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The Myth of Reality

The myth of reality is the fundamental myth we live by—the granddaddy of them all. We mistakenly see the world—and ourselves—as a result of this fundamental misperception of reality. Reality here is both a philosophical topic and a day-to-day topic. In this discussion we are only really interested in how the philosophical theory impacts our everyday life. Simply put, the definition of reality is that things appear in the way they exist. Buddhist theory posits that since we actually do not see things the way they truly exist, then we are in constant relationship—actions and reactions—with things as we incorrectly perceive them. Thus, the conclusion can be made that if we are responding to things, people, events, even ourselves, in the way they do not exist, then this has consequences. And those consequences work against our lasting happiness and peace—the goal of our life. On the flip side, having a clear understanding of how our mind works is the foundation to understanding reality, and understanding reality is the key to mental health and well-being. So we can say that not having a correct 24perception or experience of reality is the root of every living being’s discontent, confusion, and conflict.

All subsequent myths, and one might say all of Buddhist thought and practice, flow from the myth of reality. It is the foundation for the entire psychological and spiritual development of the adept. It is said that Shakyamuni Buddha taught his entire corpus of teachings, over one hundred volumes, for the sole purpose of leading beings into an understanding of reality. It is the very breath of the living body of Buddhism.

SO WHY TALK ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE?

Having stressed the importance of the understanding of the nature of reality, one could ask, “So what’s up with the other 84,000 things the Buddha taught and all those practices we’re supposed to engage with? What about those instructions in meditation, teachings on developing compassion and the laws of cause and effect, and the rest? Why didn’t the Buddha just teach this key topic and cut to the chase?”

I received my answer to this question when I was living at Kopan Monastery in Nepal. One of my duties there was to manage the annual month-long “November Course.” In those days, in the mid-1970s, it was not easy for a Westerner to study teachings in Tibetan Buddhism because very little had been translated. There were very few qualified translators, let alone lamas who spoke English. But the founders of Kopan, Lama Thubten Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche, were unique in that they did speak English (albeit a sort of unique dialect that was learned from their hippie students), and at the 25request of their students, they would regularly offer teachings on the various topics of Tibetan Buddhism.

The November Course was an immersive experience that involved many hours of instruction by the lamas accompanied by many hours of meditation. In the second half of the course, participants took precepts, observed silence, and ate just a single meal each day. It was intense, to say the least. It was meant to be strict in order to foster a sense of retreat from one’s ordinary life.

One day, I went to see Lama Yeshe with a concern. Some students were sneaking out of the facilities to go down the hill to get better food, a shower, and maybe smoke a cigarette or get high. These things were of course strictly forbidden during the one-month course. Feeling indignant about their behavior, I asked what I should do to try to corral these few rule-breakers and bring them back in line. As I voiced my complaints, I was sure I had a sympathetic ear with Lama Yeshe. But as was often the case during my nine years under his guidance, I was set straight. Lama simply looked at me and said, “People are at different levels, dear.”

The Buddha did not only teach about the nature of reality, but instead taught 84,000 different teachings because, similarly, “people are at different levels.” While understanding the nature of reality is core to breaking our misperceptions and finding a path out of suffering, people are of such different places in their development. The skillfulness of the Buddhist approach is that while the development of the insight into reality is the core practice for becoming liberated from our problems, getting to this insight is a long and gradual process. If, for example, someone is overwhelmed by distractions, as 26in truth all us are, then we need to attend to these distractions first so that our mind can develop at least some ability to focus on reality itself. Working on distractions like desire, attachment, irritability, anxiety, and so on can take years to get a handle on. This why there are so many methods and interventions in Buddhist therapeutic practice. Compassion is the primary attitude that assists the awakening to reality. Many of us need a great deal of work on developing compassion. The compassion referred to in Buddhist practice, the compassion that aids the awakening of wisdom—the view of reality—is a compassion that extends to all living beings, especially the people we don’t like or feel justified in despising.

On a related note, His Holiness the Dalai Lama often observes how wonderful it is to have different religions and spiritual paths in the world so that there can be a system of spiritual improvement for many different kinds of people. People have such various dispositions that it is unreasonable that any one method, theory, or religion can speak to all people’s needs.

