1. The world is illusory in the sense that it is empty of
inherent existence.
3. You need to re-read my statement:
That’s not to deny reality as we
observe it, nor to say that there’s no reality outside the mind,
but simply that no ‘reality in itself’ exists. Phenomena only exist
in dependence on other phenomena.
4. Being killed by a car is conventional efficacy of cause and
effect. But it does not mean however that car has substantial core
or existence ultimately. Everything being dependently originated is
empty ultimately. Empty does not mean non-existing but empty of a
substantial core, unchanging, independent existence.
2. Redness is an experience of vision in human kind. You cannot
speak of redness apart from vision. Redness is a dependently
originated phenomena, neither existing in mind nor in outer
objects, for both mind and outer objects are conventions for
dependently originated activities that are empty and cannot be
pinned down as a substantial entity.
Anyway there is an interesting article by Kyle:
http://awakeningtoreality.blogspot.sg/2012/03/sun-that-never-sets.html
As a quick disclaimer: Faculties that are named and used in making
the descriptions and examinations i'm writing about are only
temporary and will be discarded at a later point. Something said at
one point may be contradicted and negated later on in reference to
titles such as, mind, sense-fields, awareness, consciousness,
subject, object etc....
When the [ultimate] truth is
explained as it is, the conventional is not obstructed; Independent
of the conventional, no [ultimate] truth can be found. -
Nagarjuna
Ok so throughout this I want to stick with what is sensible. By
"sensible" I mean capable of being sensed or that which is
perceived by the senses. So audible, visible, tangible, etc... and
for this we'll go with what is immediately perceived. Not mediately
(through the intervention of something else). For example; when
reading a book what you immediately perceive is letters on the
page, but mediately or by
means of these, notions of truth, virtue, vice etc are suggested to
the mind. So though notions such as truth, vice, virtue etc are
suggested and signified to the mind by sensible marks with which
they have an arbitrary connection with, it would be absurd to
designate these(truth, virtue etc..) as sensible things. So
'sensible things' means only what is immediately perceived by the
senses and sensible things that we investigate don't include such
designations inherently. To add; in instances such as a situation
where one sees both red and blue in the sky, and thus it is
inferred that there must be a cause for the differences in colors,
that cause cannot be said to be a sensible quality immediately
perceived by eyesight. Likewise, when one hears a variety of sounds
it cannot be said that you hear their causes, and when one touches
something hot or feels something heavy; one cannot say with truth
that you feel the cause of the heat or weight. Hopefully we can
agree that the senses perceive only what is perceived immediately
because they do not make inferences.
So immediate sensible qualities include:
Sight - light, colors, shapes.
Hearing - sounds.
The palate - tastes.
Smell - odors.
Touch - tangible qualities.
(And obviously combinations of these.)
The purpose for this is to obviously stay with the theme I
mentioned in an earlier post which was based on the premise that
experience suggests nothing about itself. Aside from our
conceptualizations about experience, experience itself communicates
nothing. So staying with what is immediately perceived allows us to
remain objective (no pun intended) and allows a mutually shared
middle ground (non-conceptual awareness) apart from our contrasting
notions about that middle ground. So like I said we're empirically
investigating the nature of experience itself, and the emptiness or
non-emptiness of an objective field in relation to it's validity in
being a substantiated attribute of experience.
The underlying inquiry consists of two contrasting notions which
are; does the reality of sensible things consist of being
perceived? Or do things in fact exist as inherent exterior objects
independent of sensual perception, distinct from, and having no
relation to being
perceived? And related notions of objectivity, subjectivity,
physicality, etc. Inherent separate existence vs. Empty dependent
origination.
You started with salt before so... beginning with salt; inquiring
into salts characteristics and attributes we'll look into whether
salt exists as an objective independent agent which inherently
exists and posses these attributes or the contrary.
Salt as it's usually experienced is predominantly comprised of
vision, tactile sensation and obviously taste. I suppose salt can,
on occasion be heard and also undoubtably bears an aroma to match
it's pungent taste but those senses are secondary. So I think
approaching salt sense-by-sense will be appropriate so that we can
ensure that each sensory field can be properly isolated and
examined. The reason for this is that in my opinion the different
sense fields are heterogeneous instead of how they are usually
taken to be (homogeneous). So even though they seem to amalgamate
and interact to create what appears to be an organized and
coordinated experience of reality, they are in fact separate fields
which only communicate with one another via inferential
projection.
This issue was examined rather thoroughly in a philosophical
thought-experiment called Molyneux's Problem which consisted of
attempting to understand the level of sensorial coordination one
would possess upon immediate recovery from blindness. Taken from
wikipedia; The problem can be stated in brief, "if a man born blind
can feel the differences between shapes such as spheres and cubes,
could he similarly distinguish those objects by sight if given the
ability to see?"
