An Integral Esoteric Fourth Turning Update to the Emptiness Teachings - Jon Eden Khan
Emptiness is one of Buddhism’s most radical teachings. Built upon the more ancient Vedic teaching that the world is ultimately illusory, the Buddha’s teaching on emptiness ignited two and a half thousand years of philosophy, debate, and contemplative practice all laser-focussed on what it means to awaken to the true nature of reality and live from the freedom, wisdom, and compassion of that realisation.
The emptiness teachings have been extended in highly innovative ways with each new turning of the Wheel of the Dharma. From the First Turning we have the Theravada teaching on the emptiness of the self. This was extended with the Second Turning into the Madhyamaka teaching on the emptiness of self and world. And this was then developed further in the Third Turning into teachings affirming that the realisation of emptiness reveals buddha-nature – primordial consciousness – as the true nature of reality. (For a breakdown of the Three Turnings of the Wheel of the Buddha-Dharma, see here)
In each iteration of the emptiness teaching, the fundamental idea is that we humans tend to misperceive the true nature of things, and this is the cause of our suffering. We project reality onto things that are not truly real and get swept up in the painful illusion that creates. Conversely, Buddhists understand it is the realisation of the ‘empty’, or not truly real nature of our experience that allows us to stop projecting reality so strongly onto it, which liberates us into awakening to reality as it truly is. A buddha is one who has fully awakened to this reality in a way that has completely rewired their psycho-energetic-physical system in alignment with its deepest truths.
These ideas are radical. They can feel confronting and sometimes uncomfortable. And the implications of the emptiness teachings are hard to overstate. They slam right into the basic trust we hold in our perceptions of the world as it seems to be. They clash directly with our native sense of the meaning and nature of ourselves, our relationships, and the universe itself. They wipe our most primal presumptions about all these clean off the table and leaves us with….what?
Many who encounter the Buddhist emptiness teachings take them as a portal into nihilism. If nothing is truly real and all meaning is constructed, then I guess it’s all just a big nothing! This is a misunderstanding of the Buddhist position on the true nature of reality, but then sometimes it can seem that even Buddhists aren’t fully aligned often on what that is.
Theravadins of the First Turning often speak of nirvana but are hesitant to define it as anything beyond that which is ‘unconditioned’. Madhyamakas sourced in the Second Turning speak of emptiness in an epistemological way - that the ultimate nature of all things is unknowable, which leaves only a giant question mark where we hoped we’d find a final answer. And the buddha-nature proponents of the Third Turning schools like Zen, Vajrayana, Dzogchen, and Mahamudra speak of penetrating insight into the constructed nature of all relative phenomena revealing an ultimate reality of primordial consciousness that is radiant with an infinite number of buddha-qualities.
The Red Thread
There is evidence that at a deeper level these positions are not in conflict with each other. Theravadins speak of a luminous mind revealed in nirvana (see “Small Boat, Great Mountain”, by Ajahn Amaro). Many see the purpose of Madhyamaka not as affirming nihilism, but as a skilful means to fundamentally checkmate the dualistic foundations of conceptual mind, thus revealing its true nature of reality without creating more concepts about it. And the Tibetan schools would say these presentations are compatible with their focus on buddha-nature teachings, which simply emphasise what is revealed once emptiness is realised (here is the difference between the rantong and shentong perspectives on emptiness).
So, there is evidence through all Buddhist schools of a core teaching pointing to insight into the emptiness of phenomena revealing the true nature of reality.
In this piece, I want to focus on the nature of this emptiness teaching, its strengths and weaknesses, and hopefully contribute to a Fourth Turning iteration of it. The idea of a Fourth Turning of the Wheel of the Dharma has been associated by certain practitioners, teachers, and authors with the integration of the core teachings of Buddhism with findings from fields such as psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, and the sciences in the modern west. The consideration of what a Fourth Turning presentation of emptiness would look like is the focus of this article.
