Let’s talk about emptiness. But how to talk about it in a simple way, you know – it’s just so complicated for us. Somebody asked His Holiness, “How do you apply it in daily life?” And he said, “That’s easy: look at things from another point of view.” It sounds so simple, but it’s profound. And we do understand it.
Look how we are when delusions are rampant. And the main delusion is attachment: attachment’s the junkie that drives everything, that only wants the nice experiences. And look what happens the millisecond it doesn’t get what it wants: there you are with your boyfriend, and he wants to do this but you want to do that, and then you have a panic attack because attachment is not getting what it wants.
Attachment, of course, is driven by the root delusion, ignorance, marigpa, unawareness, ego-grasping, this frantic junkie in there that pervades everything, that is absolutely fundamentalist: everything is set in stone, black and white: I’m right and you’re wrong. This is right and that is wrong.
If you’ve got a very spacious mind, which is what we’re trying to get to, you will have enough courage to stop, check your mind, know that you want a certain thing and that he wants something else. And then you’ll turn it around and see it literally from another point of view: his point of view! Straight away, the whole dynamic changes – straight away, it appears differently to you. It’s really obvious!
Of course, this is hugely difficult! But we can see the logic of it.
If you’re looking at a cup with a handle on the right, and then you turn the cup around and now the handle’s on the left, you just looked at it from another point of view – it looks different. Well, everything can be this way.
In other words, it’s learning to have a spacious mind instead of a fixed mind.
The fixed mind thinks, “You are wrong, you said this!” You have a panic attack and aversion arises. “How dare you say that!” And he’ll say, “Oh, I didn’t say that.” And you’ll say, “Yes, you did!”
But, straight away, if you think, “Okay, maybe he didn’t,” and you see it from his point of view – straight away, the whole thing changes.
Or something as simple as ordering your coffee hot but it comes only warm. Right there: see it as good, see it differently: “I can handle warm coffee!”
Why is doing this applying emptiness? We’re using the view of dependent arising – that things exist in dependence upon many factors, specifically upon the mind, how we see things. It proves emptiness: that nothing has a fixed nature, nothing is set in stone.
These words are so profound, but we just take them as a cliché: “Oh, nothing’s set in stone.” That’s emptiness right there! But you’ve got to catch your mind and want to do it, you know?
That’s exactly why I always talk about my friends in prison – for example, Sunny, always I mention her: she was accused of murder, she was innocent, she spent seventeen years in prison, many of them on death row, her husband got executed – his brains burst into flames! – she lost her children, her parents died: you can’t imagine the nightmare after nightmare. And she said, “Finally, at some point, I realized I couldn’t change anything, but they couldn’t take my mind from me.” She said, “I knew I had a choice to think differently.” This is exactly putting dependent arising into practice. So she developed a practice for herself, learned yoga, and slowly slowly transformed her mind from despair and rage to stability and contentment. I never fail to be amazed by her! She proved her innocence and got out eventually.
And why should we think this way? Because guess what? We are the beneficiary! It’s not moralistic – it’s practical: if you want to be happy, then think differently. “Don’t believe in your karmic appearances,” as Lama Zopa says. Of course it’s hard – it’s unbelievably hard – and it’s every second we have to do it.
It’s almost so simple it’s a joke, you know? It’s applying dependent arising to prove emptiness – and the final level emptiness is that nothing’s set in stone, nothing has an intrinsic nature as this or that. Doing this can transform our lives, for sure.