GO TO GOOGLE DOC LINK OR THE ESSAY OF EMPTINESS NOTES IS BELOW...
RAIN AND REIGN AS ONE ENCOUNTERS EMPTINESS...
"In meditation, I had stumbled upon a new way to be with myself. I did not have to make that disturbing feeling of emptiness disappear. I did not have to run away from my emptiness or cure it, or eradicate it. I had only to see what was actually there. In fact, far from being 'empty', I found that emptiness was a rather 'full' feeling. I discovered that emptiness was the canvas, or background, of my being. I did not understand it, but I was much less afraid."
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"Demanding of her fellow villagers the way we demand of our families and therapists that the problem be taken care of, she came to see that her individual problem was not unique, that it was universal. Redirecting her gaze from her own trauma to the flickering lights of the village, she achieved a breakthrough: She saw the more universal experience that her own particular misfortune obscured. It was only by facing, not denying, her personal tragedy that Kisagotami could uncover the greater reality. By struggling with and accepting her loss, she could understand the Buddha's teachings. No longer striving to contain her grief and keep herself together, she nevertheless, stopped falling apart. By appreciating that she could never have what she thought she deserved, she was able to relax. Her emptiness stopped overtaking her only when she stopped taking it personally."
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" It was the early eighties, and there was a kind of revolt going on against the caricature of the dour, silent psychotherapist. People need mirroring, the theory went, in order to become secure in their own reality, and so i tried, in accordance with this idea, to reflect back some warmth to my patients.
The model for this approach to therapy came from observations of infants and parents. When a child does a new task, it was noted, she will turn back quickly to check to see if her mother is watching. Catching the twinkle in her mother's eye, she will be empowered to keep going, and she will take her mother's approval, or affirmation, with her into the new activity. Self-esteem and self-assurance grow in proportion to how mirrored a child feels. When this process is inadequate, the child feels empty. The empty self needs a real relationship with a real person in order to discover its own reality.
This orientation did much to humanize the kind of teaching I received: It gave a theoretical justification to what many were already feeling and allowed skilled therapists to break down the self-conscious edifice that had alienated many a struggling patient. But this approach, while appealing, seemed sometimes to have serious flaws when put into practice. In my own early work as a therapist I hoped vigorously that my own 'unconditional positive regard' would help my patients consolidate their selves and relieve their suffering. More often than not, however, I found that , from their point of view, I could not do enough. They wanted more and more of me, and i would find myself embroiled in their lives."
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Kernberg taught that emptiness was the result of defects in self-development that interfered with a child's abiity to integrate the idea of one person having both good and bad qualities. Ih Kernberg's view, the infant first keeps 'all-good' and 'all-bad' experiences separate; she has no idea that the mother who gratifies her hunger is the same person as the mother who is not there immediately when she cries. At some point, if the child's frustration and anger are handled properly, she will have the realization that the gratifying and frustrating mother are one and the same person and will thus have the ability to relate to 'real' people, not just to what he called 'part-objects' Feelings of emptiness, thought Kernberg, occurred when this ability to relate to 'whole-objects' was lacking. Often masking a virulent rage or self-hatred, emptiness, for Kernberg, was a sign of lack of cohesiveness in the self, of an inablility to tolerate conflicting feelings for the same person......
My problems with my demanding patients lay, he felt, in my failure to deal with their aggression. Unable to see me as a real, and therefore limited, person, they were expecting me to be 'all-good' and at the same time, they were completely furious with me.....
Indeed, these interpretations were extremely helpful when I put them into my words and found ways of communicating their essences to my patients. ...Their disturbing complaints of unreality and depersonalization went away. But...their core feeling of emptiness did nt disappear....
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"I knew that emptiness (or sunyata), from a Buddhist perspective, was an understanding of one's true nature, an intuition of the absence of inherent identity in people or things. It was the core psychological truth of Buddhism. Emptiness, from a Western perspective, seemed to me to be a tortured feeling of distress, an absence of vitality, a sense of being not quite real enough, of disconnection....