Strengths of the Emptiness Teachings
The emptiness teachings of the pre-modern world dealt a devastating and sophisticated blow to naïve realism, way before the rest of humanity started to catch on. Naïve realism is the perspective that the world truly is as we perceive it, which has been the predominant common-sense paradigm for most human beings for most of our history. Today though, because of research in domains like the neuroscience of perception and quantum physics, it has become scientific consensus that this is not the case.
That Buddhist philosophers demonstrated such a level of self-reflective insight in the pre-modern era to get this is highly impressive. They were clearly what developmental psychologists today would call, “construct-aware”. That is, they were able to differentiate reality from their concepts about it. They got that we see ourselves and the world through the lens of conceptual designations – that we project meaning onto everything and construct our world on that basis.
Furthermore, they evidenced a capacity for systemic cognition in their doctrine of dependent origination. Dependent origination is based on the insight that all internal and external events, from thoughts and dreams to perceptions and apparent objects, arise within vast interconnected and interdependent systems of other events. They saw that nothing stands on its own, and therefore nothing can be seen to truly independently exist.
These insights allowed them to turn the mind back upon itself like a diamond drill in a way that fundamentally deconstructed our most cherished and uninspected presumptions about ourselves, each other, and the world.
Problems with the Emptiness Teachings
To track what I see as the main issues with classical emptiness teachings I’ll use the lens of Ken Wilber’s four quadrants. These are the four perspectives that Wilber has suggested in his Integral Theory need to be considered to form a genuinely holistic view on any event. Those quadrants are the interior and exterior perspectives of the individual and the collective, as can be seen below.
I’ll explore the limitations of emptiness teachings through this lens by focussing on:
Western Psychology and the critical functions of the self (related to the upper-left quadrant)
The neuroscience of perception (related to the upper-right quadrant)
The influence of collective patterns of meaning-making (related to the lower-left quadrant)
Insights from quantum physics on the nature of matter, space, and time (related to the lower-right quadrant)
So, we’ll start with:
Ultimately Unreal, but Functionally Crucial – Western Psychology and the Critical Functions of the Self
Despite their strengths, the emptiness teachings have not been without their problems. They focus pretty much entirely on reality as it is experienced through introspection and rationalist logic. Both approaches have surfaced profound insights, and they can sometimes lead to dubious assumptions. Furthermore, they completely leave out certain other critical lenses and aspects of the world.
Firstly, emptiness teachings, particularly those focussing on the emptiness of the self, don’t tend to recognise the developmental necessity of a healthy self-structure, or the role of shifting identification in healthy development.
The first of these points rests on how critical the self is for healthy psychological functioning. It’s one thing to recognise, as Buddhists have, that the self is non-ultimate, meaning it is conceptually designated, dependently arising, and unable to be introspectively located. But it is incompatible with everything Western psychology has realised over the last 150 years to not also acknowledge that the self is simultaneously functionally crucial.
The self serves as the point of integration for all our experience. It is the spine of the psyche. Memories, perceptions, sensations, feelings, and thoughts are woven together around the nexus of the self. When someone doesn’t have a coherent self-structure, such as in various forms of mental illness, the consequences can be disastrous.
None of this is addressed in classical Buddhist philosophy. The self is simply described as an error in perception with the prescription being to realise that as soon as possible. While this can be a powerful portal to radical awakening for those with a stable enough self-structure already established, for those whose self-structure is more tenuous and vulnerable, it can be highly problematic. This is because, as Western Buddhists with a background in psychology started to realise when the emptiness teachings first landed in Europe and the USA, you must have self before you can have no self.
Another problem here is that Buddhist emptiness teachings fail to understand not just how functionally critical a healthy self is to psychological integration, but also how critical identification is in the process of development. Consciousness grows through identification. We identify our self with a particular stage of development to grow into it. We then expand ourselves in that stage, and eventually, when it no longer satisfies the evolutionary drive within us, we disidentify with it to shift our identification into a new stage while including the previous stage as a part of our being, though no longer the main focus. This is the principle of transcend and include.
