Rodney had been trying to explain to me what the experience of emptiness is like. On the one hand, I gathered, there’s a sense in which things in his perceptual field don’t project their independent identities as strongly as they do for most of us. But, Rodney emphasized, you don’t lose your ability to identify things. “You want to be able to pick up a pair of glasses and put it on, and not think that it’s a pencil,” he said. “You don’t lose the shapes or colors of things. It’s just that the space between them no longer divides.” I asked, “Do you have less strong emotional reactions to things
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