Three Core Issues on the Spiritual Journey
This is a deep dive into three issues I have been trying to understand for a long time in my spiritual journey. In recent years, two teachers have been especially helpful with these questions: Tsong Khapa (1357-1419), the Tibetan Buddhist monk and teacher, and Meister Eckhart (1260–1328), the Christian theologian, philosopher, and mystic. This essay will focus on Tsong Khapa, and a later edition will deal with Meister Eckhart.
Since I do not read Tibetan, and have scant knowledge of their vast literature, the thoughts presented here will rely primarily on ideas shared by Robert Thurman. He was Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University until his retirement in 2019, held the first endowed chair in Buddhist Studies in the West, was the co-founder and president of the Tibet House in New York, and was the recipient of India’s highly prestigious Padma Shri award in 2020 for his work in the field of literature and education. Thurman started his personal Tibetan Buddhist practice in 1962 and was ordained as a monk by the Dalai Lama in 1965, thus probably becoming the first American Buddhist monk in the Tibetan tradition. Through the years, Thurman and the Dalai Lama have remained close friends.
I relate this much information about Robert Thurman because I must rely on what he shares about Tsong Khapa, thus his credentials seem important. The ideas presented below are taken mostly from an audio program entitled “Buddhist Theory of Relativity,” supplemented by other programs by Thurman entitled “The Yoga of Ordinary Living,” “Liberation Upon Hearing in the Between: Living with the Tibetan Book of the Dead,” and “Modern Thought in Buddhism.” All these are audio programs. His most relevant book is The Life and Teachings of Tsong Khapa, but for me, the ideas are much more clearly presented in the audio programs.
What follows is not a replication of Thurman’s ideas, but the way I have come to understand three core issues in light of my own reflections, which have been significantly affected by the deep insights Tsong Khapa offers through Thurman’s voice. (Tsong Khapa was himself to a certain extent following and explicating the thought of Nagarjuna, who lived in second century India and is considered by many as one of the most important Buddhist philosophers.) I believe these insights can be of great value to anyone on a spiritual journey today.
In what follows there is a good bit of repetition, but these are complex issues, so if you have wrestled with any of them for a long time yourself, perhaps having the ideas repeated in slightly different ways will bring you a little closer to your own insights.
The three core issues I will focus on that Tsong Khapa spoke to are:
- What is the ego, and is it a good thing or bad? Or is “no-self” the actual reality—with the ego, self, or “I” only delusions. If this is the case, how can I best understand no-self, selflessness, non-duality? There is much talk today about these words, but there is also much confusion about what they mean. How can I better understand their relevance to my life and journey?
- Is the world I seem to perceive “out there” real, or is it an illusion? If it is an illusion, why bother with it? Why try to be good, to love and help others out there in that illusory world? If the primary goal is selflessness, awakening, freedom, opening to the Infinite, finding God—what should be my relationship to the world “out there”?
- What about suffering? Why is there suffering, and what should I do about it—my own and that of others? Is the goal to free myself from suffering? Yet some teachers say the path to freedom from suffering requires sacrifice, even suffering. If that is so, how much must I sacrifice, and how long should I put up with suffering in order to end my suffering? How will I know how much is necessary? Or is the important goal to help others who are suffering, even if it requires sacrifice and suffering on my part?
If the world is an illusion, why bother with it?
If the world is an illusion, which so many of those who have had a mystical or transcendent experience say (and I have glimpsed at moments myself), why treat the everyday world we normally perceive as important?
Tsong Khapa says there are two ways we can perceive the world:
- We perceive the objective existence of things
We take the objects, people, and events we encounter every day as real things existing in the world out there, outside of us. They seem to exist in a world external to us, and that world seems completely real. The things in it seem to objectively exist. This is the world of science and normal social relations—the point of view from which we interact with and manipulate the objects, people, and things that we perceive in the normal, everyday world.
- We perceive the objective non-existence of things
In a transcendent or mystical moment, we perceive that everything we had taken to be real within the everyday world is not the only reality. We see clearly that the things we had taken to be real in our everyday perceptional frame are not solid and substantial in the way we had thought them to be. This is not a fuzzy or vague perception but a clear, sharp penetration into a different dimension.
Most people go through their lives using the 1st way of perceiving to determine what is real. They do not consciously choose to do this—it is how we are conditioned to see from the time we come into the world. Thus, as we go through a normal day, we focus our attention on a small number of things in the world around us and everything else, which we perceive in a vague, peripheral way, is background information surrounding the primary perception.
On the other hand, saints, sages, and mystics through the ages have had powerful moments in which they clearly saw “the objective non-existence of things.” This opened them to an understanding that the world as we normally perceive it is not what it seems; rather, the world is “empty,” “no-thing.” “Nothingness” is a better description of ultimate reality than “somethingness.” This is the 2nd way of perceiving—when one has a profound moment of seeing behind the veil. A lot of people never have such a moment, or do not give it importance when they do. This is why many have no understanding of the “objective non-existence of things.” Those who have had such moments, however, say that what they saw is that there is no such thing as an individual “self,” and the only true perspective is to see everything as “non-dual,” “not separate,” “not two.” A person who has had a powerful perception of this reality is sometimes thought of as “awake,” “enlightened,” or “free.”
One consequence is that from this perspective, the problem of suffering is eliminated. You see that you suffer because the world is not giving your ego self what it wants for itself and for other people. You realize you have been judging what is going on by the standard of what your ego wants or thinks is right. If you can see from the 2nd perspective for a moment, however, from this new point of view you see that, as long as you are stuck in the 1st perspective, no end of suffering is possible.
