The Most Dangerous Idea of Buddhism
Warning: this will upend your understanding of reality
When My World Split in Half
I was 30 when a doctor looked up from the chart and spoke the words that split my world: “Your husband has leukemia. This is very serious.”
One moment, we were raising three boys in the quiet safety of affluent suburbia. The next, I was watching the man I loved deteriorate cell by cell while medical bills piled up and our predictable routines dissolved.
The illness dragged on for two brutal years with chemo, bone marrow transplant, side effects, hospital corridors, despair, and the slow erosion of the life we had built. When he died, I was no longer a wife. I was a solo mother, holding the weight and responsibility of everything we’d once shared and the solitary holder of a vision forward for my sons’ future.
In the aftermath, my nervous system never really came down. I lived on high alert, tight-chested, sharp-tongued, and perpetually overwhelmed. Grief turned me chronically defensive and I began to believe everyone, including life itself, was out to get me.
I wore victimhood like a second skin. Life had been cruel, and I had the battle scars to prove it.
The Moment My Victim Story Collapsed
Five years later, I found myself hollowed out again freshly unemployed, after being fired for taking too much time off to tend to the family. That’s when I discovered meditation and began exploring the teachings of the East.
At a dharma talk, a Buddhist Lama said something that sliced through the air:
“The world is not coming at you. It is coming from you.”
I froze.
Heat rose up my neck, my jaw clenched. My thoughts jumped to protest:
What the hell could that possibly mean?
I hadn’t chosen leukemia. I hadn’t created years of stress and instability. I was a victim of tragedy.
But that wasn’t what he was saying.
He wasn’t assigning blame. He was pointing toward perception.
He was pointing out that reality isn’t fixed. What we experience is shaped by the stories we carry, the wounds we haven’t resolved, and the way our minds meet the moment.
I didn’t like it. It made me feel exposed. But it also cracked something open.
What if I wasn’t just a passive character in the story of my life?
The Self Melts First
This teacher was introducing the class to a fundamental Buddhist teaching: emptiness, or sunyata.
Emptiness doesn’t mean nothingness. It means that things don’t have fixed, inherent existence and they exist only in relationship with each other.
Just as in quantum physics, where particles exist in states of potential until observed, reality is not a fixed object, it’s an unfolding interaction between the observer and the observed.
The objects and experiences we encounter arise through our perception, conditioning, and past experiences. That means that subject and object are interdependent. For something to exist, it needs something else that perceives its existence.
The Pen Is Not Really A Pen
This can be hard to grasp. This is the way I learned it:
Imagine holding a pen in your hand. You feel its weight, the smooth surface pressing against your fingers. You recognize it instantly. But what makes it a pen?
Its “pen-ness” doesn’t come from the object itself. It comes from the name you’ve given it, from its function in your experience, and from shared agreements with others who also call it a pen.
Show that pen to a dog. Does it perceive it as a pen? No, it might see a chew toy. To a baby, it’s just a shiny object. Meaning emerges not objectively from the pen itself, but subjectively through the lens of the observer.
Which sounds benign, almost trivial, until you realize this applies not just to pens, but to everything:
To betrayal. To illness. To identity.
If even something as basic as a pen is defined by perception, then what about the things I had clung to with my whole being? What about the grief I wore like armor? What happens to the belief that I had been permanently damaged by loss? The story of being a widow? Was I actually powerless, overwhelmed and broken?
Those ideas too, were shaped by the lens I was looking through.
The good news was that if meaning is not fixed, then even pain can be re-written.
How the Mind Leaves Fingerprints on Everything
If reality is subjective, what determines that subjectivity?
Enter the eastern concept of karma.
Karma, a Sanskrit word meaning action, can be thought of as the imprints left on our minds by every experience. It’s the mental residue of our thoughts, words, and deeds. These impressions shape how we perceive everything that comes next.
According to this concept, the mind stores everything, even from past lives, and that archive influences what we notice, how we feel, and what we believe to be true. In short: karma shapes the perceptual lens of our awareness.
So if you fill the mind with positive impressions, you see more good. Negative impressions do the opposite. In Buddhism, karmic imprints are the building blocks for how we interpret our lives.
When the Ground Beneath You Gives Way
At first, emptiness felt like standing at the edge of an abyss. If meaning is fluid, what keeps us from falling into nihilism and feeling like nothing matters or nothing is real?
