The Empty Path: A Discussion With Billy Wynne

Source: Image provided by New World Library

I spent an hour this week chatting with Billy Wynne about his book, The Empty Path: Finding Fulfillment through the Radical Art of Lessening. Although I have relatively little knowledge about Buddhism or Zen (Billy's areas of expertise), we share a common interest in helping people overcome suffering. And our conversation didn't disappoint. Below, I'll discuss some of the key insights I gained about how to move beyond suffering, increase a sense of calm, and find fulfillment.

Emptiness: Seek Less, Not More

A core principle of Buddhism is emptiness. On its face, it may sound like meaninglessness or nihilism—the word emptiness is not something that sounds very inspiring or exciting or happy for people at first glance. But it's really more about seeing that the things we cling to are empty of permanence and of self. Everything comes into existence and out of existence; it all starts as one and ends as one. Therefore, we are one.

No Self: Labels Are Not Truth

Billy walks us through exercises on deconstructing the idea of self a couple of different times in the book, starting with more mundane things like a chair, or even an olive that he's futzing with. When it comes to us humans, we have a name, parents, personality, opinions, etc... But if we take a very, very close and careful look at these things, we'll start to wonder: which one makes me me? There might be some things that we've sort of assumed are us. But again, if we really step back and take a careful look at it, we can see that we are both everything and nothing.

So what happens then? Billy says, "Our relationship to our world and our life and our life experience is totally changed. We've been living in this idea that we have a self and others have a self and these things have a self. And so I'm over here, you're over there, we're separate. And therefore there's scarcity because there's all these different things kind of competing for finite resources." Something shifts when we see that everything is empty of a self. There is no better or worse—everything simply is as it is.

Non-Attachment: Suffering Is In Our Clinging

The human mind quickly labels everything as either good or bad. When things are labeled as good, we attach. When things are labeled as bad, we avoid. For example, we may have an expectation about the next vacation we're going to take. We expect the weather will be good and that everybody's going to be happy and smiling all the time. And it's going to be fun. Then we attach to those ideas or expectations. And that often inhibits our authentic and direct experience of what the vacation itself is actually going to be.

Billy offers the advice that we "greet the next moment with an open heart." Or, in other words, cultivate a sense of non-attachment.

We have things we like and dislike, and those things guide how we behave toward them. But Billy says, "If we can cultivate this understanding of things as empty and therefore actually not separate in a very important way, if we can think of ourselves as fundamentally fulfilled and satisfied and sufficient, and cultivate these other practices, then that very deeply ingrained instinct we have to attach to things starts to soften, and we start to have a little more space and patience to be with things as they arise before our attached judgments and reactions to them start to play out."

You can watch the full interview with Billy here:

In Sum

Needless to say, I really enjoyed my chat with Billy, and I feel like I learned a lot about the intersection between Buddhism and positive psychology. If I had to choose just one insight to take from the chat, it would be that emptiness can be a good thing. As a variety of quotes from famous thinkers allude to, "To be filled, we must first be empty." Indeed, I now understand why this is true.

You can also read the transcript at The Berkeley Well-Being Institute.