From the 1st perspective, the world and your ego are the only realities, and since the world is not and will never be organized to suit your ego, you will always suffer. (Just one of the reasons is that there are a lot of other egos out there, and their wishes and desires are often in conflict with yours.) There is no escape from suffering as long as you think your ego and the world of the 1st perspective are the only realities. When you can move to the 2nd perspective, however, you see clearly that the world was not set up to fulfill your ego desires and images of how things should be.
A significant number of people have glimpsed the 2nd perspective, but only a few have been able to sustain this 2nd way of perceiving for very long. The 1st way of perceiving is learned naturally as we are growing up, but the 2nd—perceiving the objective non-existence of things, of other people, and of your own ego-self—this requires a profound transcendent moment as well as the ability to hold that new perception after the moment has passed.
Is the goal to escape from suffering?
A statement often attributed to the Buddha is: “I teach one thing and one thing only: suffering and the end of suffering.” But if life is only suffering, why go through all the difficulty, discipline, and pain of trying to awaken? Why not just end your life and be immediately free of suffering?
In the Buddha’s time and place, one answer to that question was that after death you are born again, reincarnated over and over, and if you didn’t find release from the wheel of rebirth in this life, your next birth might be even more difficult. This answer is sufficient for anyone who believes in reincarnation, but for those who have not made reincarnation an act of faith, this idea does not provide a reason to go on living.
Another issue for me is that my experience of life is that it is not primarily made up of suffering. Not even close. I have had many wonderful moments, including great adventures, satisfying achievements, the joy of helping others, terrific sex, the pleasures of music, literature, theater, watching sunsets, talking with friends. During much of my life, the good times have far out-weighed the suffering. So why would I want to focus on suffering?
In answer to this question, I have been told that things will get worse, so I should get busy trying to end suffering now. But if I am not suffering much now, am having a good life, why not make the most of it? If I start to have too much suffering, then I can end it when that happens. Since I haven’t accepted reincarnation as a given, if the suffering becomes more than I want to put up with, then I’ll just end my life and there will be no further problem. In the meantime, my experience is that life has both suffering and happiness, good times and bad, and if there is no deeper meaning, then what I want is to learn how to increase the good times and decrease the bad. I don’t want to focus on how to end suffering, but how to have as many good moments as possible. Few modern Buddhists I have read or talked with have given a very good answer to this question. They either assert that I should accept reincarnation as an act of faith, or they tell me about all the suffering they have had, or that others have had.
A further issue I have tried to understand in relation to the issue of suffering concerns the lives of all those people who have chosen to undergo personal suffering in service to a cause, to help other people, or to create art. Many, many people have lived in a way that increased their personal suffering, as exemplified by figures such as Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., Joan of Arc, Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Vincent Van Gogh, and Dorothy Day. How does this relate to the goal of trying to end suffering?
What is emptiness?
One place to start trying to better understand the three core issues is with the concepts of emptiness, nothingness, the idea that “nothing is real” or “all is illusion.” If these words and concepts capture what is true at the deepest level, as many enlightened beings are interpreted as saying, why do so few people believe this to be true, or live as if it is true? Why do the things of the everyday world seem so real to me and most everyone else I know most all of the time?
Numerous spiritual teachers today are saying that ultimate reality is “empty” or that “nothingness” is the final encounter, or that “no-thing” is what we ultimately are, or that intrinsic reality is “non-dual.” Such statements have always seemed problematic to me, for a variety of reasons. For one, if you identify with “emptiness” or “nothingness” as being who you are, how is that different from identifying with the ego as being who you are, because all these words are concepts in your mind to describe yourself. If you think “I am non-dual” or “I am nothing,” these words have simply replaced other concepts about my identity. Further, if all concepts are “empty,” isn’t the concept of “empty” just as empty as any other concept? If it is a concept, how is it different from any other concept? For instance, “ego” is a concept. “God” is a concept. So how are the concepts “empty” and “nothing” different from the concepts “ego” or “God?” Why is one of these concepts more substantial, more authentic, more true than another?
This is precisely the point at which Tsong Khapa, in Robert Thurman’s understanding, gives one of the most brilliant analyses I have ever encountered. It is complicated, but has been deeply helpful for me.
The basic point is that talking or thinking about emptiness or nothingness cannot really refer to “nothing,” because any concept you form of “nothing” can only be a negation of “something,” another concept you have. There has to be a “something” in your mind that “nothing” is opposed to, is the opposite of. Therefore, “nothing” can never be independent of “somethings,” of a world of things.
To say this in a slightly different way, emptiness and nothingness are concepts that indicate the absence of something. “Nothing” can therefore never be independent of things but can only be a concept involving the absence of things. Thus, “nothingness” is not “nothing,” and “emptiness” is not “empty” of everything.
To use Thurman’s language, if you pursue this deep insight to its conclusion, you recognize the “emptiness of emptiness.” Wisdom’s “diamond-drill” reveals that the concept of emptiness is just as empty as any other concept, so why give it special status or value? The same is true for the concepts “nothingness,” “no-self,” and “non-dual.”
Tsong Khapa’s profound insight is that emptiness and nothingness are without intrinsic identity themselves. One cannot rest in the concept of nothingness, or emptiness, or selflessness as one’s final identity, for all of these words are dependent on prior concepts that one has that have been perceived as having intrinsic existence. In the final analysis, no ideas are separate. The concepts nothingness, selflessness, and emptiness cannot be separate from everything else. Everything is inextricably interrelated with everything else. Ultimately, emptiness is best understood as being empty of thinking you are separate. It is to recognize that you are not separate, that nothing can be ultimately separate, that all words and concepts, as well as all things, are interdependent. There is no way to think about anything that is “itself only” and nothing else.
What did the Buddha really, truly say about “no-self”?
