What Thich Nhat Hanh’s explanation of emptiness says about ego and why you get defensive
Have you ever been in a heated argument with someone and realized you no longer believed in the “side” you were arguing but you just couldn’t stop?
You were hooked. Or as American Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön says, something, maybe that person, triggered your “habitual tendency to close down.”
But what were you hooked to? The other person? No, you were hooked to ego, the idea in your mind that you exist as an individual, separate “self.” Because if you exist in and of yourself then you must defend that self. When you’re hooked, being right becomes a scarce resource, and you must get all of it.
Now, of course you exist — you have a body and mind. Knowing that ego is just an idea, i.e., not real, doesn’t mean the world is meaningless and there’s no point in arguing or doing anything at all. Buddhism uses the concept of ego to explain how you — and that person across from you or in the Facebook thread — are the result of an infinite number of causes and conditions.
People interpret this in many ways but the way I see it, every human made up of a cornucopia of forces: how their parents treated them when they were young, the trauma they’ve experienced, how this society treats their gender and skin color, how much property they own, the historical injustice their family has suffered through, how much therapeutic work they’ve been exposed to, and much more.
In short: nothing exists by itself — but even so, it still exists. Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, in describing the Buddhist concept of emptiness, explains: “It is like a flower that is made only of non-flower elements. The flower is empty of a separate existence, but that doesn’t mean that the flower is not there.”
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There’s a sort of koan-esque wisdom to this, koans being those Zen riddles that nudge you towards enlightenment by being paradoxical. Like, “what is the sound of one hand clapping?”
Yet thinking about ego the next time you’re hooked and the fiery intensity takes over your body probably won’t help. There’s something bodily and out of control about being hooked — if you couldn’t stop once you realized you were wrong how will you stop to think of ego?
This is the power of meditation— to practice noticing when we’re trying to hold on to happiness or get away from pain, when we’re wishing things were different. That’s all an argument really is, right? Wishing the other person were different?
Meditation is practicing being alright with the fact that things aren’t different than they are. We get caught up in thinking— because that’s how the mind works — but we come back to the breath, sounds, and the sensations of our body, over and over again. This process relaxes us into mindfulness, which opens up a little more spaciousness in our mind and around us, more room to decide whether we want think about something further or act out in a certain way or…continue an argument because it needs to be had.
(It’s important to note that meditation isn’t therapy. If you’re pushing up against your edge, you’re bound to fall into habitual patterns of dealing with the anxiety, fear, and stress that come up. Sometimes you can’t see those patterns, or the moment feels too big and scary to do anything about them. Unraveling why you react in certain ways, with the help of a professional, can help locate what situations and people trigger those reactions, which can help you learn what to avoid or how to set new intentions. Pushing up against your edge becomes more of a choice, rather than wishful thinking.)
