Is this Real?

Neo: This...this isn't real?
Morpheus: What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.

Based on what we have been contemplating until now, how do you define real? If you look around you right now and see the objects around, the sounds, the smells, do any of them have an inherent existence? If you weren't there at this moment, would they still be recognized in such context? If they weren't there at this very moment, what would give you base to affirm you exist? Can you think, elaborate, or reason, about anything that you haven't experienced with your senses?

When we look at an object, when are we actually seeing? Is it at the moment the lights enter our eyes? Or is it when the light is decoded by the brain? If that's the case so is seeing (and the other senses) a mental activity? If so, what makes us capable to recognize things in common, and what makes us perceive different things in the same objects?

I guess this posting has been more of an encouragement to further contemplation than anything else!!!!

Have a great one everyone!!!

Cris

The Spoon Is Empty!

Hello folks, hope you all had a great holiday season.

Continuing with our line of contemplation, I would like to talk a bit about one of the most important texts in Mahayana Buddhism, The Heart Sutra, from the Prajna Paramitta literature. This is the essence of Buddhist texts which will explain emptiness.

In this Sutra we have the bodhisatva mahasatva Chenrezi, or Avalokitezvara, teaching about the emptiness of the five skhandas (aggregates). They are form, sensation, perception, mental formation and consciousness.

In the last posting when we saw that "There is no spoon", we contemplated the fact that the spoon is empty. In other words, when we say that the five skhandas are empty, we are saying that they do not have inherent existence. Lama Samten introduces here the concept of co-emergence in order to explain this better. As we have been seeing in the last postings, co-emergence refers to the fact that the "form" comes to existence when contemplated by the observer. And he too comes to exist as an observer on the dependence of "forms" to contemplate.
















When we deal with reality on our daily lives, we are not establishing a connection with the substratum of all things, being what they are made of, but with what they represent according to our views of them. As an example, when we look at a picture of someone we love, we have the same feeling as when we are face to face with that person. Even though the picture is only paper and ink, we establish with the picture the same sort of connection as with the person herself. "There is no spoon" means the same thing. If left alone in the kitchen, the spoon has no use, no existence by itself. But when someone grabs it in order to eat a bowl of soup or a dessert, the person (or the "observer") is adding meaning to the spoon in a context. Look around and contemplate the objects you have in your house. They all live in a dimension of meaning of your mind. They wouldn't be there simply by their own will.

Therefore we can see that there is a "magnetic" reality, and this is the reality that produces meaning and makes our energy flows from one direction to the other, that drives us and makes us appreciate things or not.

Have a great contemplation everyone!

Cris