Closely related to understanding emptiness and nothingness is how to understand no-self, selflessness, and non-duality. I hear these words a lot these days, but there is much confusion about what they mean, so how should I understand their relevance to my life and my journey? This question takes me directly to the ego. Is it real or is it an illusion? The world’s wisdom traditions seem to provide contradictory messages. In the Buddhist tradition, this is centered around the controversy as to whether there is a self, or atman, and if not, what “no-self” really means.
A crucial point Robert Thurman makes is that the Buddha taught for 45 years, delivering thousands of sermons to individuals and groups who had very different points of view. Trying to be relevant to each, he adapted what he had to say to fit the audience. If a person was out of balance in one direction, he would say something to bring that person back toward the truth. If a person was out of balance in a different direction, the Buddha would say something different to bring that person back into balance. Crucially, these two teachings would seem to an outside observer to be in contradiction. When the Buddha was questioned about such contradictions during his lifetime, he said that he had both definitive teachings and interpretable teachings. The definitive teachings were totally true, but the interpretable teachings were only relatively true, and depended on the circumstance in which they were being given.
So far so good. But how do we today know which of his teachings were the definitive ones and which were the interpretable ones? The problem is, when he was delivering a discourse, he didn’t indicate which was which. In fact, when he gave an interpretable teaching, he indicated to that audience that it was definitively true. Otherwise, the listener wouldn’t have paid much attention. So how do we today know which is which?
Well, we don’t. We can’t. And in trying to understand his discourses, we additionally have to take into account that each discourse has been through many interpretations and translations through the centuries. Furthermore, each word in any language shifts and changes in what it means with each new generation, so the meaning of any word the Buddha used is subject to debate and interpretation. Each of us and each scholar must decide for ourselves what the meanings are. Or we must decide which expert to believe.
This is important because understanding a key point of Buddhist thought has to do with whether we each have a “self” or “atman” (the word used for self in Sanskrit). Many Buddhists today in the West strongly assert that the Buddha taught “no-self.” Besides the fact that there are many different views about what that phrase means, there is great contradiction in the history of the Buddha’s original words, presented in the book, The Atman-Brahman in Ancient Buddhism by Kamaleswar Bhattacharya. In it, there are numerous quotes where the Buddha clearly says that the atman, or self, does exist. And others in which he says it does not exist.
The only way people today can possibly deal with this, Robert Thurman says, is to acknowledge that the Buddha said many different things that were contradictory. On this subject, in the original texts, the Buddha said: a) each of us has a self, b) there is not a self, and c) there is not not a self. There is no way around the fact that various statements attributed to the Buddha in the most foundational texts are contradictory. So, which is the right view? Unfortunately, there is no definitive edition of the Buddha’s words, let alone what he really meant, to which we can turn. For me, the only solution is to go deeper and deeper within myself, finally getting deep enough that I can come to an understanding for myself on how to reconcile the seeming opposites. This is the kind of deeper understanding that physicist Niels Bohr was getting at when he said: “The opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.” In the same vein, psychologist Carl Jung explored and then taught that we can only comprehend the deepest truths by reconciling views that at first seem to be opposites.
For me, in trying to reconcile the opposites of having a self versus no-self, it is valuable to remember that “no-self” is a concept dependent on imagining the absence of a something—the absence of a self. The idea “no-self” is completely dependent on the thought that there is something called a self that it is not. No-self cannot be empty. Thinking about “no-self” cannot be separated from the existence of a self.
Crossing the threshold
All the world’s wisdom traditions have reports of mystical moments from their founders, moments when these saints and sages entered a different realm from the one we normally experience as the reality of the normal world. Many of the wisest and most important figures in human history have had these moments—the Buddha under the bodhi tree, Moses on Mount Sinai, Jesus in the desert, Mohammed’s visions in his cave, and many, many others from every tradition.
To understand what this might be about, the starting point is to recognize that there are dozens of different kinds of spiritual, mystical, and altered state moments people can have. The spiritual literature is filled with descriptions of many different kinds as well as many different levels of experience, including the seven chakras in Hinduism and the seven castles of St. Teresa of Avila. In some Hindu and Tibetan texts, there are hundreds of different levels a person can visit and experience, each exquisitely differentiated from the others.
Having realized the existence of this vast range of possible experiences beyond the everyday, the next step is to recognize that every tradition speaks of an ultimate dimension, an experience beyond all other experiences, a domain one can enter that goes beyond “experience” as we normally use that word. This is the domain of the seventh chakra of Hinduism and Teresa of Avila’s seventh castle. To describe this timeless dimension, words such as Emptiness, Nothingness, Nirvana, Selflessness, Non-Duality, Heaven, Pure Land, Infinite Light, God, Pure Consciousness, and many others have been used to try to capture what was encountered.
All these words, however, have led to endless debates about what they reference, and often the words used create more confusion than clarity. Why is this so? Why do the most profound moments we human beings can have cause such confusion and misunderstanding? Tsong Khapa presents the best answer I have come across.
From Robert Thurman’s translation: “The experience of nothingness can only be an experience of being on the threshold of the loss of all ‘somethings.’” In other words, at a certain point, as you move into the highest mystical realm, you approach a threshold beyond which you cannot see. The feeling sense that arises is that you are about to lose the reference points of the world you have known, that all the “somethings” that have made up your world are about to disappear.
The next thing that happens, he says, is that, “transcendent insight dissolves … the apparent threshold and the apparently objective nothingness looming beyond.” After that, in Tsong Khapa’s words: “There can be no further ‘experience.’” In other words, as you come to the threshold, if your transcendent insight continues to open, everything shifts, like going into hyperdrive, and whatever happens next is not an “experience,” is not something that can be thought, or described, or put into any category of the mind. It most certainly cannot be put into words. You enter the Cloud of Unknowing, to use a Christian mystical image.
