After meditating and gaining enlightenment the Buddha initially planned to stay silent. He simply did not believe that there would be an audience for the profound insights he had gained. After all, the first person he met was a kind of ancient Homer Simpson. Impressed by the luminous aura around the Buddha this man asked him if he was a god.
‘No,' replied the Buddha.
‘Are you a human?'
‘No.'
‘What are you then?'
And the Buddha replied: ‘I am awake.'
At which point H. Simpson shrugged and walked off.
What he could have learnt from the luminous figure who was neither god nor human, but who had cast off the veils of delusion and woken from the sleep of ignorance, was the profound analysis of the nature of reality.
When the Buddha was finally persuaded to teach, he told his listeners that all phenomena were empty of inherent existence, that everything we see as actually existing was simply a mirage, a delusion like a conjurer‘s trick. What he meant was that we dwell in a reality that is full of apparently concrete entities, but that these are subject to decay and impermanence. Their perceived nature is only what we project on to them.
In our world of delusion everything seems to be exactly what we think it is. A hammer is a hammer, and if we drop it on our foot we know it. But when we actually start looking at the hammer, say in a happy moment in between some tricky DIY manoeuvres, we begin to wonder what actually makes it a hammer. Is the metal head the hammer, or is it the wooden handle? It can't be both. We perceive a thing but where does its ‘hammerness' reside? We begin to realise that the object in our hand is merely labelled as a hammer so that we can pass it on to our mate when he asks for it, and not give him a metal object that is labelled spanner.
Labels are a convenience. They are not reality. We are surrounded by lots of things, forms that we need to conceptualise in order to communicate with others. They have no intrinsic nature that corresponds to the label and they do not suddenly spring into existence but they emerge, they are dependent arising, they are made or created, and they eventually decay.
Buddhists call this the empty nature of all phenomena, modern science explains it as interactive processes. A recent article in the science magazine Current Biology (Pearson/Clifford: ‘Suppressed Patterns Alter vision during Binocular Rivalry') establishes that imagination influences our perception, or in other words: labels determine what we see.
The tricky bit is that the labels we give things sort of take on a life of their own, like ghosts taking over, and we begin to believe in the self existence of labels. What is a short hand becomes an incubus, concepts begin to masquerade as reality.
And this is not the only problem. We also tend to think that objects and phenomena have an intrinsic nature of being either good or bad. But as soon as we seriously examine this we are once again confused.
Is dog poo really disgusting? Well, yes sure. We tread in it and it is vile. But flies and dung beetles don't think so. The pickled gherkins that most people hate and leave out of their Big Mac are precisely what I really like about a burger. But surely poo and gherkins can't be both good and bad, disgusting and delicious? We have to conclude that what they are to us is what we project on to them, and that like all other phenomena gherkins and dog shit are without any intrinsic characteristic whatsoever. Weird but true.
Consider the fabled Goldwing motorbikes: they are either perceived as the bees knees by some, or the failsafe sign that the guys riding them are wankers. The bike itself is golden and innocent. Heavy Metal is a sound orgasm for some, unbearably loud and primitive for others. In itself it's simply a combination of sound waves.
Diamonds are very simple carbon structures, and it is only by a kind of insane universal agreement that they are deemed extremely valuable. Money, too, of course. No one carries sacks of gold around, and a mere piece of paper with numbers on it and worth a few cents replaces the yellow metal. And gold itself is also only valuable because we all agree it is.
Our projection of pleasant and unpleasant can change too: most of us have photographs that we would rather hide because we wear the truly embarrassing clothes of previous fashions. But remember - these were cool at the time!
If we become aware of labels dominating our life, then it can become a little easier. We can relax more into a natural level of love and affection with friends and lovers for example. We realise that most of our clinginess and obsession is based on fantasy, and a lot of characteristics that are inflated and changeable.
People and things are simply what they are before we project our concepts and expectation on them, and so we need to become more realistic. That doesn't mean that our loved ones become grey and uninteresting, just more themselves rather than what we want or need them to be. We no longer tend to fall into dramatic extremes when anything happens to disappoint us. Relationships benefit from this kind of realism.
In the material world we are surrounded by an endless array of different forms, and they simply exist bare of our hallucinated view. They are present, vibrant, exciting and vivid in their own right.
If we understand this we can see the world around us with new eyes, awake as the Buddha was in India, 2500 years ago.
Renate Ogilvie is a psychotherapist and teacher of Buddhist philosophy.