By
Peter Fenner, Ph.D
http://www.radiantmind.net/index.php/radiantmind/written-entry/we-are-what-we-see/
The manifold of phenomenal appearances is primordially
unoriginated and non-dual, just like an image reflected in a
mirror. The nature of openness isn’t separate from phenomenal
appearances, just as water and its quality of being moist are
combined in a non-dualistic condition. Free of the limits of
illusion, like an imaginary city, the instant things manifest they
are in the condition of being primordially unborn.
Although the phenomenal world appears to be located (in time and
space, in fact) it is the non- abiding dimension of being itself.
The instant an appearance seems to disappear it does not in fact
cease, (since ultimately phenomena) neither increase nor decrease.
As such, phenomenal appear- ances do not exist in the way they
appear.
These lines are from a text called the Natural Freedom of Being
by the great Complete Fulfill- ment master Longchenpa who lived in
Tibet in the fourteenth century. As we have said elsewhere, the
Complete Fulfillment or Dzogchen tradition offers a spiritual
perspective that is very consistent with our own work. Here we will
unpack these few lines for they will help us understand the radical
immediacy of the Complete Fulfillment experience which embraces and
dissolves the sense of separation we create between ourselves and
the world.
Longchenpa begins by stating that our sensory experience is
uncreated and indivisible. He uses the analogy of a mirror-image to
illustrate this idea. This is an image that is used frequently in
nearly all Buddhist traditions to illustrate how our experience
lacks any discrete and irreducible properties. In our own time we
can also use the examples of film or video images. If we examine an
image in a mirror the image gives the appearance of being composed
of separate elements, yet in reality it is a single indivisible
image. We cannot take the image apart and put it together in
another way. The elements appear to be separate but in fact they
are inseparable. As an image, the seeming boundary between one
feature and the next signifies nothing. There is no change in
constitution, or media that differentiates one feature from
another. Even if the image is moving and changing its shape and
constitution it cannot be broken up into separable elements.
From the Complete Fulfillment perspective the sense world is no
different from the mirror image. While it appears to be divisible
and manipulable like a set of building blocks, the idea that we can
isolate one element of our experience and move it around, or
replace it with another, is a linguis- tically created illusion. In
particular, it is created through the language that attributes
choice and agency to ourselves and others. The language of human
agency produces the appearance of control and manipulation. We
learn to claim responsibility when certain, often repetitive
actions, occur in a predicatable way. For example, when our body
moves as we stand up from a chair we say we choose to do this. At a
more profound level, the image of a reflection in a mirror also
illustrates the inseparability between a perceiver and that which
is perceived. According to the Complete Fulfillment, concepts of a
perceiver and objects of perception are theoretical abstractions,
which have no basis in the domain of being. In the same way that an
image in the mirror is inseparable from the mirror, similarly we
don’t exist as something different from the universe that we
experience. This is an extension of the idea that is now commonly
accepted in the natural and human sciences, that our experience is
“theory laden”. In other words, our perceptions are shaped and
influenced by our beliefs, theories, and structures for
interpreting the world. However, the Complete Fulfillment tradition
applies this discovery in a far more radical way by demonstrating
that even the most obvious and palpable dimensions of our
experience, such as the feeling of being different from the things
we experience, are but structures of interpretation.
The contemporary English mystic Douglas Harding has presented
the visual dimensions of this disclosive space in a particularly
accessible way through his notion of “having no head.” As Harding
demonstrates in his writings, and through simple practical
exercises, we never experience our own head in the same way that we
experience those around us. In place of our head is a space that is
the universe we experience. As Harding writes (p. 9), “This is not
a matter of argument, or of philo- sophical acumen, or or working
oneself up into a state, but of simple sight…. Present experience,
whatever sense is employed, occurs only in an empty and absent
head.” Our own head is a theoreti- cal construct, inferred on the
basis that we are like the people who show up within the field of
our experience.
Though our limbs and torso are often revealed within this field,
our head is never revealed as an object of perception. Were it ever
to be where we “think” it is, it would occlude the possibility of
experiencing anything else. If our head was where we “imagine” it
is, the universe would disappear. As Harding says (p. 11), “there
is one place where no head of mine can ever turn up, and that is
here on my shoulders, where it would blot out this Central Void
which is my very life-source.” Of course, you might say that the
existence of our head as the gateway for our visual, auditory, and
olfactory perception can be confirmed by reaching out and touching
a mass that seems to rest on our shoul- ders, but as Harding says
(p. 8), “when I start groping around for my lost head, instead of
finding it here I only lose my exploring hand as well: it, too, is
swallowed up in the abyss at the centre of my being.” In the place
where our head would be is a space that is the universe as we
experience it. Consequently, from this perspective we are the
universe. As Harding writes (p. 19): “It is absolutely Nothing, yet
all things; the only Reality, yet an absentee… There is nothing
else whatever. I am everyone and no-one ...”
In the above lines Longchenpa uses the term openness (shunyata),
thus connecting the Com- plete Fulfillment to the broad and
powerful river of Buddhist wisdom contained in the Perfect Wis- dom
(Prajnaparamita) tradition. In language reminiscent of the famous
Buddhist text, the Heart Scripture, Longchenpa writes that “the
nature of openness isn’t separate from phenomenal appear- ances.”