What then? Tsong Khapa: “The next subjective experience must be the threshold on emerging from the trance, even if it be moments, hours, or days later.” So, at some point you emerge from the timeless dimension, from what had seemed to you as you approached it, the threshold of “Nothingness.” After crossing the threshold into the timeless, eventually you cross back into the human world of time. You emerge back into the world you had known before, the world of “things” and language and other people.
What can you then say about what happened, what you experienced—about where you have been from the time you crossed the threshold? The mystics say it is beyond words, beyond speech. As the Tao Te Ching put it, “The name that can be named is not the true Name.” When you come back from that dimension into the realm of the everyday world, anything you say about that which was beyond the threshold is not “It.”
And yet, the great teachers tried to share what they had come to know. But in making this effort, they had to use words from the everyday world to try to convey just a glimpse, a taste. But as the Zen saying captures it, these words can only be “fingers pointing at the moon.” In order to inspire others to search for the moon, such words are necessary. But it is a great mistake to think the words are the same as the mystery beyond the words.
In eastern traditions, words like emptiness, nothingness, no-self, non-duality, and selflessness are sometimes used, and in western traditions, words like God, Heaven, the Kingdom, the Infinite, Allah, and Yahweh are used to speak of what is beyond the threshold, but all these words are concepts in the world of human discourse. Thus, these words cannot be “It.” No human words can capture “It,” so don’t turn words into beliefs that you hang on to. Rather, use them as pointers to look beyond, to that toward which they point, to the ineffable.
Joseph Campbell emphasized another problem with using language for this purpose: The people hearing the words that mystics speak are hearing them within the mental framework in which they normally think, the world of concepts and language. Thus, those hearing these words and trying to make sense of them are doing so within the framework of worldly mental concepts, even though whatever is beyond the threshold cannot be captured or understood by any concept. The inevitable result is that whatever is said about the realm beyond the threshold will be confusing, misleading. This is the reason Tsong Khapa makes vividly clear that when you come back to this world, no words, thoughts, or images can ever truly describe what was on the other side.
This truth has been known in every culture and tradition. For thousands of years, shamans, priests, oracles, mystics and Buddhas have reported going back and forth over the threshold, bringing back wisdom from that other dimension. But all have understood that when this wisdom is presented to people in human language, it is difficult to understand and interpret. When wisdom that is outside the domain of human language is brought back into the everyday world of human thought and action, it is inevitably confusing. This is why the guidance of wisdom teachers, oracles, and mystics is often misunderstood—we humans interpret what we hear the way we want to hear it. Just read the Greek dramas for powerful, and sad, examples.
Back in the world of time
Once you leave the transcendent, timeless realm and cross the threshold back into the world of time, your “I” reemerges. Your ego self is there to greet you. Given where you have just been, however, at first your ego, your old “I,” will not seem to be who you are. You might even think it doesn’t belong to you anymore. But this is a delusion you must overcome. Once you are back in the world of time, you cannot function without an “I.” If, however, you can see it clearly for what it really is, a useful concept, you will be able to use it to function in the world without thinking it is who you really are. You will understand that it is your conditioned way of being in the world, an agreed-upon convention in human society to be used to refer to your particular body/mind functioning in the everyday world. Then, recognizing that this is all it ever was, you will understand that nothing has been lost. Your ego, your “I” has not been lost. You have only been freed from identifying solely with your old “I.” You see clearly now that it was never separate from the conventions of the everyday world in which you live. You understand that it was always just a vehicle for functioning in the relative world of appearances that you share with other people. And once you see this, once you see your ego for what it truly is, you can use it to interact with others in the conventional world without taking it too seriously.
If you reach this level of understanding, and then have the thought “no-self is guiding my actions,” you quickly recognize that you are deluding yourself once more. You are hiding your unconscious motivations behind a concept you are telling yourself is “pure,” or “ultimate,” or “enlightened.” Unfortunately, many teachers who have had a true experience of emptiness do this when they come back into the world of time. They make selflessness, nothingness, the non-dual into “somethings,” and the ego says “that’s who I am.” The ego convinces itself and others that it is “pure awareness,” a neat trick the ego learns to perform so it can do whatever it wants, while calling its actions “enlightened.”
This problem arises because most everyone who crosses the threshold into the timeless dimension eventually crosses back into the world of time. Then, when they are back, their human urges and desires are also back, their ego is back. If they consciously recognize this, they can begin to balance the two realities, the timeless and the world of time. But if they do not consciously see that their worldly urges and desires are back, they will begin to tell themselves that they are free to do whatever they want, because they no longer have an ego, and therefore whatever they feel like doing must be from no-self, or God, or whatever.
But these human words that attempt to describe something about the timeless dimension are not the same as the timeless itself. Crucially, once back in the world of time, these concepts do not provide motivation for actions in this world—they do not provide reasons to get up in the morning, make money, eat, interact with people you care about, or be of service to those in need. Why would a “no-thing” speak? Why would that which is behind the mind think, or read books? No, even those who have had a profound visit to the timeless dimension, upon coming back into the world of time—if they are ruthlessly honest with themselves—will discover that their human urges and desires have begun to affect them.
A most dangerous delusion – spiritual inflation
This is the source of a major problem in our world today—spiritual inflation. Many spiritual seekers who truly cross the threshold don’t recognize when they have crossed back into the world of time. Or they do not choose to accept it. They entered the other dimension, perhaps even had a profound taste of it, but have now crossed back into this world. Now, however, they believe they are special, enlightened. They think that who they are is “no-self.” But anyone who has that thought is back in the world of time, because that is a concept in human thought in the world of time. If you are thinking that way, it is proof you are back in your thinking mind, that you have made “no-self” into an object in your consciousness.