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY REALITY?

One aspect about Buddhist teachings that I deeply appreciate is that terms need to be defined before one can have a conversation about them. We all speak about love, for instance—but what is love? When we tell someone we love them, is that the same love as when we say we love a pair of shoes? Is loving a beautiful sunset the same as loving our dog? I was watching a reality show the other night, and when one of the contestants got voted off by his competitors, he gave them hugs and as 27he was leaving, said, “Love you guys!” Surely that isn’t the same love as I have for my mother! To have a dialogue about love, we have to be on the same page about what it means. The definition of love in Buddhist philosophy is actually quite simple: Love is the wish and attitude that another being experiences happiness, and the act of loving that being is the not just the attitude to wish them happiness but to ensure their happiness, even at the expense of one’s own. It is not a contrived practice, but a spontaneous and natural one that is developed first by working on it with some level of manufactured love, whether through design or fabrication. Genuine love is not so hard to understand when reflecting on a mother’s authentic and spontaneous love for her child. She doesn’t think about feeling empathy when her baby cries. It’s natural and spontaneous. This is a similar kind of love, though absent of an emotional attachment, and can be developed for all living beings. With this kind of mental development, along with the development of other healthy attitudes like compassion, equanimity, and nonviolence, the development of wisdom, the wisdom of reality, comes easily. Just a side note: As one develops these healthy mental states, wisdom deepens. As wisdom deepens, so do these other wonderful attitudes. Thus, they can be considered codependent. As the well-known Buddhist saying goes, “Wisdom without compassion, and vice versa, is like a bird trying to fly with one wing.”

For our conversation about reality, the way the term will be employed here is to mean “that which exists in the way it appears.” In other words, for it to be “reality,” the way we perceive something—whether with our eyes, 28the other four senses, or our mind—has to appear to us in the exact same way it exists. There is an implication here that if it exists the way it appears, then it must appear that exact same way to everyone else, at least everyone with functioning senses and a healthy mind. Seems pretty straightforward, right?

During those many years I lived in Nepal, my father would get frustrated that I was not interested in returning to live in the United States. He would say to me, “When are you going to come back and live in the real world?” This statement was always curious to me. I would reflect on the fact that I was living in one of the poorest countries in the world, where walking down the street I would see people, some of them beggars, with diseases I’d only ever read about. I encountered people with leprosy, with tumors on their heads or faces the size of grapefruits, with elephantiasis, with scars from smallpox, and with limbs that were merely broken but with inadequate health care could not be reset properly. Funeral processions would weave their way down the narrow streets of the bazaar with crying family and friends in tow. At the same time, there might be a mother watching the procession while she oiled and massaged her newborn. Feral dogs roamed among the vegetable and fruit sellers displaying their goods in vibrant colors next to the butcher store, which had the head of a water buffalo hanging outside the shop, displaying the shop’s goods as if it were a neon sign. The streets were dusty and dirty, but at the same time sweet incense would waft through the crowded alleyways, leading to hidden shrines and temples that might be hundreds if not thousands of years old. Here, a family 29having had a poor harvest would be supported by the other villagers; despite the poverty of the area, starvation was rare. And once, when I had taken a Tibetan friend to the hospital, we sat in shock as we overheard a doctor explain to a nearby patient that he had contracted rabies from a dog bite, and it was too late for the treatment to be effective. This young French couple had just come back to town from a trek in the Himalayas; evidently the gentleman had been bitten by a dog in a remote village some three or four days earlier. Now he was going to die of rabies.