With an uncharacteristically serious expression, the lama was making what looked like a hammering motion with his hands over and over again, as if waiting for me to tune in to what he was saying, 'It is like a blacksmith,' he was saying, 'striking on a ...what do you call it in English?...striking on an anvil.' I could not follow what he was getting at; I had trouble even understanding his words. 'These are like sparks of emptiness,' he went on, making upward motions with hs fingers to show the sparks flying off of the anvil, 'These are minds striking against emptiness, like a blacksmith strikes against his anvil. The hollowness you describe, the deficiency and distress, these are like sparks of emptiness, untrained minds trying to grasp emptiness.'....
The implications of Gelek's statement for the psychotherapy profession leaped out at me. 'Stop trying to eliminate emptiness!' he was saying. This is where Western therapy was going wrong. Like their patients, psychotherapists were intimidated by emptiness. They were struggling to take those feelings of insufficiency that I had struggled with since high school and eradicate them.....Therapists were trying to get rid of emptiness by uncovering its cause...
Psychotherapy was holding out for a cure. Buddhism, as I was learning, sought to turn the Western experience of emptiness around. 'Don't be so afraid of it,' Gelek ws saying. 'You can never understand what the Buddhists mean if you are so afraid of your personal emptiness.' The problem with the Western experience of emptiness was that it was mixed with so much fear......
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"In our zeal to eliminate the ghosts of our childhood, to nourish the empty places of emotional insufficiency, and to achieve that pinnacle of psychological development that the British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott called 'feeling real', we were treating feelings of emptiness as something that needed to be fixed and cured and therefore losing the ground upon which we rest. Our aversion to emptiness is such that we have become expert at explaining it away, distancing ourselves from it, or assigning blame for its existence on the past or on the faults of others. We contaminate it with our personal histories and expect that it will disappear when we have resolved our personal problems. Thus, Western psychotherapists are trained to understand a report of emptiness as indicative of a deficiency in someone's emotional upbringing, a defect in character, a defense against overwhelming feelings of aggression, or as a stand-in for feelings of inadequacy. Since most of us share one or more of these traits, it becomes all too easy to pathologize a feeling that in Buddhism serves as a starting place for self-exploration.
As Gelek Rinpoche indicated, emptiness can never be eliminated, although the experience of it can be transformed. Like sparks flying off of the blacksmith's anvil, experiences of emptiness are part of the fabric of our being. Emptiness appears first as the dark side of our attempts to create a separate and self-sufficient self. Any therapy that tries to explain it away, or cure it with a corrective emotional experience, is destined to produce frustration and disappointment........
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"....Emptiness did not have to mean annihiliation, I had realized, nor did it have to mean nothingness. By looking into my own emptiness, I had paradoxically discovered more of my own voice. If therapy could target the fear of emptiness instead of trying to wipe out the entire feeling, perhaps it ouwld be more effective. What was this feeling, really, but he sense that I did not know who I was? Why should that be so objectionable? What I had learned from Buddhism was that I did not have to know myself analytically as much as I had to tolerate not knowing.
This line of reasoning led me directly to a potent undercurrent in the writings of ...Winnecott. [who] taught that to go willingly into unknowing was the key to living a full life. Only if a parent provides what he called 'good-enough ego coverage' can a child go without fear into the unknown. As he explained it, a child needs to develop the capacity to be alone: a faith or trust in the relationship with the parent such that it is possible to explore the world outside of it....
...Leaving alone means allowing the child to have her own experience, whether alone or when feeding, bathing, or being held. When suspended in the matrix of the parent-child relationship, a child is free to explore, to venture into new territory, both within herself and without. This freedom to explore while held within the safety net of the parent's benign presence develops into the capacity to be alone.