This is where many people turn away. Because emptiness doesn’t just challenge your beliefs, it challenges the very entity that is doing the believing. It pulls the rug out from under the self we’re so sure is real.
The teaching of emptiness reveals that meaning is co-created. If nothing is fixed, everything can evolve. If suffering isn’t absolute, then healing isn’t impossible.
That’s what makes emptiness so dangerous.
It strips away certainty because there is no script. Just your own shaking hand, holding what you have labeled and perceived as a pen.
And it asks: Now what will you write with this pen?
When Emptiness Stops Being a Concept
Understanding emptiness intellectually was just the beginning.
Meditation trained my mind to watch itself and the thoughts passing through like clouds and dissolving before. This was useful as a preliminary training ground. The mind’s ability to notice itself is absolutely essential and creates a subject/object relationship from within. Then, it was during an ayahuasca journey that emptiness moved from theory into the body.
At one point, I was pinned to the ground under the gaze of a jaguar (not metaphorically). I couldn’t move. I didn’t need to. Its growl reverberated through my chest like truth. In that stillness, my identity disassembled. Grief shimmered away and my pain lost its solidity.
There was no me. No story. Just vibration.
It was the most terrifying and holy encounter of my life.
Power Doesn’t Want You to Know This
We live in a world that profits from our helplessness and empowers our victimhood.
Political movements feed on outrage. Religions offer salvation in exchange for obedience. Even the seemingly compassionate commercial self-help industry thrives by convincing you you're broken, and then sells you the cure.
The belief that life is happening TO you is useful. For them. It keeps you dependent on the system and small, victim-like and contributing to capitalism.
But Buddhism doesn’t offer comfort. Life is coming FROM you so therefore it offers something far more disruptive: No one is coming to save you. You are the creator of your experience.
That isn’t a feel-good affirmation. It’s a radical shift in power. Because once you see how perception shapes reality, how karma grooves the mind, you can stop waiting.
For years, I waited for something to fix the pain whether therapy, time, or a change in my luck.
But no one was ever coming to save me so eventually, I realized I had to be the one to choose.
It’s Not Your Fault. It Is Your Responsibility
When I say you are the creator of your experience, I don’t mean you caused your suffering. That distinction matters.
There’s a crucial difference between being a victim of something like an illness, a betrayal, a loss and becoming fused with the identity of victimhood. The first is a fact of life. The second is a story we may begin to tell ourselves when the pain lingers too long without a place to go.
The idea that “the world is coming from you” can feel dangerous because it threatens the scaffolding around us that we’ve built to survive. I know how protective that scaffolding can be. I clung to mine for years until I was ready to let it fall.
Holding emptiness in this view, doesn’t erase what’s been done to you. It just means you get to decide how you relate to the past and what happens next.
The Future Belongs to the Clear-Seeing
The world feels like it’s tightening and we are trying to breathe through a straw. Lines seem to have been drawn and sides have been taken. We scroll through curated outrage, each headline sharpening the divide. Politics has infiltrated our perception. When we allow that perception to be left unexamined it becomes our prison.
But what if the bars aren’t real?
This is why emptiness matters now. We must push beyond the concep and into an embodied knowing. If nothing has fixed existence, then no one is fixed in their role. Not the betrayer nor the betrayed wrapped in the stories that once kept us safe.
If meaning arises in relationship, then every interaction is interdependent. That means that every enemy is actually a teacher.
This spiritual precision can hold paradox without splitting apart. This is how polarity begins to collapse by widening our lens.
Emptiness trains us to build the muscle that can sit in contradiction without flinching. It teaches us to ask: What else is true beyond my perception in this moment?
Our inner work ripples out. How we see becomes how we speak, listen, choose and how we influence others.
The future depends on people who can hold complexity without needing to blame others for their reality. This is why the teaching of emptiness is fundamental and understanding the subjective nature of our reality deeply matters.
In a time of noise and fracture, the most dangerous and sacred thing we can do is to see clearly, love anyway, and keep the subjective pen moving, even when your hand is shaking.
If you’re navigating a season of unraveling—where old identities no longer fit—I offer one-on-one coaching and personalized rituals to help you integrate, rebuild, and move forward with clarity. My work combines deep inner inquiry with practical tools for transformation, designed to meet you exactly where you are.
very powerful piece. Many sentences left me spellbound.
You write so well. I love the idea of 'the mind leaving fingers on everything' Thanks <3