If you then become a spiritual teacher, while believing you are “no-self,” “pure emptiness,” or “pure awareness,” it becomes easy for your ego to convince you it is just fine to sleep with vulnerable disciples, buy a Rolls Royce, or get caught up in various aspects of money, power, or prestige. Anyone who pays careful attention will see that believing you are “no-self” or “no-thing” doesn’t shield you from having to make decisions about how you will act in the world of time.
For those who step into the space beyond all concepts, time disappears, all worldly concerns disappear, the need to be concerned about urges and desires disappears. From that place you can “Love, and do as you will,” as St. Augustine put it. My favorite modern example of how a person in such a condition lives and acts is Ramana Maharshi. He entered and, by all reports, stayed in the timeless dimension continually for several years. While in that place, he had no concern for what he ate, where he slept, or any depravation he was subjected to. He had no concern if harm was inflicted on his body. He was in another dimension, seemed to be in bliss, no matter what was happening to his body or ego self, the two things we normally think of as who a person is.
Such examples are very rare, of course. A few extraordinary individuals through history have been viewed as having completely dis-identified with all personal goals and concerns, such as Jesus and the Buddha. But most of those who step beyond the threshold come back into the world of time after their sojourn. Coming back, they might form a mental concept of “no-self,” and this concept might deeply resonate with what they felt during their transcendent time. “No-self,” however, has now become an idea in the mind, and this concept cannot tell that person what they should or should not do in the world of time. It is now one concept among many other concepts. And in the world of time, either 1) your base instincts (the id, to use the Freudian term) carry you wherever they will, 2) your ego takes control, or 3) you use reason and discipline, based on a set of moral ideals, to guide your actions (with the ego’s acceptance and cooperation).
Once back in the world of concepts, of time, you have to make decisions. You have to decide how you will eat and have shelter, who you will talk to and not talk to, whether you will attend an event or not, whether you will sleep with someone or not, whether you will write, or teach, or meditate, or spend time on the internet. Once back in the world of time, who decides these things? It certainly will not be “no-self” or “emptiness.” Some part of you will now organize your life in the world of time. Some traditions suggest that it can be your soul, or atman, or Higher Self that takes over. But how do you know that the Higher Self has taken charge? Where is the gauge within you that tells you definitively that the Higher Self is now making all your decisions?
As Mariana Caplan documents so clearly in Halfway up the Mountain, a lot of spiritual teachers convince themselves they are acting from an enlightened place when they are not. For anyone who has transcendent moments, this is a great danger. After such moments, as you begin to reenter the everyday world, you attach to the belief that you are enlightened. But once back in the world of time, how do you know your unconscious desires are not affecting your decisions? It is only through meticulously getting to know your shadow, your unconscious wishes and desires, that you can begin to work with them, learn to manage them, and gain some awareness of when they are in charge. Just because a person has visited the incredible domain beyond the threshold, just because he or she has had a powerful moment in the timeless dimension, does not mean that person has the ability to banish all their urges and desires when they return to the world of time. On the contrary, history is littered with the wreckage of lives ruined by those who crossed the threshold and then came back into the world of time with the conviction that they were enlightened, who had no awareness that their unconscious urges and desires were now running the show.
When the ego thinks it is enlightened
The danger being discussed applies to those who form a concept of “no-self” and identify with it after returning to the world of time, and then justify their id urges and desires (to use the Freudian term, again) as being just fine because they believe they are “no-self.” But just because you have touched the timeless dimension does not relieve you of the necessity of making choices about how you will act once you have crossed the threshold back into the world of time. On the contrary, you must become increasingly aware of your urges and desires and how to discern when they are moving you to action.
How can you do this? You must carefully get to know yourself, especially your unconscious parts. You must carefully get to know your “I,” your ego self, who you think you are. You must learn the ego’s tricks, learn how it rationalizes and justifies your actions, and develop the capacity to compare the goals and images you are pursuing to some set of higher values. Perhaps, in the timeless dimension, you had a glimpse of some set of such higher values. Now you must work diligently to bring them into fruition into your everyday life.
To do this, you must always remember that the ego is a very canny beast. It has an amazing ability to convince you that its goals and plans are meant to serve “a higher good,” or that you are doing what you are doing for someone else’s benefit. The ego, the “I,” is brilliant at rationalizing everything it does, at attributing higher motives to all its decisions and actions. Stop for a moment and ask yourself: “How do I know when my ego has taken charge and is making the decisions, while telling me it is my Higher Self at work?”
If you do not have a really good answer to this question, then it is certain you are at times being motivated by ego goals and images. The only way to break this powerful tendency in the modern world is by a sustained, fiercely-honest life of self-reflection, a life in which you gradually develop the ability to recognize and work with the subtleties of your ego. It takes a lot of ego work to be able to recognize when you are truly being motivated by deeper intuitions arising from a connection to that which is beyond the threshold.
There are other paths toward overcoming the ego’s hold. One is to give complete control of your life over to a spiritual teacher or guide. This is difficult and often painful, and there is little guarantee it will work, but occasionally it does result in a person’s complete freedom from identification with the ego self. A second path, followed by a few exceptional individuals in the past (like Ramana Maharshi) was to overcome the “I” by a complete denial of all urges and desires for several years, until unconscious desires and ego goals had completely withered away. But very, very few individuals have ever been willing to endure such a painful process for long enough to completely dis-identify with all their urges, desires, hopes, and fears.
In the modern world, if you have been over the threshold, a path that offers itself is to make a determined effort to hold on to the glimpse you received about how to live that you brought back from the timeless dimension. Many of those who have crossed the threshold into the timeless say that being in that domain gave them a sense of the importance of trying to be loving, kind, forgiving, and compassionate, that it provided a glimpse of “the Good, the True, and the Beautiful,” and a longing to live more from the energy these words represent. The path, therefore, is to make an effort to hold on to the sense you had of what life would be like if you could live from that place all the time, and to use intention and discipline to do so as much as you can.