This is how consciousness development works when all unfolds healthily. However, there are all sorts of psychopathologies that can occur when this isn’t how the process works. Old stages can be denied and repressed rather than transcended and included. New stages can also be shut out and pushed away rather than identified with for growth. And if there isn’t a coherent self-system navigating the process, the whole developmental arc of someone’s journey can be filled with fractures and instability.
Furthermore, from an esoteric perspective that widens the purview of the developmental potential of a human being to a multidimensional spectrum of levels that include not just the personal level of self but also the higher levels such as the soul and spirit, the capacity of the self-system to identify with a stage, grow into that stage via identification, and then disidentify to continue the path, continues to be critical.
Classical Buddhist emptiness of self teachings have literally nothing to say about this, other than the prescription for practitioners to realise the empty nature of the self and all identification. There is no recognition of the functional necessity of the self-system for psychological integration or identification for developmental advancement. This significantly limits their usefulness and viability.
2. The Neuroscience of Perception and Why You Don’t Really See What You Think You See
Buddhist emptiness teachings come from the pre-modern era prior to the advent of disciplines like neuroscience, neurophysiology, and the wealth of insights these disciplines have brought us about how human perception and sensory processing work.
As it turns out, many of these findings turn out to support major pieces of what Buddhist philosophers have been telling us for millennia.
We know now that the naïve realist perspective on reality – that the world truly is as we perceive it to be – and that the Buddhist philosophers delivered a devastating and sophisticated blow to in the pre-modern era, is false. Research in neurophysiology and the neuroscience of perception has shown us how our brains do not simply open a window for us to see things as they truly are. Rather, our brains interpret and construct representations of the world based on the neurobiological hardware they have available (e.g. a face fusiform area in the visual cortex, an auditory association area, or an intact amygdala). We know now that colours and sounds, for instance, don’t exist outside our brains the way we perceive them. The colours we see are a product of the rods and cones in the retinas of our eyes that can code for red, blue, and green, and combinations thereof. The sounds we hear are a product of our auditory system processing sound waves, or vibrations in the air around us. Other animals, such as dogs and birds, for instance, can see and hear things we cannot because they have different neurophysiological equipment.
We also know now that the brain is a highly sophisticated pattern-recognition system. Startling research in the neuroscience of perception has shown us again and again now how our brains work incredibly quickly to match perceptual inputs (sights, sounds, tastes, etc.) to already encoded representations that can give rise to us seeming to see things (people, events, colours, etc.) that may or may not be correct.
The point here is that our brains interpret the world they are built to perceive and construct representations as best they can. This still leaves a big gap between perception and reality – a gap that Buddhist philosophers have been pointing to for thousands of years. That said, Buddhist presentations of emptiness are highly limited given their introspective and logic-based focus that doesn’t include anything about neurophysiology and the neuroscience of perception. It’s true that there has been a lively dialogue building between Buddhist practitioners and cognitive neuroscientist over the last decades, but that dialogue has focussed much more on things like the neural corelates of consciousness where neuroscientists identify certain parts an functions of the brain that are relevant to our understanding of consciousness (at least in terms of the ‘easy’ rather than the ‘hard problem’) rather than offering constructive critique on the limitations of emptiness theory.
3. The Influence of Collective Patterns of Meaning-Making - Basis of the Culture Wars
Another limitation of emptiness teachings is that they don’t include a recognition of collective patterns of meaning-making, and by this I mean the collective paradigmatic worldviews that pervade cultures and play such a huge role in people interpreting their experience.
These worldviews vary across nations, religions, and communities, with certain major examples of these that pervade our humanity’s collective life today being the traditional, modern, and postmodern worldviews.
Theorists such as Jean Gebser, Don Beck, Ken Wilber and others have tracked these worldviews and their roles in collective discourse extensively. An important point here is that these are understood to be representations in the collective of humanity of stages of psychological development that developmental psychologists have tracked in individuals. Furthermore, these theorists suggest it is the clash of these worldviews that account for so much of the culture wars that are playing out on the planet.
