There are no essences, just interpretations

We humans want to make more of reality than is actually there. We believe that things have more substance, more independence, and more of an unchanging essence than is justified.

This is the message of my previous post about the relative nature of the quantum world. And as I noted in that post, it fits with a core tenet of Buddhism -- emptiness.

Buddhism emptiness doesn't mean a void, or nothingness. 

It refers to the fact that nothing has inherent existence. Nothing has an unchanging essence. Nothing stands alone, complete in and by itself.

In the book I've been writing about recently, "Why Buddhism is True," Robert Wright, the author, says that essence is closely linked to emptiness.

Essence, as we've seen, is central to the Buddhist concept of emptiness. At least its absence is central to the concept of emptiness. The idea of emptiness is that, while the things we perceive out there in the world do in some sense exist, they lack this thing called "essence."

Essence appears in quite a few of the neuroscience books I've read. Often the example used is of, say, someone being told that they could have a nice used sweater at no cost.

The person is delighted.

Then they're told that the sweater belonged to a murderer who killed his victims in a grisly fashion. Learning that, often the sweater offer is refused, because somehow the essence of the murderer is felt to be part of it.

More positively, Wright cites the true example of someone who paid $48,875 for a tape measure owned by John F. Kennedy, "apparently motivated by a sense that it was imbued with some sort of presidential 'essence.'"

He then wonders what would have happened if the successful bidder was told that a mistake was made, and the tape measure actually belonged to a plumber.

The bidder's altered facial expression would leave no doubt that there had been an alteration of feeling. A tape measure that moments ago inspired awe and adoration would now inspire nothing of the kind. A precious relic had turned into a mere object, emptied of the essence it possessed only moments before.

What this points to is another subject discussed by Wright, how perceptions and feelings are intimately related. In fact, they are virtually inseparable. 

Meaning, how we look upon something or someone is deeply affected by our prior experience and emotional attitude. 

I've talked about this sort of thing in reference to how devotees of a guru typically view his qualities in absolute terms, whereas actually they're relative.

I had personal experience of this when my wife went with me to see the guru who led the religious organization I belonged to at the time, Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

Well, actually my wife went to Palm Springs for shopping and sightseeing. But she was able to see the guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, at a small group session where she got to sit in the front row.

She wasn't at all impressed. To her, Dhillon just seemed like a regular guy.

But to his devotees, the guru was imbued with marvelous qualities: love, wisdom, charm, and so on. This shows something obvious: beauty, or any other quality, is in the eye of the beholder, not anywhere outside.

Essence also is tied into stories, as Wright describes.

The stories we are told about things, and the stories we tell ourselves about things, influence how we feel about those things and, presumably, thus shape the essence that we sense in them. 

If the story behind a tape measure is that it belonged to JFK, that implies a different feeling -- and a different essence -- than the story that the tape measure belongs to a plumber.

If we think of ourselves as having a successful marriage and wonderful, thriving children, then the sight of our home probably gives off more positive vibes than if we think of ourselves as trapped in an obsessive marriage that has bred ne'er-do-well kids. And so on.

...But that's just one example of a more general illusion: that the "essences" we sense in things really exist, that they inhabit the things we perceive, when in fact they are constructions of our minds, with no necessary correspondence to reality.

Things come with stories, and the stories, whether true or false, shape how we feel about the things and thus shape the things themselves, giving them the full form we perceive.

Comments

[um]

Dis-believe or un-believe exists also as something in the eye of the beholder.

If one is not able to love a thing or a person, there must be something in that thing or person that explains it.

The capacity to attribute positive feelings is spread according a Gauss=curve.
Or to use his poetic words.
In order to say "I eat" there must be food on the plate and hunger in the man ... both are "given" ... meaning its is beyond his power to manifest these things himself by effort.

Un belief is just the missing of that hunger and the lack of food.

Strange,....it makes me think of my dad who used to say that people that are hungry first eat and only later do speak and/or exchange compliments etc. He also warned me for people who first speak and exchange compliments and then eat.

When i was still involved with this path, I found that there where some that where always convincing others about their choice and appreciation for the path. These days I would consider that as a form of projection of their own need to convince themselves ... being unbelievers at heart.

After all, it is no big deal if one likes coffee nor if one doesn't do so. What doesn't matter to others what one likes and dislikes..

The world is a false mirror .. better not to speak to the figurines that appear in the mirror.

And ..... I came to talk to an kind lady of the Dalit community and her family. They explained to me that they were not allowed to participate in religious services and were maltreated in many ways by Brahmans that excused themselves with religious reasoning about a God .... REASON for many Dalits tho chose for Buddhism that doesn't speak of an God.

Buddhism, it seems, has become a save heaven for all that found nothing or just misery in relation to this or that religion.

[Spence Tepper]

The attributions the mind makes to things gives them relative value, but may have little to do with those things.

Our attachments and associations to things become their relative value to us.