Crucially, as you do this, always keep in mind that in the world of time, the “you” that is trying to figure out how to live is not the concept “no-self.” Once back in the world of time, you must use judgment, values, and intentions to guide your actions (which is exactly the reason the Buddha emphasized living by the values contained in the Eight-fold Path). Because of this, one of the most forceful arguments Tsong Khapa makes is that human reason is essential to help a person move toward the threshold of the transcendent dimension, and it is also crucial for making decisions in the world of time after you return to it.
Tsong Khapa does not say that reason and values are enough by themselves to take you beyond the threshold—they are not the final element that takes you there. But having a set of values is essential when you come back into the world of time. You must use your “I” to live in the world with other people, and it must be guided by intentions and values chosen wisely. Further, developing such wisdom requires all of your faculties—intuition, reason, concern for others, as well as the guidance given by the wise figures of history about how to live and how to achieve the goals a tradition offers. This is why the Buddhist canon is filled with many different sets of vows, guidelines, and rules of behavior such as the Eight-fold Path, the four Great Vows, the instruction to cultivate the “Four Perfect Virtues,” the request to commit to the Five Precepts, and many more. In fact, in some Buddhist traditions there are hundreds of vows, and similar sets of vows and rules are central in all the other wisdom traditions.
The reason? Just because you had a very profound mystical experience, and perhaps even visited the timeless realm beyond the threshold does not mean you are free to do whatever you like. Being free does not mean being free to do whatever “you” want, it means being free of the “you” that wants. This is why it is very dangerous to take the insights of a tradition out of context, to think you can have an experience described in a tradition and then know on your own how to act in the world outside the culture and guidelines of that tradition.
When you are beyond the threshold and free of your urges and desires, beyond your ego goals and plans, you can let the spirit, or “the force,” or Buddha-nature guide your actions. But very, very few people can stay in that space all the time. If you do not carefully come to know yourself, your ego will quickly convince you that you are still in that space when you are not, and that you are entitled to follow your “enlightened” urges. This is why so many spiritual and religious teachers do much harm—they are pursuing personal desires for sex, power, wealth, fame, and privilege under the guise that they are spiritual beings and/or had a profound experience and are thus free to do what they want.
Things exist and they do not exist
The conclusion we are led to is that things do exist, other people do exist, you do exist—but not as separate things. All things and all persons are intertwined, enmeshed with everything else. The same is true of the concepts of emptiness, nothingness, selflessness—they are entwined and enmeshed with all other concepts, including concepts of things.
To think of yourself as existing is true; to think of yourself as a separate thing is an illusion. To think of nothingness as a valid concept is true, to think it can exist separate from the concept “something” is an illusion. When you grasp this, when you understand that nothingness is “objectively non-existent,” when you see that the concept of nothingness is dependent, that nothing is, itself, nothing, “the world is back.” The temporary experience of the world as illusion is replaced by “a world of relativity.” Both the world and emptiness are seen for what they truly are—relative. You see that nothingness, emptiness, and selflessness are relative. You see them as empty of intrinsic identity. Now you are ready to hold simultaneously two realities that had seemed contradictory. Seeing that each is relative, you find a “center of balance between being and nothing” and rest in a “holy equipoise.” The end result is: “This cognitive double exposure grants the person realizing it the freedom to engage with the world of apparent realities.” This is not, however, “the collapse of Samsara and Nirvana into each other,” but “finding a harmonious balance,” an integration of both in a natural equilibrium. You can now engage with the manifest, everyday world while simultaneously knowing that it is not totally real, but that it is relatively real. (In a fascinating counterpoint, the philosopher Martin Heidegger brilliantly explored the same terrain within the western philosophical tradition in his book Being and Time.)
This profound insight solves two great problems we face in the modern world, nihilism and extreme realism. For anyone who has had a transcendent moment, a problem often arises: When the moment is over and that person begins to reenter the everyday world, he or she attaches to the belief that the 2nd way of perceiving is “It.” He or she thinks the “non-existence of things” is the final truth. But if you believe that nothingness is the final reality and organize around that view—you are a nihilist. If nothingness is the final reality, why bother about the problems and suffering of the world? If the everyday world is only an illusion, why not just ignore it? Thus, Thurman says, those who fully embrace the concept of the world as illusion end up as nihilists. Other people don’t matter. Nothing matters. Just get enlightened and don’t bother about the suffering of the world, for it is all illusion anyway.
The other extreme one can fall into is that of realism—the belief that only the world is real—so eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we all die anyway. This is the end result of adopting a materialistic belief system, of making your act of faith that the material stuff of the world is all there is. If you hold this view, nothing will ultimately matter except to fulfill your basic urges and desires for comfort, sex, pleasure, prestige, and power.
If you do grasp, however, that both nothingness and the world of appearances are relative, if the vision of true relativity dawns, you will automatically search for a “harmonious balance” and begin to avoid the error of both extremist camps. Having seen the non-existence of the things, of the everyday world, you will not be seduced into giving that world too much importance. But having perceived the emptiness of emptiness, you will not be seduced by nihilism, you will not ignore the value of engaging with the everyday world. You will be able to engage with the world while simultaneously understanding that it is not the only reality. The result of this balanced view is that recognizing the relative reality of the everyday world dispels nihilism, and recognizing the relative reality of emptiness dispels realism and its singular focus on the everyday world.
The steps to this place are: You come to see that the everyday world, the world you normally live in, is an illusion. Next you begin to grasp that you have made the insight that the world is an illusion into a concept you are holding on to. This concept that the world is an illusion has become your belief system, your place to stand, your religious belief. It has become the theory that provides you a basis for living and deciding. You have made a profound insight a belief system, reified it, made it seem to be a substantial thing, made it seem like a solid resting place for your views. You have turned the concept of emptiness into a “something.” You have made of nothingness your act of faith.