People operating within the traditionalist worldview tend to have absolute notions of right and wrong that are applied according to ethnocentric boundaries (e.g. religion, politics, nationality, ethnicity). Life is a series of punishments and rewards that occur according to whether one followed the rules of their chosen group and its values. If you are a Christian or a republican you are going to heaven, and if you’re not, well, probably not. These are gross generalisations, but think religious conservatives, orthodox traditionalists, and ethnocentric nationalists around the world.
People operating within the modern worldview tend to value rationality, science and technology, innovation, evidence, business, and success, and extend rights to pursue ‘the good life’ to anyone in the world based on their drive to achieve. Nature, the Earth, and the physical body tend to be seen as tools to be instrumentalised on the path of development, often with deeply damaging results. More gross generalisations: think business champions, crypto advocates who are in it for the money, materialist scientists, atheists, NLP self-development, and free market capitalists.
People operating within the postmodern world tend to value cultural diversity, identity politics, equality, emotional intelligence, care for nature, and a contextual awareness of how power structures tend to influence relationships on collective an individual levels. Further gross generalisations: think the political left, social change as well as human and animal rights activists, social justice warriors, blockchain decentralised power advocates, and hipsters.
The point here is that each of these worldviews pervades the field of humanity as a whole and each involves fundamentally different interpretations of events.
One group watching Donald Trump expelling undocumented migrants from the USA sees a political saviour sent by God to save America, the greatest country in the world, from the erosion of its traditional Christian values (a common traditionalist perspective). Another group sees a shrewd businessman who is resetting the economic prosperity of the USA by weeding out those who could have done a better job at making sure they entered the USA legally (an example of a modernist perspective). Another group sees a racist, misogynistic man with no awareness of white privilege and racial injustice targeting the least fortunate of society, probably to divert attention away from the real issues of wealth inequality and systemic injustice that his own privilege rests on (a possible postmodern lens).
As Wilber and other theorists have noted, while these worldviews bring profoundly different lenses to what is happening in the world, one thing they share is that each perceives its view as the right view, with all the others being wrong. It is only in the integral worldviews that develops after the postmodern that there starts to be a recognition that each previous worldview has healthy and unhealthy versions, with each containing certain values that are crucial for society in their healthy form.
As far as emptiness is concerned, that classical Buddhist teachings don’t include any recognition of how collective worldviews across cultures shape perception is another major blind spot.
4. Insights from Quantum Physics on the Nature of Matter, Energy, Space, and Time
One of the most fascinating discoveries of quantum physics has been about the relationship between consciousness and matter. Specifically, what has been found is that a quantum system can exist in multiple states simultaneously until a measurement is made. This means a quantum particle, such as an electron, can be in multiple locations or have multiple properties at once until it is observed, at which point its indeterminate nature collapses into a defined location and state.
As long as the quantum system is not observed it is said to exist in a state of superposition, which involves an indeterminate set of potentials all simultaneously existing. As soon as it is observed, however, that indeterminate superposition state collapses into something defined. This has raised huge questions about the nature of matter and the universe. What is the state of a galaxy before it is observed? Does it exist in the way we know it if no observation is happening?
The critical point for our consideration of emptiness teachings here is quantum physics has been confirming that the constructed nature of our experience exists even down to the very matter, energy, space, and time that the world we participate in appears to be constructed of. This is a breathtaking discovery, and one that Buddhists over the last decades have been connecting with the various ways emptiness is described across the different schools.
An Integral Esoteric Fourth Turning Presentation of Emptiness
Having journeyed through the four quadrants above, we’re now able to explore emptiness in a way that includes not only the pre-modern insights of Buddhist philosophers but also core modern and post-modern insights from Western psychology and esotericism, neuroscience, integral anthropology, and quantum physics. In doing so, we can start to glimpse what could contribute to a Fourth Turning presentation of emptiness.
Through the lens of Integral Theory’s four quadrants, we can see that our experience of the world – inner and outer – is constructed and enacted according to factors including:
The functional coherence in our self-system and our stage of development and identification
The nature and health of our neurophysiology
The collective patterns of meaning-making we participate in
The participatory nature of matter, energy, space and time
Each of these factors plays a key role in the construction of our experience, moment to moment.
