowned scholar in the theological disciplines of ecology, economics, and feminist Christianity.” McFague wrote: “To empty the self is not an act of denial, but of fulfillment, for it creates space for God to fill one’s being.” McFague was focused on the problems of rampant consumerism and social justice, which she approached from a theological perspective. Her perspective was grounded in Christian tradition, but seems to track closely with the Buddhist thinking that Batchelor described in the “On Being” podcast.

This one-two punch of the podcast and the meditation immediately caught my attention. It awakened in me the notion that the quest for self-improvement is a two-part equation. We can’t better ourselves just by trying to add to our good characteristics like compassion, kindness, empathy, and generosity. We also need to make room for those characteristics by emptying ourselves of the bad, like selfishness, anger, cynicism, and hatred. If we don’t allow for the emptying, we will have too little space for the filling.

Of course, these concepts are not new. They are, in fact, thousands of years old, and even have penetrated our modern mythology (as in “Star Wars,” when Luke says to Darth Vader “Let go of your hate.”) Still, because of the podcast and the meditation, I am beginning to think about them in a new way. And I’m excited about that because I think the emptying not only is the primary, but also the easier task. It is simply a letting go. When we feel anger growing, take a breath and let it go. When we find ourselves acting selfishly, let go of whatever it is we are holding onto. When we react cynically to persons or situations, let go of our judgmental attitude and try to see the good in them.

And here’s a hypothesis I’m sure others have considered and I am now considering: in our pursuit of happiness, we put the cart before the horse. We tend to seek happiness and its trappings as ends in themselves. Perhaps we would do better to make room for happiness as an incidental byproduct of the self-emptying process that Batchelor and McFague describe. Or if not happiness, then peace, contentment, joy. I wonder if that’s what McFague was getting at in her criticism of our consumeristic culture.

In modest ways, I have tried to incorporate these principles in my daily living, but I have lacked the intentionality to do so often enough or well. Now that the confluence of the podcast and the meditation have gotten my attention, I hope to do a better job at the type of self-emptying they describe. And, unlike Darth Vader, maybe I still have time to see it through.

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You can find the “On Being” interview of Stephen Batchelor here. His book, “The Art of Solitude,” can be found here.

You can find the meditation from the Center for Action and Contemplation here.

Sallie McFague’s book, “Blessed are the Consumers: Climate Change and the Practice of Restraint,” can be found here.