It’s really helpful when contemplating emptiness to do it with a blissful, spacious mind, to allow the mind to rest naturally, releasing thoughts without clinging. You can use the time-honored Yogis’ favorite meditation on the clarity of the mind, for example; and if you want to experience the natural bliss of your mind and use that to meditate, you can start with a quick meditation on transforming enjoyments.
For coming to understand our own mind experientially in this way enables us to observe how our thoughts create our world, which is the other side of the coin from the world not existing from its own side. Apart from our own deluded conceptions, which we grasp at as true, there is nothing outside the mind that obstructs our peace and happiness. We remain bound by our own delusions, bewildered in suffering as if strangled by a tortoise-hair noose.
So is the dress white and gold or blue and black?!
(I am carrying on from this article, The Non-Thingyness of Things.) So, we are continually grasping at real things, at inherently existent things, and this is where the problem lies. Modern Buddhism says (p.104):
We naturally believe that the things we see around us, such as tables, chairs, and houses, are truly existent because we believe that they exist exactly in the way that they appear.
They appear real, so in our ignorance we believe they are real.
Even whether a dress is white and gold, or blue and black, the subject of a video that is going viral, depends entirely on the mind!
But we always believe that what we see is what is really going on. Of course it was white and gold! Everyone who saw it as otherwise was basically wrong! Or, as this article says:
Everyone, it seems, had an opinion. And everyone was convinced that he, or she, was right.
Harmless in this instance, perhaps, and some of the Tweets on the subject made me chuckle; but this rigid belief in our own perceptions also causes all the aversion, disputes, polarization, and so on in this world.
None of us is right!
However, the way things appear to our senses is deceptive and completely contradictory to the way they actually exist. Things appear to exist from their own side, without depending on our own mind. This book that appears to our mind, for example, seems to have its own independent, objective existence. ~Modern Buddhism p. 104
Do you feel that your mind was involved in any way in bringing your body just sitting here, for example, into existence? Your world? Is that how it appears? Or does it feel more like, “Enter stage left, bump into a life full of things – objects, bodies, people, some nice, some not – and exit stage right?” Like we come along and say, “Ooohh, look at that!”, hang out a bit in the world, and then check out? We enter a world that is independent of our mind, and we die in a world that is independent of our mind?
This is a massive hallucination. This world and absolutely everything in it is a projection of our own mind with no existence from its own side in the least. This means that everything without exception – including our friends, our dog, our job, our self — depends upon our mind entirely and completely. There is nothing that can exist out there independent of our mind.
Anything that appears to be more than just appearance to our mind, to exist over and above a dream-like appearance, is what we are grasping at with ignorance. Anything that appears to exist in any way from its own side, objectively, is an inherently existent thing; and grasping at this is causing all our suffering.
Never the twain shall meet
As it says in Modern Buddhism:
[This book] seems to be “outside” while our mind seems to be “inside”.
There’s a gap, isn’t there? We talk about “dualistic appearance” in Buddhism because the mind seems to exist from its own side, over “here”, and the object seems to exist from its own side, somehow over “there”, and there is a gap between us. But that gap does not really exist.
It is due to that gap that we find it hard to cherish others. We also grasp at a real self (somehow over here) and a real other (over there), and as a result it’s hard to bridge that gap and feel in transcendent communion or union with others. In truth, we are totally interconnected with other living beings. There is no independent self or independent other. I am not the real me so cherishing my own happiness and working only for my own happiness is a fool’s game. This gap is responsible for our inability to open our hearts, love others, have compassion, and so on.
There is nothing there to grasp at
We feel that the coffee cup we are holding can exist without our mind, don’t we? A moment ago it was in the kitchen cabinet and now it’s here – all I did was carry it. The cup was just floating around somewhere in this big old real world, and has nothing to do with my mind. It can exist without my mind, it can go back in the cabinet, it can do what it wants. We do not feel that our mind is in any way involved in bringing this cup into existence. It’s like this cup has a power from its own side to exist. There just IS a cup there. There is a REAL cup behind the thought “cup”.