Given that I bore witness to such life and death and disease every day, when my dad would make this comment, “When are you going to come back to the real world?” I would think, Well, Dad, this place seems pretty darn real to me. I would reflect on the fact that in Los Angeles, where I grew up, I would never see beggars on the street (this was before the homelessness crisis we now face). In fact, for me and my friends, our feet almost never touched the concrete. We’d go to the perfect beach to surf waves in an ocean straight from a fantasy while the majority of the world was looking for food. Our lives seemed straight out of Hollywood, which was just around the corner creating fantasy worlds for the silver screen and TV. We went to work to earn enough money so we could party on the weekend with our choice of drugs to “escape reality,” and yet this was considered normal “real” life. It seemed our goal was—for most of us, is—to weed out all the unpleasantness of life and increase the pleasurable aspects that feel good. But reality is more about coming to the realization that things in life are actually difficult, painful, and dissatisfying, and that our pursuit to numb 30this pain through pleasure seems, well, pretty unreal, and unrealistic.

PERCEPTION IS NOT REALITY

When David Copperfield, the renowned illusionist, makes the Statue of Liberty disappear before an audience of thousands of people, we somehow know that is not real. It looks like the monument disappears—our eyes don’t perceive it anymore—but our rational mind tells us it can’t be so. We know, somehow, that the appearance—or in this case, the lack of appearance—of the Statue of Liberty is not the way it actually exists. So we say, “That’s not real.” People would think we were nuts if we were to start protesting to David Copperfield that he has destroyed the statue and threaten to file a lawsuit against him if he doesn’t return it. The audience accepts that the Statue of Liberty didn’t actually disappear. They accept it is merely an illusion.

On the other hand, we’ve all been scared by things we’re sure are there—we think someone is trying to break into our house after we hear a scratching sound on a window; we glimpse a man lurking in the shadows; or we develop a sense of paranoia when we think we overhear someone talking about us. Only, instead we find there’s a breeze blowing a branch on our window, a bush in the shadows of the night, or two people are talking about the player who struck out at last night’s baseball game and not us.

If we react to these false perceptions as if they are real, we create distress and act in a way that is not only unnecessary but disturbing and emotionally jarring to 31ourselves and others. We might call the police because we are scared someone is breaking into our house. We might start an argument with the two people who we think are talking about us behind our backs.

Of course, these examples are relatively minor, but it gets worse—much worse. There have been countless murders, for example, that have occurred due to misperception. But I want to draw your attention to one particular case that highlights the devastating consequences of racial prejudice that obscures correct perception.

Ahmaud Arbery was gunned down by three men as he ran through their neighborhood. The three white men saw Mr. Arbery, an African American man, as a burglar running from the scene of a crime. However, Mr. Arbery was only a jogger out for a run, something he did frequently. The jury found the three men guilty of murder and committing a hate crime. These three men’s misperception of reality had horrific consequences. “Reality” is actually conditional, and in this case, mistaken interpretations of reality were deadly and catastrophic for all parties involved.

Here’s my point, and it’s an old one: Perception is not reality. If something, be it an object, an experience, a belief, and so on, exists in such a way that it appears differently for different people because it is dependent upon conditions, then that perception cannot be real. To be real, everyone would have to perceive it the same way, because that’s the way the object, experience, or belief exists. Reality, by definition, means it maintains its true nature in all conditions and at all times. If it changes for each person, each perceiver, then it is not real. It is something else.

On a far lighter note than the tragic story related above, allow me to recall a story about three umpires having a beer after a baseball game. One umpire says to the others, “There’s balls and there’s strikes, and I call them as they are.” The second umpire, seeking to correct the first umpire, says, “Well, actually, there are balls and strikes, and I call them as I see them.” The third umpire, quietly listening to the discussion, chimes in and says, “Well, sorry, guys, you are both wrong. There are balls and strikes, and they’re nothing until I call them!”

This captures the central Buddhist idea of how we create our own reality—which, then, cannot be called reality at all. As the French American diarist Anaïs Nin said, “We see things not as they are, but as we are. Because it is the ‘I’ behind the ‘eye’ that does the seeing.” There may be no better quote among modern writers to illustrate the main point I am making here. When the various Buddhist philosophical schools debate the nature of reality, they argue about a central question: “How exactly do things exist?” Our natural notion, the one we go through life with, is that things exist “out there,” on their own, independent, really, truly, concretely, inherently. But when we delve into the deepest philosophical questions, we discover a different way of explaining, and locating, reality.

