The problem with micro analysis of the world, ourselves and our place in the world is not that it is not true, but that invariably it distracts from the real truth.
I'm guilty of an error recently.
1) After reading Thich Nhat Than's account of the 8 consciousnesses I took a nihilistic attitude to self. If we imagine consciousnesses in and of themselves then there is no room for a self. There are the 5 senses, the 6th realm of thoughts and imagination consciousness, the 7th self consciousness and the 8th "store" consciousness of unconsciousness. That last one sounds like a contradiction how can "un" consciousness be a consciousness. Well it is very near the 6th and 7th consciousness, like the background consciousness and we are certainly aware of it (or should be) as the cause of our world. This perhaps is the most basic ignorance thinking that our everyday consciousness arises directly from the world not realising that it is senses layered over by unconsciousness, thoughts and self. So layered over that Buddha says that "our thoughts make the world." Senses by themselves are not a world. If the sense are the sails of a boat then the mind is the wind that propels the boat along. Clearly the life we live is entirely driven by the mind.
Anyway driving off down the idea of consciousness occurring in-and-of themselves I negated a very important element indeed. The Truth.
It's not a terribly bad approach as it forces us to see our habitual usual self as just a conscious overlay on the world.
But it rips the heart out of the world.
When we dismiss and no longer take as a foundation the mortal self, which is that person standing in a crowd, we do not end up with nihilistic nothing.
What we do is steal back the "existence of the world" and give that foundation.
Problem with science and philosophy is we can almost end up saying that "I" cause existence. Looking at cognitive science and the brain and the processing that is undertaken to create the world we can almost say that "My Brain" makes "My World."
In a lower sense we think this cos we work hard and accumulate money and then buy "our world." We (as the male) can wake in the morning (at least in the traditional family) in "My" house next to "my" wife and send "our" kids off the school and get in "my" car and everything is chosen and in a sense made my "me."
Philosophy and science just continues this into "my" brain and all the work it does to perceive the world work it out, and my thoughts to understand it and make "my" choices. And again more superficially "my" legs to run the marathon, and "my" determination and "my" will and from last blog "My" doll or action-man that I live my life through.
Looking at the picture above, its always been odd that "I" am completely fundamental to "My" life and yet in reality I'm almost indistinguishable from all the other people. In a NAZI concentration camp I am just a nameless number and it seems I do not matter more than anyone else, in fact if I am selected to be killed that is the closest I get to being a separate being, different and important.
At the heart of all this is "my."
All this is true, BUT what is not true is that "my" belongs to anyone. If anything my body and life belongs to God or if we don't like God it belongs to Nature and the planet and the billions of years of evolution that brought me into existence. And if I don't like that then something else, but what it doesn't belong to is "me." I can't belong to myself?
And this is where the Truth comes into it.
In Shurangama Sutra there is a great exposition of Host and Guest. A Guest comes and then goes. A Host HAS NO WHERE TO GO. This is the confusion we make throughout our lives. We are always coming and going in our life: growing, getting older, learning, making mistakes, moving on, building, changing, buying, getting happy, getting sad: we are always coming and going. We are always only ever the guest in our own lives!
What we tend to ignore is that our lives are already here. The world is already here. In a sense we do make the world, but not in the sense that we are part of the process, but in the sense that we are the stage onto which the world comes along and happens and then goes. The world is the guest, we are the HOSTS to all this business. We don't need to come and we have no where to go. The host just waits for the guests and then opens to door to let them go. That is all we need do in our lives.
Now any analogy gets corrupted. Put like that we think "My" stage, which play shall I book and start rehearsals for. Which guests shall I invite, which food, drinks and music shall we have. Who sits next to who at dinner? But even this getting a play or party ready is more Guest like behaviour. We are now just moving onto planning. Even the putting a show on is just a play itself. Even thinking out this blog is just the soliloquy of an actor on the stage. We ARE the stage itself. Shakespeare is wrong there, we are not actually the actors in reality, although we can adopt their perspective as needs be like the audience does.
So then we think (and I'm back in the same place as dolls in the previous post) so I'm just passive dead planking on which actors live and work. No that is the nihilism this post is about, all the stuffing has been taken out.
Now this is the subtle thing. That Shakespearean analogy doesn't quite work. A better one is booking a room. If there are people already in the room we can't use it. It is the emptiness of the room that makes it useful. This is Daoism as well. "I" exist in the "space" or "silence" or "absence of light" that gives the world room to happen. That means when something happens we are intimately involved in it, not in the "shape" or "nature" of the occurrence, but in the invitation for "happening" itself.
This is essentially the same as Kant's "condition for the possibility" except there is just One. What is the point of dividing the "condition for the possibility" into as many possibility as there are things. What is the condition for that plurality? Why not just have that root one as The Condition?
This is also Heideggar's "hiding of Being" in the emergence of beings or things. In Heideggar we can see Being as what gave way in the emergence of things. It is the "lighting up process."
"Lighting up" is directly relevant to the experience of sight where literally "light" is what brings the world into presence. But as Buddha argues in the Shurangama, light is not all that is needed for seeing. You light a candle does the table now see? The seeing of our True Self is very close to light, so close that the analogy works. When we do any seeing what is most obvious is that there is light. That "light" is standing right next to our true self... just one step away. The "lighting" is literal but it issues directly from the empty room in which the world happens.
The other senses are not "lit" up exactly, but the analogy is again right next door. The sudden arising of a sound like a bird call "lights" up our hearing. There was nothing and then suddenly it awakens into a form or an "appearance" in our hearing. The sight and light analogies work seamlessly for the other senses. The reason is that they are right next door to the truth.
When Buddha says to Sariputra that "Form is Emptiness and Emptiness is Form" he is telling us to have no step between these, the sudden appearance of the sound is the same as the room or space or silence in which it happens: they transform one into the other, and they are the same, as one side of a coin is on the same coin as the other side when the coin is so thin that there are only 2 sides. When something happens we can chose to see the form or we can chose to see the emptiness.
My own great insight came as a kid seeing that the circular light cast by an angle poise lamp over my shoulder was "illuminated" by the darkness around it. No darkness around it then no circle of lamp light. At that point my mind expanded to fill all space so that as I remember "I was able to see in that mysterious space behind my head." I've been told by a very advanced meditation teacher that this was not jhana. But the 5th Jhana is the "infinity of space" so what else was this? Not that it matters beyond questioning the limiting of Jhanas to 4 by some schools. Jhanas are not ends in themselves, but help us step above the wrong views and orient us, exactly like compasses toward the EXACT direction of truth. We can think and have rough ideas about all this but to get it laser sharp requires real focus, attention to detail and work.
That "seeing" is our "True Self." So that the woman standing in the crowd above looking out is looking in the right direction (kind of). The ability to see at all comes from our True Self. Not the ability to perceive and make out things, like "I see the sun", nor even to be consciousness, not the light entering an eye or stimulating a sense: all this belongs to her body standing there. But the actual "seeing" the ability to ignore thoughts and sense of a body or world, to have a venue and be able to put out an invitation for the world just to happen: that is the True Self.
Which has one interesting feature. Now we let go of our body as the heart of our "True Self" we also let go of everyone else. "We" all share in One Self, in that "we" is not the place where "truth" comes from, but rather the other way around. Once the world has happened then we get a chance to make the mistake of choosing a body and then all the problems of "which body?", and "why are there so many like me but different?" all start. And those bodies start thinking about this problem given to them and the suffering, the difficulties and the being born and dying, it all beings.
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