Once you see this, the final step is to grasp that any idea you have about “emptiness” or “nothingness” is a mental construct, just another concept in your mind. You finally understand that the idea “the world is an illusion” is itself an illusion—and you can live and move from a “harmonious balance” between the two extremes.
The Great Death becomes the Great Life
One final point Tsong Khapa makes is that, when you get close to the threshold, but before you cross it, “It might seem like death.” It might feel as if you are approaching “total dissolution of all subjectivity and objectivity,” are about to enter “absolute nothingness.” This is, however, only the experience of the personal “I” as it approaches the threshold; the personal “I” has the feeling that it is approaching death. In some ways this is true. Thurman says this is precisely the “Great Death” described in Zen literature.
But again, this is only the fear of the ego, the personal “I,” as it approaches the threshold. What actually happens is that the real you is “catapulted beyond the cognitive black hole,” beyond identification with your ego being all of who you are. When this happens, there is a temporary experience of the loss of your “I”—your ego. If, however, you continue to open, “critical wisdom energy dissolves the apparent existence of non-existence, and immediately there dawns the magnificent panorama of relativity.” Then you realize that nothing has been lost, because who you thought you were was never the true reality. Your “I” has not been lost, but simply understood for what it really is. Being able to do this is precisely the meaning behind the admonition in many traditions, “Die before you die.” I have also seen it continued, “Die before you die, and then you will not die”—which I take to mean that if you have completely ceased to identify with your body, your instinctual urges and desires, and your ego goals and images, as well as all concepts about no-self, non-duality, and selflessness, then there is nothing that you identify with that is left to die. As Ramana Maharshi so poignantly put it when his disciples said, “Don’t leave us“ (when he was about to die), he replied, “Where would I go?” He was conveying that he had entered the realm of the “deathless,” as the Buddha had named it.
To say it one further way, as you die to your old concepts of who you thought you were, and simultaneously see that your concepts about non-existence, no-self, and non-duality do not reflect the actual reality either, you are ready to clearly see that both are relative; that both are true—and not true. Wisdom’s “diamond drill” has shown you that nothingness as well as the world are both relatively real. With this, “the Great Death is the threshold of the Great Enlightenment, in which the clear light of wisdom reveals the immense field of play, of compassion, the Great Life, the Boundless Life.”
A better understanding of the three core issues
Now I can come back to the three issues I have struggled with that Tsong Khapa and Robert Thurman have helped me understand much better.
- What is the ego, and is it a good thing or bad? Or is “no-self” the ultimate reality?
The ego is not real in the way we are conditioned to think it is real as we are growing up. Part of the enculturation of every child is to help it learn to take care of its own needs. To do this in the everyday world requires an ego, a concept of “I.” Without developing an ego, no one would be able to function in the world.
Having learned this lesson, however, all the spiritual traditions say that the ego or “I” is not all you are. But this is a very hard lesson to understand and accept fully. For the Buddha, it required leaving family and community completely, followed by six years of austerities, privations, and renunciations. With his awakening, however, he felt he had seen into the heart of his true identity. But this did not lead him to return to his old life or the world he had known. Rather, although he now engaged fully with the world and with many people, he did so from a place of wisdom and compassion rather than from personal desires or ego motives. These no longer controlled him. He had fully mastered himself.
Yet he still had a body/mind that functioned in the world. In Tsong Khapa’s imagery, those who reach the “authentic view” do not take their “I” as ultimately real, but they see it for what it is—a vehicle for living in the conventional world. They can hold it lightly, perhaps even playfully, as depicted in the final Zen Ox-herding picture, where the wanderer, free of all cares and concerns, enters the marketplace with helping hands. This is the place of “holy equipoise” in which one has found the “harmonious balance” that holds the two realities in natural equilibrium. It is from this place that one can be, as Jesus suggested, “In the world but not of it.”
An analogy from another tradition (adapted in modern times by the teacher George Gurdjieff) is that of a carriage with a team of horses, a driver, and an occupant of the carriage. The horses are the basic desires and urges we all have, which provide our vital energy to move through the world. The carriage is the body. The driver of the carriage is the ego. And the occupant of the carriage is the one who has mastered the ego, has come to understand that the ego needs to be a servant, not the master, and that the ego’s job is to manage the urges and desires, to organize them so they can move the carriage in the world in a way that fulfills the intentions that only the occupant of the carriage, the deeper Buddha-nature, can provide.
- What is reality? Is the world an illusion? If so, why bother with it?
There are two possible errors:
One error is to believe that the world is real in the way that realists or materialists think it is real—a fixed, tangible thing “out there,” and that who you are is an object in that material world.
The other error is to believe that everything is an illusion, that “emptiness” or “nothingness” define reality, and that “no-self” is who you are. And further, to believe these concepts will provide a basis around which you can organize your identity and your life.
To deal with these two errors, the first step the Buddha took was to dis-identify with the world and his ego life in it. The way he awakened to the fact that the world is not real in the way he had thought and that ego life in the world is empty of meaning was to abruptly sever all engagement with his old life and his ego roles in it.
But the Buddha didn’t stop there. Once he had seen through the first error, he then recognized the second, the error of thinking that everything is illusion. He saw that nothing is separate, that “emptiness” and “no-self” are not real either. These are just words, concepts; they are not “somethings” to organize one’s life around. He recognized that he was part of a whole, and that helping all others who are part of the whole is the natural thing to do. After penetrating both errors, he therefore spent the next 45 years helping others. This is also what Jesus and so many of those who reached the highest levels of spiritual awakening did as well. Even Ramana Maharshi, after many years of being heedless to the world, finally turned his attention back toward the world and helping others.