Having a stable self-structure makes a major difference in how we experience our own thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, mental health, relationships, and the world outside us. And where we are sourcing our sense of identification makes a huge difference too. This is as much the case for the completely different worlds experienced by babies and full adults as it is between adults and advanced initiates who have transitioned their level of identification into subtler levels of our multidimensional being. The self that Buddhist practitioners point to as being simply a thought, dependently arising, and impossible to locate still doesn’t exist from an absolute perspective. And yet recognising the above insights from Western psychology and esotericism gives us extra insight on how the nature of the self and its experience is specific to different stages of development, and therefore empty.
Our neurophysiology constructs, filters, and interprets perception. Sensory inputs such as colours, sounds, tastes, scents, and touch are not objectively ‘out there’ but are constructed and interpreted by the brain according to its relative level of health or injury. We do not know the nature of the world outside and beyond our embodied processing of it. That processing is constructive, and therefore, empty.
Collective worldviews also filter and provide interpretive lenses for our experience. These collective patterns of meaning-making and normative values cohere cultures into shared interpretations of reality that do not truly exist independently. Hence, they are empty.
And as quantum physics has shown us, the foundational building blocks of the entire domain of matter, energy, space, and time only crystalise in the way we perceive them in the presence of an observing consciousness. They are therefore empty of inherent existence in the way we perceive them. Furthermore, if we consider these findings from quantum physics through an esoteric lens that is open to the possibility of there being multiple planes and realms of experience, it makes sense that entirely different worlds are enacted according to the nature of the consciousness that is perceiving them. If we consider an esoterically informed multi-realm model, then each of the 4 factors named above – consciousness, body, culture, and world – could be considered to tetra-arise according to the developmental capacity and karmic propensities of the beings involved.
The Fourth Turning View
All of this points to our experience of the world as not simply given, but rather enacted according to above named factors. This fuller presentation of emptiness significantly extends the classic Buddhist presentation and in so doing, demolishes any remaining notions of naïve realism we might have and shows us that all experience is:
Conceptually designed
Dependently arising
Developmentally specific
Somatically constructed
Collectively interpreted
Materially enacted
The Fourth Turning view is that reality in its essential nature is beyond and the indivisible basis of all these domains simultaneously – consciousness, body, culture, energy-matter, space, and time. This draws on the classical Third Turning Buddhist view that the ultimate nature of reality is an infinite expanse of unconditionally sacred space, consciousness, radiance, and dynamic energy arising as all things. And it extends what this reality is arising as to include experiences of self, body, culture, and world, enacted by beings with various levels of development and karmic propensities across a spectrum of more contracted to more liberated states.
It’s worth noting that this view is incompatible with the new age notion that we all ‘create our own reality’. Reality is arising through a plurality of selves, bodies, cultures, and worlds. Rather than the solipsist idea that we all create our own different reality, many experiences are shared. That isn’t because reality is independently existing ‘out there’ though. It is because there are certain kinds of consciousness, somatic hardware (energetic or dense physical), patterns of collective meaning-making, and physical or subtle realm experiences that are shared, which produces similar perceptions and interpretations.
If we start to see emptiness in this way, it updates the classical Buddhist presentation into a much more comprehensive sweep of deconstruction.
Just as the Buddhist philosophers of all times have oriented us to, every dimension of our experience is suddenly penetrated by a realisation that none of our dualistic experience of self, body, culture, and world are ‘true’ in the way we might have presumed. In this, we are liberated from our apparent identification with these domains, allowing our mind to settle back into its own essence. There, when there is no longer any attempt to modify, change, accept, reject, or maintain our experience in any way, our true nature dawns as ultimate reality. The clear light of primordial consciousness self-reveals, without centre or end and radiant with an infinite array of buddha-qualities. The true nature of reality is self-evident as this eternal ground of being, with its radiance arising as all things that are intrinsically known as empty displays, like shapes drawn on water. Every single one unspeakably sacred and impermanent.