It's normal for the mind to become conditioned to associate responses, thoughts and emotions to all that it perceives, whether people, things or theories. This isn't a wrong or bad thing. It is simply the way the mind works, and in its sphere can be highly functional. Our responses, including our thoughts and feelings, reflect our experience and conditioning.

If we can learn to understand from a different perspective, we can better see both the strengths and the limitations of the brain and the mind.

[Tim Rimmer]

Brian
Just been reading over your last few posts with their Buddhist flavour and have a few comments:

I wondered about how a person who hadn’t done lots of meditation/self inquiry/personal growth work (not that special :-)) would react to your claims that we’re ‘nothing special’ and that what we normally think of ourself to be is ‘illusory’. I consider that while some people these days may be more aware of what science says in regards to our ‘self’/psyche etc, I’d say many folk are just trying to get on with life, to thrive or even just survive, with scant interest in whether or not this internal CEO is real or not, nor question the specialness of such, i.e. this blog is relevant to a small % of people.
I considered Wright’s comment about the bottom line being natural selection and the need for the next round of genes - not about how thoughts/feelings/perceptions etc are there to give us an accurate picture of reality. I would see the former as factual if we take ourselves to be purely physical creatures. Certainly many people seem to suffer from a kind of deep seated anxiety of varying intensity - something related to our genetic ancestry and the fight or flight response? In a recent movie we watched called Alpha, humans were living in the Ice Age and the threat of being taken by a sabre toothed cat was definitely real!
However it’s my view that such anxiety is countered by an evolutionary process that helps us start to see it (anxiety/thought forms/perceptions etc) as not what we are. As Wright says we can develop the power to disengage, disown and exclude, (which is one approach) and following such application start to realise the so-called ‘executive self’, although needed, seems to be more of a fabrication. What interests me is WHATS LEFT?
I believe Wright is alluding to this when he says ‘Be open to the radical possibility that your self, at the deepest level, is not at all what you’ve always thought of it as being’ - your interpretation [Brian] is to say ‘It’s possible to look upon our emotions, thoughts, perceptions, and such as not being in the realm of good and bad, nor as being lasting parts of who we are’ - Yes I agree, but isn’t there more to it? Are such observations after the event? Not having the book I’m wondering what Wright will eventually say - guess that will be up to you.
The recent whirlpool analogy to describe our illusory self is a good one imo. I thought Rupert Spira portrays the story well in a recent YouTube clip. Maybe our ‘selves’ can be described in similar terms in a quantum sense - temporal energy vortices - outcomes of various interactions at varying scales. You talk of Rovelli’s philosophising about the deeply entangled interactions between the world and the brain and how consciousness can possibly be explained in terms of relations. I can get that everything is related, coming and going. It’s all co-dependently arising WITHIN something - consciousness imo.
In your latest post you bring in Wright’s consideration of ‘essence’ and his contention that the origin of such lies in mental constructions. The JFK/murderer’s sweater stories work fine as examples to me, if perceived from the distorted viewpoint of a mind generating an essence from conditioning and discursive thinking. What about the factual accounts of people whose behaviour changes after they receive a new transplanted heart/liver etc? Remnant essence?
Getting back to consciousness, the on going big question of course is whether all this is happening within our heads/brains. My view is that our brains are just part of it. Evolution is both responsible for shutting down/limiting access to expanded consciousness through things like the DMN (Default Mode Network) in the brain, but also for the urge to experience ourselves as non-separated, interconnected and expanded.
I remain intrigued in that which gives shape to the whirlpool, the river - yes, the water - more so.

[Dungeness]

@ The idea of emptiness is that, while the things we perceive out there in the world do in some sense exist,
@ they lack this thing called "essence."

The more interesting question is what is the dichotomy between what's perceived and
the perceiver himself. The quantum is a wave or a particle depending on the presence
of a perceiver. Is the Cheshire Cat's visitation only occurring because we perceive it?
Or does it vanish because we cease to create it? A magic show all staged for a bit of
sport?

Of course the mystics say the answer is yes the entire creation is "Mithra". That is,
it's illusion without "essence" at all except to the perceiver. So is the perceiver himself
without essence? No, of course not. Only the part you're perceiving with your blinkered
eyes is. That is until your awareness is total and you see "within". Then the drama ends.
You've awakened. The dream's props are gone. So is the cast. They've merged back
into the wave.

[Spence Tepper]

Hi Dungeness
You wrote
"So is the perceiver himself
without essence? No, of course not. Only the part you're perceiving with your blinkered
eyes is. That is until your awareness is total and you see "within". Then the drama ends.
You've awakened. The dream's props are gone. So is the cast. They've merged back
into the wave."

What if becoming awakened includes seeing more dramas, more situations, not less?

Many, many more.

What if awakening includes seeing more dreams, not less. Only these dreams are other people in other situations that don't appear to have any connection to our life at all.