The question was originally posed to Locke by philosopher William
Molyneux, whose wife was blind:
Suppose a man born blind, and now
adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube and a
sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to
tell, when he felt one and the other, which is the cube, which is
the sphere. Suppose then the cube and the sphere placed on a table,
and the blind man made to see: query, Whether by his sight, before
he touched them, he could now distinguish and tell which is the
globe, which the cube? To which the acute and judicious proposer
answers: ‘Not. For though he has obtained the experience of how a
globe, and how a cube, affects his touch; yet he has not yet
attained the experience, that what affects his touch so or so, must
affect his sight so or so…’
To which Locke responds in "An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding":
I agree with this thinking
gentleman, whom I am proud to call my friend, in his answer to this
problem; and am of opinion that the blind man, at first sight,
would not be able with certainty to say which was the globe, which
the cube, whilst he only saw them; though he could unerringly name
them by his touch, and certainly distinguish them by the difference
of their figures felt.
In 1709, in “A New Theory of Vision,” George Berkeley also
concluded that there was no necessary connection between a tactile
world and a sight world—that a connection between them could be
established only on the basis of experience. He speculated:
the objects to which he had
hitherto used to apply the terms up and down, high and low, were
such as only affected or were in some way perceived by touch; but
the proper objects of vision make a new set of ideas, perfectly
distinct and different from the former, and which can in no sort
make themselves perceived by touch (sect. 95).
There have been events matching this predicament which actually
verified these philosopher's educated speculations; one of them
being the case of "a woman who gained sight at the age of 12 when
she underwent surgery for dense bilateral congenital cataracts.
They report that the subject could recognize family members by
sight six months after surgery, but took up to a year to recognize
most household objects purely by sight."
So starting with vision; I included a reference image we can both
use to avoid conflicting imagery.
(image A)
Salt on a table is a fairly common affair (if one is making a mess)
and is good because it entails fairly limited differences in
color, which as it ends up
is pretty much equivalent to the very sense of vision we're
exploring.
My argument to start is going to be that color is exactly vision
and vision is exactly color, they are synonymous in nature and
manifestation. The common presupposition that the process of
visually perceiving an object consists of 'seeing' a 'color' (which
exists separately from said act of seeing) is a misnomer. Wherever
there is color there is seeing and vice versa. The two go
hand-in-hand and you cannot have one without the other. With color
we also get 'shape' which is a result of colors bordering each
other in various ways. So color also implies shape, and shape
likewise will imply color. Ultimately the object of vision is color
and therefore shape.
Vision standing alone as an isolated sense is much like Image A
posted above. If we attend to the visual evidence in the image
alone we get a circular patch of white surrounded by brown. There
is no separating line between the colors and vision. And likewise
there is no separating line between the colors and you, no evidence
in the colors of being "out there" and no evidence of yourself
being an observer "in here". The conclusion that the colors are
external to us is based on the principle that these colors change
over time. So we accept a story that the colors (object) is
separate from us even though the basis for this conclusion is
lacking in the visual evidence in-and-of-itself. This aligns with
my previous statement that experience suggests nothing about
itself. Experience instead receives projected conceptual overlay
which over time serves to create habitually solidified subconscious
presuppositions conveying a compelling sense of separation.
Separation in general is based on spatiality. We usually conceive
of two opposite aspects existing on opposite sides of unbridgeable
spatial gaps. In truth we never experience spatial externality or
independence. These designations are based on the formation of a
subtle reference point of a subjective self "here" as opposed to
"there". The feeling of subjectivity is never anything more than a
tendency to identify with certain clusters of sensation and project
that the remainder is objective and "other". But by looking at
experience very directly it can actually be ascertained that this
"otherness" is never a part of our experience.
So back to the white salt on the brown table... this image that
arises as vision is composed of these colors, we see a white
circular expanse of color, and various shades of white within that
circular shape. Bordering that we see a brown expanse of color
which seems to surround the white, and if we could back up and see
a larger image the colors would unfold as we went along.
These colors are all there is to vision. So to examine the
'objectivity' of vision let's examine the 'whiteness' in the
image(and you can do this by putting salt on a table in front of
you)... speaking specifically about the shades of the 'whiteness'
and the particular value of the color. Can we say that the shade
itself is salt? Can it be said that wherever you have that
particular shade(white) you have salt - and wherever you have salt
you have that particular shade(white)? Obviously not. So white
itself isn't definitive of salt. Now would you say that there is
salt on the far side of that color? Do you directly experience salt
behind the white? Because we just established that we wouldn't take
the shade of white itself to be salt one should naturally inquire
as to whether there is salt behind the white. We'll find that there
is in fact no salt to be found on the posterior side of the white.
Now on the near side of the color, do we experience any separation
between the seeing of the color and the color itself? Attending
exclusively to vision and letting go of any arising concepts or
beliefs, is there any distance experienced between the seeing of
the white and the white itself? You can't see the 'seeing'... so
there can't be any distance, the color simply arises. So there's no
salt on the far side of the white, and no salt on the near side,
and no distance or gap between the white and the seeing of the
white itself. Wherever white appears, vision is occurring, there's
no access to white without vision, so the objectivity of the salt
should melt or fuse into vision itself. The color should disappear
into vision, because at that point it makes no sense to say one is
"seeing" a "color" in the first place... the two are inseparable.