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..."With too much interference from the parents, or too much absence, a child is forced to spend her mental energy coping with her parents' intrusiveness or unavailablilty instead of exploring herself. This mental energy then takes over, leading to a situation in which the child's thinking mind becomes the locus of her existence and the child feels empty. ....When the relationship with a parent is too fragile, a child naturally tries to compensate. This leads to the development of a precocious 'caretaker self' that is tinged with a feeling of falsity. Besides feeling empty, a person in this predicament also fears emptiness. The fear of emptiness is really a sign of the fragility of the bond with the parent. We are afraid to venture into the unknown because to do so would remind us of how unsafe we once felt. This fear, taught Winnicott, is of being 'infinitely dropped', or, perhaps, of being infinitely reminded.
"What connected me even more assuredly to Winnecott's explanation of emptiness was his insistence that overcoming the fear of emptiness requires ''a new experience in a specialized setting.' This is precisely what I had found in meditation. Without the counseling of my meditation teachers, and without the method of nonjudgmental awareness, I could never have done the unimaginable thing of looking into my own emptiness. I could not have tolerated that degree of aloneness nor would I have been willing to drop my compensatory mind. Meditation gave me the faith that there were other techniques of self-exploration than the analysis of my thinking mind. It gave me a way of getting back to the secret room of my dreams.......
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...."Buddhism seeks...to purify the insight of emptiness."
..."When we grasp the emptiness of our false selves, we are touching a little bit of truth. If we can relax into that truth, we can discover ourselves in a new way"....
..."It is part of our drive for wholeness that we need to connect up with the agonies of the past."...
"Meditation has taught me that people can tolerate more than they think....Psychotherapy ...can also serve as a forum for authenticating and encouraging a capacity to bear the unknowability of the self."....
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"At the same time as B. was trying to get away from hated aspects of herself, or internalized remnants of her intrusive mother, or (more to the point) the pain and pressure of her own anger, she was also reaching for a new experience. She needed to know that her urge was not merely pathological. As she began to explore around the edge of her recurrent worries, she discovered an anxiety in her chest that seemed to run through her like a hollow core.
At first she was deeply afraid of that place. With some encouragement, though, B. learned to rest her attention in the hollow core, and she saw that it was a rich source of mysterious feeling, sometimes sad and lonely, but at other times filled with the energy and inquisitiveness of a young child. The hollow space became an enriching space as well as a scary one, filled with unanticipated qualities that expanded her sense of her own reality.
.....Although B. has fought with her mother to preserve herself from her mother's criticisms, she emerged from those long years with an identity that was forged complelely in reaction to her mother. Needless to say, this was very limiting. Only by going into the hollow core could B. retrieve the rest of herself....
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..."J. had been hiding this particular inadequacy, and yet, as the intensity of his feelings revealed, he had remained much identified with it. S. Roshi helped him open up to the very vulnerability that J. was struggling to avoid. He helped him to be: open and vulnerable and insecure, not confident, controlled, and coherent. By making J.'s own childhood emptiness accessible to him once again, and by focusiing on it, Roshi unleashed the power of J.'s mature mind to be empty. Relieved of the associated shame and humiliation, he no longer feared, in Huang Po's words, an infinite drop through the Void. Uncontaminated, his own personal emptiness became his ticket to ride."...
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..."slowly, or sometimes suddenly, something sweet emerges out of the depths of our own minds....Our own personal and self-centered emptiness yields to something more universal. The sparks of emptiness return to their source....we can have access to the still, silent center of our own awareness that has been hiding, unbeknownst to our caretaker selves, behind our own embarrassment and shame. When we tap into this secret storehouse, we begin to appreciate the two-faced nature of emptiness--it fills us with dissatisfaction as it opens us to our own mystery. As the Buddhist traditions always insist, if we look outside of ourselves for relief from our own predicament, we are sure to come up short. Only by learning how to touch the ground of our own emptiness can we feel whole again."- NOTES FROM MARK EPSTEIN
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TO SEE DIFFERENCES IN ACCUMULATION/COLLECTION OF EXPERIENCES IN FORTRESSINGS VS. TRANSFORMATION ALTERATIONS/SHIFTINGS IN DISTILLATIONS AND BECOMING...LETTING GO OF ALL THAT IS NOT ONE...........
