On Emptiness + Soup
If you were given the choice between perceiving reality in the limited, mainstream, subject-object, grasping-rejecting cycle of ho-hum meh; or relating to it in the psychedelic, everything is alive, subject-subject dance of interdependence that it really is (while still being able to do things like file taxes and drive, but with way more juiciness) - which would you choose?
If you’re still reading this, I’ll assume that you’re of the psychedelic proclivity and continue.
But first, just for shits and giggles, let’s dress up like Salvador Dali, complete with lobster phone and state out loud: “I don’t do drugs, I am drugs,” before we continue.
To be clear- I’m all for psychedelic plant medicine magic, so by all means respectfully seek their wise counsel if you are so called. The bonus prize is that when they recognize you as one of their own, there will be less time wasted in the ouchiness of cracking open the hard shell of your ego’s fixed positions and more time to frolic with the playful plankton of space-time bendiness.
So now, garbed in our own depictions of Dali, let’s take a brief stroll through emptiness and soup.
Interdependence
Buddhism and particularly, the left-hand, lightning path of Tibetan tantric Buddhism, conceives of phenomenal reality, the material world, which includes our own physical sensational terrain as essentially empty.
The Unified Theory of physics also supports this view.
However, it’s hard for us to get our heads around this because when we think of reality as emptiness, it’s all a bit nihilistic and dissociating - especially when we have to pay bills and buy groceries, not to mention experience grief, love and heartbreak, and all the many meaningful intensities contained in a single human life.
The business of being incarnate as human is anything but an empty experience - much as we try to make it so with all the socially mandated numbings and dumbings. Add to that the internalization of calcified narratives of this vs. that, good vs. bad, etc., and the notion of quietly contemplating the nature of reality as emptiness on the meditation cushion feels...well...maddeningly unrealistic.
Fear not: here’s where we invoke the superpower of our Dali-esque persona.
Tantric Buddhism’s perception of reality as emptiness has at its core the understanding that phenomenal reality - which also includes you, your thoughts, emotions and physical sensations - does exist. It’s the experience of it all as being independently and concretely self-existent that’s rubbish.
This objectified view of the self-existent nature of phenomena is also at the core of the conventional scientific-materialist mindset which takes its orders from Cartesian dualism, courtesy of French natural scientist and philosopher, René Descartes.
In a nutshell, the Cartesian view, which is the foundation of the dominant Western industrialized mindset, separates the mind from the body and reduces the body and all phenomenal reality that is not the human mind as separate, inert, non-sentient, non-thinking.
Enter: objectification, exploitation, degradation, alienation.
The apex of this is the status quo of patriarchal colonization, and its aggressive inner and outer monoculture; a conforming, disempowering homogeneity and the denial of our innate, vividly alive biodiversity.
Nazi rallies of thousands of identical goosestepping soldiers bent on destroying anyone and anything that doesn’t conform and comply come to mind as an example of this unchecked megalomania.
HELL NO! says Dali, the Dalai Lama, the Earth, the Unified Field Theory of physics. And me.
(Unity is not conformity, it’s biodiversity - but we’ll talk about that another day).
Tantric Buddhism sees through the childish narrative of phenomenal reality as having an independent, self-existent nature - that is, as not separate, inert and dead. Everything is interdependent; phenomena arise and exist through the process of interdependent co-arising. What’s more, everything is in constant communication and participation with everything around it.
The web of sentient biodiversity is also the cornerstone of Indigenous traditions from around the world.
Art by Hilma af Klint
We’ve just been colonized into demeaning the aliveness of our unique and biodiverse bodies, paying attention to nothing more than the incessant droning on of our never satisfied baby-ego and all of the fears and addictions it’s been medicated with.
Emptiness then, is not nihilistic. It’s pulsing with life and interdependence and is inherently empty - that is, ungraspable as just one thing by the myopic hollowness of dualistic, polarized thinking.
Much like trying to catch a rainbow - which arises out of the interplay of clouds and sky and sun and rain, and is perceived by our eyes as something separate and self-existent. But it’s not.
Interestingly, the rainbow is a symbol of powerful, non-dual awareness in tantric and western alchemical traditions.
Ok. But what does soup have to do with this?
Ah yes- let’s consider the humble and deeply magical act of making a steaming pot of delicious, life-affirming soup.
First, you want to have a vessel large and spacious enough to accommodate everything that’s going into the soup, not to mention the appropriate temperature of heat from your stove. Then, think of all the ingredients you prepare and put in the pot.
Where do they come from? How have they been grown or reared? Who by? What sort of soil and pasture did they grow and feed from? Where did the soup stock that you’re using come from? Did you make it or buy it?
Is your consciousness, like the vessel you’re cooking your soup in, vast and open enough to accommodate the manifold stories of interdependent co-arising that’s taking place as you also participate in this mundane, mythic act of making soup?
This is the tantric, non-dual view of emptiness: nothing that exists is independently self-existent. It is also a fundamental quality of the indigenous perception of reality - and the experience of a radically decolonized psyche.
Think of all the seemingly separate stories mingling in the pot, cooking and absorbing each other’s energies, forming something new. Soon it will all be integrated into your body-mind, changing form, reincarnating.
The vast origins of the ingredients in the soup need the spacious container of the vessel through which to fully be and fully transform. And so too with us: we are repositories of mysteries more vast, alive and sensuously subjective than the colonizer’s frigid, rigidly reductionist little narrative of scientific materialism.
When you cook and eat soup in this way, it has the power to precipitate deep transformation.
I have eaten soup prepared like this by a curandero from Brazil. It was in resonance with being tapped on the third eye by a Tibetan lama: a lightning flash of enduring insight and zoomed out, non-local, both/and seeing.
Non-dual emptiness from which all the diverse, mythic aliveness of duality springs.
The practice is cultivating the powerful flame and vessel of centred, embodied presence, the ability to contain this sort of high sensation seeing and then co-create our reality from it.
This is what I have spent years learning, studying and practicing. And this is what I am now teaching. More than ever, these times of extreme, alienating polarisation are calling for us to awaken and start seeing, being and re-membering the mysteries of our shared indigenous wisdom.
Full disclosure, my friend: my intention with doing this work in the world is to initiate and participate in a larger movement of radical inner and outer decolonization through changing the entrenched ideas of who and what we think we are. If you’re interested in making these bold and urgent moves, would love to hear from you, specifically about what’s driving you.