(For more on how we can discover for ourselves that cups and bodies and everything else are not real, check out these articles.)
Buddha said everything is mere name. Mere name, mere label, mere imputation of mind. We, with our grasping, think there’s got to be something behind that label. We feel this cup is very concrete, we fix things with our ignorance. We reify, make everything solid and real. Ignorance makes us live in a concrete world where everything is solid and real, and we keep bumping up against things and people, or else trying to get away from them.
With wisdom, we get a completely different experience of reality — a non-dual experience of our mind and its objects. Try to compare this experience with the crunchiness of ignorance and we can’t, it is incomparably blissful.
More in a future article. Meantime, your comments are welcome!
12 Comments
When i read articles like this it clarifies more for me the verse from Shantideva in the book How to Transform your Life..it begins something like
” When examined in this way who is it who is living, who is it who will die…”
The people who have died/will die are created by my mind, a collection of thoughts arising out of my karma, not real “out there” ..my experience of them, the collection of characteristics they have, is unique to my mind…such a relief to not grasp at them as “real out there like this” and instead have a mind of love, wishing for them to be happy…a relief to let go of it all and rest my mind instead in love …digs me out of that hole, at least temporarily!
It is so true that emptiness clears the way for real love, you are good at that. (Like lending me your car for months on end once, lol 🙂 Thank you for this beautiful comment.
I would expect to see an argument about the coffee cup not being real, but after reading the whole article there’s nothing to demonstrate that. Is this a joke?
Yes, sorry about that, no time to explain everything in every article 🙂 But i write a lot about how we can discover that things are not real elsewhere on the blog, for example here: https://kadampalife.org/our-body/
It was blue and black! Not that it gets at the heart of the article though. Thank you Luna Kadampa… reading your blobs helps me with my delusions! 🙂 http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/02/28/science/white-or-blue-dress.html?_r=0
blobs?! ha ha ha!
Hello Luna
Again me, sorry if I asked so many questions, but I’m about to revealing all puzzles in my mind.
I know what you are talking about dellusion of mind. I’m battling with it. Since my son passed away, I’ve been praying a lot and also sometimes meditated. For some reasons, I start experiencing bardo state myself (I just found out this term of my experience). I’ve got few times out of body experience upon awakening, but I tend to stop it a.s.a.p as I’m not familiar with it. I just could not handle my fear & not knowing what will happen if I let it happened. Now, I know how my son felt when he left his body. It’s really overwhelming situations, where there appeared massive unknown projection of mind cinemas, light tunnels, beings of other realms, etc. I know all of those are merely mind dellusions, but I just could not control my confusion & my fear. This is the reason, I’ve been looking for an experienced guru who could tell me exactly why I’m having this & also teach me how to overcome such situation skillfully. Perhaps, I should feel lucky that I could experience & learn the afterlife before the actual death, but it’s really overwhelming situation for out of sudden appearance in almost daily basis, as if I’m living in a dream. It’s not something nice for me tho, but scary.
Have you ever heard it from your guru, Luna?
Again thank u
It would be great if you could find out more about going for refuge at this time so that you have the protection of Buddha, Dharma and Sangha as you navigate these new waters. Did you find the Center in Switzerland and the teacher Gen Losang? I know they can help you. Gen Losang is a close disciple of my own Spiritual Guide, or Guru, Geshe Kelsang Gyatso.
When I heard of this “dress” I immediately thought of our Buddhist teachings and the imputation of the mind. Ironically, I then read your post. Coincidence?
Everything is interconnected! But also it is a likely thing to think if one is Buddhist … a great example of imputation, which is why i couldn’t resist posting the article.
It first it was white and gold but now all I can see is black and blue! Every single image of that on the internet changed when my mind changed.
Cool! kind of weird though, seeing as it is white and gold from its own side 😉