Vision itself means color is arising, they're one and the same.
It's not as if you have independent access to colors where you can
notice a color out of the visual field and then say now i'm seeing
that color, there couldn't be a color unless vision was already
there.
Now the idea that there is a bordering line between an internal
aspect of the body and an external aspect apart from the body has
to be taken into account as well. This 'bordering line' creating
the dichotomy of internal/external is based on identification with
'the body'. But the body itself is not separate from vision either,
there are other colors and shades which are identified as 'my body'
but just like the colors which composed the salt, these colors
appearing as a 'body' do not communicate a possessive nature. The
colors simply arise no different than any other color in the field
of vision. We only impute a notion of 'my body' over these colors.
There are other faculties that seem to correlate with vision to
give the appearance of a homogeneous cluster of sensations
conventionally called the body and we can discuss those separately,
but all are merely qualities appearing to awareness as awareness
itself. So the notion of an 'subject inside' viewing an 'object
outside' is not self-evident in vision. Vision simply appears and
is completely non-discriminitive. Another thing which isn't
self-evident in vision is the presence of 'eyes' doing the seeing,
we never experience or see our own eyes at any time, even in the
act of looking at a mirror we only are ever seeing colors and
shapes arise that we identify with as 'me' and 'my eyes' but the
eyes appear nowhere within vision itself, we again only accept a
story about this.
About this Nagarjuna states: "Through this the eyes, visible forms and so
forth, which are described as the elements, these should be known
also as [the twelve] sense-fields, and as the objects and the
subjects as well.
Neither atom of form exists nor is sense organ elsewhere; even more
no sense organ as agent exists; so the producer and the produced
are utterly unsuited for production." - Nagarjuna
"In terms of objects and
subjects, whatever appears to the consciousness, apart from the
cognitions themselves, no external objects exist anywhere.
So there are no external objects at all existing in the mode of
entities. The very perceptions of the individual consciousnesses
arise as appearances of the forms." - Nagarjuna
So vision is color. You can't even say they arise as mutually
interdependent co-emergent qualities because the duality is lacking
to begin with. The notion of the duality between observing and
observed is a conceptual imputation. A story simply arises and say
"i'm seeing white" and we accept this story, but the story is never
evident in vision itself. The objectivity of color as an external
quality isn't substantiated by experience. Now vision itself
doesn't appear separate from awareness, or 'that' which 'knows'
vision to be apparent. But that-which-knows is the appearance
itself, there is no duality, even to say appearance implies
something to which the appearance would appear-to, so what "is"
escapes all such conceptualizations (aside from conventional
descriptive concepts). So the objectivity of the salt collapses,
the objectivity of color collapses, the objectivity of vision
collapses as well. We can't say that vision is a 'thing' out there
which is separate that we have access to sometimes and not at other
times. Vision is awareness, there is no separation and there are no
'objects', all we have is awareness. And this same exercise is done
for every sense modality. (Awareness itself must also be refuted as
such.)
For the salty taste; my argument would be much like what has been
proposed for vision, i saw that namdrol used the example of MSG in
showing the appearance of 'saltiness' to not be unique to salt
itself. So following the same examination done with vision and
focusing on the palate alone one can successfully find taste to be
empty as well. I would also add that with your argument being that
saltiness is an innate quality with which salt itself is inherently
endowed with; if one runs the gamut of taste congruent with other
sensory appearances such as heat; it can be seen that an intense
level of taste such as spiciness correlates with an intense heat in
that at the highest volume of appearance both arise as pain. The
pain that arises is in fact the taste. There are not two
appearances such as taste and then also pain, they are one and the
same. So to posit that an external objective thing like salt
inherently contains it's taste would be akin to claiming it also
contains the appearances of pain and pleasure. One also cannot
attribute lesser volumes of the same spectrum such as a general
mild taste to an object without naturally accrediting higher and
lower volumes of that same spectrum. So salt cannot be said to
contain it's taste. And taste cannot be said to be anything more
than awareness itself and empty. This insight combined with the
former which coincides with the experiment done in vision should
hopefully annihilate this false designation(of inherent objective
existence) apart from mere conventional usage.
Ultimately awareness itself is empty. Because for one to claim that
this inquiry has successfully reached a foundation at 'awareness'
implies a 'ground' of being of some type where none can be found.
Yet conventionally awareness is a clear and proper concept to use
in describing that-which-is, for such an awareness likewise cannot
be denied.
The Buddha attempted to capture these realizations in The Heart
Sutra when he stated:
There are no eyes, no ears, no
nose, no tongue, no body, no mind. There is no seeing, no hearing,
no smelling, no tasting, no touching, no imagining. There is
nothing seen, nor heard, nor smelled, nor tasted, nor touched, nor
imagined.
Devoid of all real
entities;
Utterly discarding all objects and subjects,
Such as aggregates, elements and sense-fields;
Due to sameness of selflessness of all phenomena,
One's mind is primordially unborn;
It is in the nature of emptiness.
- Nagarjuna