Like switching channels at random on the TV, or pulling up a simple search on the internet bringing up pages of hundreds of videos, and you, the observer, just seeing dozens of them, one each for a moment it two, scrolling to the next with little or no connection, each scene being someone else's post, flashing through dozens of other people's tick tocks.

It's easy to say "that's other people" when you do it through the instrumentation of your hands and eyes on the internet.

But what do you surmise when that's a stage of meditation? When that's inside you. The stars of all these shows seem important, but I'm just an audience member. Relative to all that's going on I don't exist. It's not about me. So when you witness within all these different scenes and people and they are random, and you have little control over that kaleidoscope, then the show is everything, all those people I've never met before and all those places, past and future, I have never seen before that hold little or no connection for me. But as the channel changes every few seconds, nothing seems particularly of value or interest. I'm surfing but just am not finding anything worth watching. What I might like or not like is completely irrelevant. There is zero consideration of any of that. It's all just the show itself.

One night a few years ago I was in one of the scenes in a dream. Engineers at a company were stuck on a problem. It was a quantum computing issue. I was explaining the math to them to solve the problem, showing them on a white board that appeared then disappeared., but they didn't seem to be listening, then one of them figured it out, and drew the solution on a real white board, but it was only a partial solution. And I remembered thinking, "well he gets part of it, that'll get them a step forward, whatever. ", and that was the end of it.

I woke up tired thinking, "I've got a lot going on right now, what is the point of sleep if I have to work during it and during the day?"

But when that dream ended so did my knowledge of the technical solution and the mathematics behind it and the people on the team I thought I had been working with.

Even when I was thrown into a roll it was just another channel change that was just work with no connection or reward other than just to do the job and get on with it.

But seeing all those people I'll never meet, why, why?

It's no different than surfing Netflix at random. So what was all that meditation practice for, if you can get the same on Netflix?

The only functional truth is that there is no value to any of it, and yet this is life here and in some similar regions. We all have assigned jobs and they change all the time. I didn't ask for any assignment, there was no discussion. I didn't get to pick a show to watch. Why would I care? So much of it, you can't help but think, that's interesting, but whatever, when you are taken to the next random scene or assignment.

I guess with Netflix you get to pick and choose.but that's someone else's creations.

But there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason. Just slices of life. You just look silently at the passing show knowing it has zero personal connection to you. You become nothing but an observer, or a minor participant, of stuff that is really other people's business and no connection to your own life. Yet it is infinitely watchable.

Awakening may be seeing more of the machinery, not less.

[Dungeness]

@ Awakening may be seeing more of the machinery, not less.

Hi Spence, you bring up a good point. At this level, we see through a
"glass darkly" at best. Your interrupted "quantum super-hero" dream is
very apt. It's all so seemingly random, fragmented, and pointless if we
don't get to see more.

My limited mystic understanding is we're all ordinary and extraordinary
at the same time. Klutzes who get confused and frustrated and wake up
from nightmares sighing "Thank God , it's over!". (dump God for a more
resonant word if needed)

I suspect GIHF differs only in level of awareness. He may get batted
around in a dream but his mindfulness is so honed, he doesn't buy
into the drama. He knows it's a dream state. No fear, no confusion,
equanimity intact, awareness still at a high level. The ultimate lucid
dreamer. An extraordinary state we're all capable of too.

You get a sense of the power of mindfulness by practicing it at even
a low level. We know when we've awakened and when we haven't.
We know it instinctively... whether you subscribe to the idea of
listening to a "RSSB stage actor" or not. Whatever the path is,
even if it were bingeing on Netflix, it's helpful if it's a pointer to what
lies within. That's where the real answers are. We can aspire to
becoming extraordinary by taking that journey.

[Jen]

I'm looking forward to death. Sounds weird I know but for me its going to be an adventure and at last I will know if I have a 'soul' that will continue to exist...

"Empty handed I entered the world.

Barefoot I leave it.

My coming, my going-
Two simple happenings

That got entangled.
– Kozan

Zen legend has it that a few days before his death, Kozan called his pupils together, ordered them to bury him without ceremony when he died. One morning, after writing this poem, he lay down his brush and died while sitting upright.

As I get older, death feels more relevant. The magical thinking of youth fades – it becomes clearer that death is not an ‘if’ but a ‘when’. And I wonder what would it take to pass over with such clarity and grace… and a tiny grain of true wisdom worth passing on?"

[Dungeness]

@ As I get older, death feels more relevant. The magical thinking of youth fades – it becomes clearer that
@ death is not an ‘if’ but a ‘when’. And I wonder what would it take to pass over with such clarity and grace… @ and a tiny grain of true wisdom worth passing on?"

Jen, I'm always stunned by the immediacy of end-of-life. I only hope along with you
that it will be with clarity and grace and that tiny grain of wisdom you spoke of. A
beautiful departure.