Psychology & Buddhism.pdf

Gestalt Psychology and Mahayana Buddhism 77
the “unfindability” of any independent, self-existent thing does not imply utter
non-existence. Things exist conventionally, but their existence is relational and
interdependent.
While emptiness may be the fundamental nature of all things, this nature is
not readily discernable in common experience. In fact, none of us – unless we
happen to be a Buddha – can perceive this essential nature in our direct and ongoing
experience of the world. We are trapped in habitual modes of experiencing
that blind us to the ultimate nature of reality as empty of independent or inherent
existence. This ignorance is the source of the suffering of samsara, from which
Buddhism offers rescue through enlightenment.
Our pattern of misperception may take two forms. Thus Buddhists describe
the error of the two extremes, which we may refer to as absolutism and nihilism.
Each pole entails an absolutization of experience. With absolutism, one clings to
a sense of things as really real, as possessing independent existence apart from
other things. Here we are unable to digest the sheer contingency of existence, the
dependence of all things upon causes and conditions beyond themselves, their
interdependent origination with other things. We thus absolutistically confer upon
things – including ourselves – an independent reality they do not have. Blind to
the nature of self and other, we thus course in the samsaric existence of attachment
and aversion as the price of our misunderstanding, and as the source of our
hurtfulness to others.
Or we may fall into the other, nihilistic extreme. If we become disillusioned
with absolutism, we may find ourselves clinging, not to being, but to non-being.
We may mistake the absence of inherent or absolute existence for an absolute
non-existence. We may end up rejecting the contingent truth that the thing may
validly possess with respect to its own interdependent origination. That is, rather
than allow for the conventional reality of a phenomenon relative to its own
causes, conditions, constituent parts, etc., as may be established through valid
cognition, we deny not just its absolutized, reified existence but its authentic, relationally
grounded reality as well. What’s worse, our negation of experience may
lead us to reject its contents, to close our hearts to others and perhaps ourselves
as well.
In between these two extremes is the middle ground of relationality, the
authentic nature of reality, whose ultimate truth is emptiness, or absence, of
inherent or independent existence. Let us consider some examples of emptiness,
and explore some means by which Buddhism exposes our chronic blindness to it.
We need to begin where we live, in the world as it appears to us, which we
take to be reality. Reality appears to be inhabited by real people and real things.
The car I drive to work in is surely real. The “I” who drives it, who moves from
one place to another with things to do and people to see, certainly seems real
enough. It is this unexamined commonsense reality that Buddhism calls into
question. While such facts of experience are by no means altogether unreal, the