The Heart Scripture itself says: “Form is openness and openness
itself is form. Openness does not differ from form and form does
not differ from openness. Whatever is form, that is open- ness.
Whatever is openness, that is form.”
The point being made here is that there is no separation between
that which is disclosed (i.e., the phenomenal world) and the
disclosive field that makes the disclosure of any universe
possible. A disclosive space is the field within which all things
manifest, persist, and decay, exactly as they do. Ultimately, it is
indistinguishable from the experiential field. It is the occurance
of that which occurs in it. As Harding says (p. 60), “The Space is
the things that occupy it.” This disclosive space cannot be created
since this is tantamount to creating the universe. Further, to the
extent that there is never a time when there is no disclosive space
(time being an occurance within it), it is a vacuous concept. In
fact, the disclosive space that is disclosed doesn’t exist. This is
why Buddhist philosophers such as Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti
emphasize that the experience of openness is itself open and
insubstan- tial.
A consequence of this level of immediacy is there is no act of
perception. As the Heart Scripture also says, “in the sphere of
openness there is no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body or mind, and
there are no forms, sounds, smells, tastes, touchables or objects
of mind. Because there is no perception, there is no perceiver, or
object of perception either. As Harding writes (p. 6): “[T]hese
coloured shapes present themselves in all simplicity, without any
such complications as near or far, this or that, mine or not mine,
seen-by-me or merely given. All twoness-all duality of subject and
object-has vanished: it is no longer read into a situation which
has no room for it.” It is meaningless to say that the world is out
there, or in here, because disclosive space is neither inside nor
outside. There is nothing it doesn’t disclose, so it can’t be
inside since nothing can be outside. Nor, can it be outside because
whatever is inside is disclosed by this space. Also, because there
is no inside or outside, this space cannot be said to be small or
large, expanded or contracted, hidden or revealed, here or there.
Furthermore, because there is no sense of here or there, there is
no experience of distance within this disclosive space. The feeling
that we are closer to some things and further away from others is
an illusion created by the beliefs that things remain constant in
size, even when they change their dimensions, and things can
occlude each other. Consequently, we aren’t located within this
space because we are the space itself. For example, when we sit in
a room we believe that the room is located within a house which is
within a city or town, but this isn’t given in our experience at
all. That our room is located in a country on planet earth is an
interpretation that is seemingly substanti- ated by memories.
Perhaps that is so, you might say, but I still have the
experience of being located in this room. You might say you are
sitting near the west facing wall, or standing in the middle of the
room. If we say we are located near the west wall we do so on the
basis of a belief that the room exists in a larger universe. Here
the sense of location is derived, not from our experience, but that
things exist “on the other side” of our experience. If we say we
are in the middle of a room we believe that things can be more, or
less distant from us, in virtue of believing that phenomena have
stable dimensions, even when they shrink or enlarge within our
field of experience.
Because the experience of distance and location deconstruct
within the Complete Fulfillment perspective, there is no experience
of motion or stillness. The phenomenon of walking or driving is
completely consistent with us moving through a stationery
landscape, or the landscape moving through us. In the absence of an
arbitrary framework of interpretation, there is absolutely no way
of distinquishing whether we are moving, or whether phenomena are
moving through the clearing we identify as the locus of our head.
Consequently, we are neither still nor moving. From the Complete
Fulfillment perspective there is simply “an experience” of colors
and shapes that modulate like reflections on water.
This thing that we call our “body” isn’t the locus of our
identity. It is simply the most constant gestalt that occurs in
“our” experience. Many of our visual experiences are accompanied on
the lower periphery by an inchoate and indistinct sensation that
frequently transforms into an experience of hands, arms and
sometimes legs. We identify these sensation as our body because
they invariably show up wherever we think we are. We think we are
there because these limbs consistently display the same markings in
terms of color, shape, size, weight, etc. If another set of limbs
showed up with predictable constancy around the bottom half of our
visual field, we would think that we were there. We interpret that
we are walking when certain changes occur in our visual, auditory
and tactile fields. In fact, we simply witness modulations in our
experience like those that can be partially replicated with virtual
reality technology. The difference between virtual reality and the
Complete Fulfillment perspective is that virtual reality creates an
impression of movement while we are statio- nery. This is partially
a limitation of virtual reality technology which cannot yet
replicate the pixel resolution of human vision, or simulate the
muscular activity involved in actions like walking. But more
significantly it is due to the memories we have of stepping into a
virtual reality unit. But unlike virtual reality the Complete
Fulfillment perspective doesn’t condition the experience of being
in a fixed location with images changing around us. In other words,
though the experience of real motion dissolves, it doesn’t produce
the sensation of being stuck in the same location. Spatial location
and dislocation both dissolve in this perspective. From the
Complete Fulfillment perspective, reality is always a virtual
reality.
Adapted from forthcoming book by Peter titled The Natural
Freedom of Being. A free Audio CD Interview is available for those
interested in the Radiant Mind Course.