Why, then, bother with the world? Because it is “relatively real,” just like the concepts no-self, emptiness, selflessness, and non-duality are “relatively real.” Who you are is actually an inseparable part of the whole. One analogy, although flawed, is that you are one cell in a complex living body, and each cell must play its part, and playing your part is healthy both for you and for the whole body. This is the reason that compassion is fundamental—you choose to organize around compassion because you recognize that you serve yourself by serving the health and well-being of the whole. (Wisdom is also essential in order to know how to do that.)
By learning to hold what seemed to be opposing truths in equilibrium, you no longer identify with either your ego self or with no-self as being who you are. Now, as long as your body/mind exists in this world, it is your vehicle for engaging with it, but you can do so completely free of fear, expectation, anger, and anxiety. As long as you remain completely awake, everything you do will flow spontaneously from the One Source.
Very, very few of us, however, are able to live this way all the time—we are pulled back into the vortex of our personal images and desires. But if you have crossed the threshold into the timeless dimension for only a moment, you can use the deep intuition about how to live that you glimpsed there as an image toward which you can aim, as a continuing guide for your actions.
- Why is there suffering, and what should I do about it—my own and that of others?
I have heard and read many Buddhists focus on what the Buddha taught about suffering and the end of suffering to the exclusion of all other ideas. And I have heard many non-Buddhists criticize Buddhism because they see it as focused exclusively on life in this world as nothing but suffering. If that were true, then Buddhism would be ultimately nihilistic in relation to the everyday world in which we live. But the Buddha did not say that life is only suffering, or that the only goal is to end suffering. He in fact said many other things. In one early authentic text, he is quoted as saying that finding Nirvana means finding bliss, suggesting that bliss is the ultimate goal of life. (Of course, he said other things at other times that suggest different aims.)
My best sense of what the Buddha was trying to tell us is that the highest fulfillment comes when you can finally let go of identifying with your encultured “I” and then completely let go of thinking that you are “nothing.” Then can you live the life you were given in peace and serenity, doing what you can to bring about the health of the whole, using your ego as the vehicle for playing your part—without attachment to what happens to your ego self in the process. You can fully engage with the world, its joys and its sorrows, without being concerned with outcomes, with no concern with the fruits of your actions. Living out the life you were given in “holy equipoise,” holding both this world and the transcendent as relatively real, you live and move, as St. Paul put it, in the “peace that passeth understanding.”
As for those who have made the choice to suffer for a cause or to help others, they might not become fully awakened, but by listening to their deep inner calling, to the still small voice within, they know that life is about serving something larger than their ego self, and they sense through giving themselves to something larger that they are moving toward that which is ultimately true and real. Most who are following a path of service probably do not make it all the way to complete peace and contentment, just as most who follow a path of renunciation do not reach complete awakening. Nonetheless, both are ways to move toward the highest possibility.
In the end, those who are able to fully integrate the timeless dimension with the world of time understand that the ultimate is to hold both the objective existence of things and the objective non-existence of things as “relatively” true, moving between them smoothly, easily, like a great dancer, shifting effortlessly with the music of life.
Having mastered the “authentic view,” they can engage with the everyday world as if it exists as most people think it does, can therefore interact with other people, honor the way they perceive, value their views about what is real, while simultaneously knowing that there is another way of perceiving that many do not see.
If you have reached this equilibrium, then you are truly free; if you have not, keep going. The Buddhist theory of relativity is that each of these two views is relatively real, and the final resting place is a position “of balance between being and nothing,” where you exist in the “holy equipoise” that has a “simultaneous awareness” of both realities, with the freedom to engage with each without being trapped by either.
And now what? How should I live?
There are many goals people are drawn to in life, and many different strategies being offered to fulfill these goals. For those have decided their aim is to reach the highest spiritual fulfillment, what is the best path?
There is no agreement whatsoever. Each religion, and thousands of sects within the religions has its own set of ideas. Additionally, in the modern world, tens of thousands of independent teachers offer an endless variety of possible paths. It is all a bit bewildering. What should you and I do?
The best options are: 1) Commit to an established path and stick to it for a long enough time to give it a chance of success; 2) find a teacher who seems deeply authentic, not just charismatic, and let that teacher guide you for a significant period of time, or 3) do your own work as best you can.
With each of these options, but especially the third, one idea that has emerged as important for me, and which Tsong Khapa reinforced, is that although moving beyond the threshold is often considered the ultimate goal, there is no definitive way to do that. There are many practices in each spiritual tradition developed through the millennia to take you into its vicinity, but no sure method for crossing. Further, if you do manage to cross the threshold, there is no easy way to stay there, or live from the insights received while there after coming back into the world of time.
In the absence of firm answers, however, there is much commonality among the wisest teachers about what you can use as your polestars for guidance on the journey. Simply keep asking yourself these questions:
Is this helping me become more compassionate and loving toward all other beings?
Is this opening me to ever deeper wisdom and understanding?
Is this serving the Good in the best way I can discern at this moment?
Is it just? Is it generous? Is it considerate?
Is it advancing care and kindness for others?
Am I being fiercely honest with myself about my own motives?
Do I know myself well enough to know my own motives?
Each time you remember to ask yourself these questions and are honest with yourself about the answers, you are moving toward the threshold. There is no barrier to intending to live this way each day, and having a clear intention is an essential part of finding the ultimate. We cannot control how far we will move along the path, but by doing these things, we can insure we are moving in the right direction.
If you do awaken fully, find enlightenment or salvation, the saints and sages tell us you will then find yourself spontaneously entering the marketplace with helping hands, with no thought or concern for goals or outcomes, either personal or communal.