TRANSFERENCE IN THERAPY

That we create our own reality was something that modern psychology caught on to on a rudimentary level pretty early on. Sigmund Freud’s theory of transference is a central concept in psychotherapy, or psychoanalysis, 33as it was referred to in his time. Freud identified transference as something that occurred in the therapeutic context. Initially, it was considered pathological. Later theorists expanded the understanding of this mechanism to include other close or intimate relationships and posited that it could be seen as either beneficial or harmful.

In brief, transference in therapy is the act of the client unknowingly transferring feelings about someone from their past onto the therapist. Transference could then be analyzed in order to account for distortions in a client’s perceptions of reality. Transference is a multilayered and complex event that happens when the brain tries to understand a current experience by examining it through the past. However, in Buddhist psychology, this process of past experience coloring our present experience happens essentially all the time. In other words, expanding the concept of transference, we can say that we are pretty much engaged in transference at every moment, though at very different levels of subtlety or concreteness.

Transference is not a word psychologists use much anymore, preferring the more modern term projection. Both involve redirecting feelings from past relationships onto a current relationship, specifically attributing one’s own thoughts, feelings, or behaviors to someone else. If we leave transference to the interrelationship with a therapist and use projection to describe, say, the experience of being in a couple, then it becomes pretty evident in couples counseling that there is a lot of projection going on.

A partner might complain about the other partner in almost the exact terms they would, and have, used 34toward their mother or father or even a previous boyfriend or girlfriend. They do this often without realizing it. In the same way, when we meet people with whom we just immediately sync with or dislike, we don’t realize until later it was because they reminded us of someone else. People who have been traumatized, particularly due to physical or sexual abuse, have a difficult time not projecting those past events onto present ones. A person may remind them of their abuser, and this makes it difficult to have an authentic relationship. Buddhist psychology tells us that we very rarely, if ever, see things as they really are. In fact, we are always projecting qualities onto people and objects alike. In romantic relationships there is so much projection going on, with such exaggerated qualities being ascribed to one’s lover, it can seem almost hallucinatory to an outside observer.

Let me give you an example from my psychotherapy practice (names and identifying details have been changed in order to protect confidentiality). James was a fifty-two-year-old single man with two adult children. He was the type of guy who “loved women” (his words) and loved being in relationships with them. He ran a successful veterinary practice, though much of the proceeds went to support his two ex-wives. He was head over heels about his latest relationship with Alana, a Serbian woman ten years younger than he was. Alana was attractive and had also been married before. She described her previous marriage as physically abusive, but said James was perfect because he was “gentle and kind.” James was also financially secure and owned his own home and some acreage. Alana was visiting on a tourist visa—a red flag for me, but I did not want to be 35overly suspicious and was willing to have couples counseling with an open mind.

Something felt a bit off from the beginning of my sessions with them. What I mean by “off” is it seemed something important was not being verbalized or was being kept hidden. This is not unusual in therapy. Of course, if you’re a psychotherapist who helps others with their emotional, relationship, and psychological problems, then you expect the unexpected. That’s the nature of the job. Otherwise, it’s like a firefighter going out on a call and being surprised to smell smoke.

James would fawn over Alana in our sessions, speak consistently about her beauty and qualities, her spirituality, his love for her. Alana would speak of James’s kindness and ability to provide a good home. He was security, she said. Our sessions did not go on for a long time as they mainly were coming in to validate their relationship to each other with me as their witness. Eventually they got married, despite most of his friends trying to talk him out of it. He couldn’t see he was projecting his own needs for companionship, fear of being alone, and insecurity on to his relationship with Alana. Everyone else could perceive his projections except him. That is usually the case.

About two years later James called me. He wanted to come in on his own. Alana and he were breaking up. After securing a green card, she was now demanding financial support. She claimed to own half of his property, and he was now faced with having to sell his beloved home.

THE BUDDHIST TAKE ON PROJECTION

So who were James and Alana, really? One can see that they each projected their own needs upon the other person. This is the kind of projection that is familiar to most people. Within the Buddhist context, however, the concept of projection goes much further and deeper to what we might call a “double projection.” It’s a projection on top of a projection.

As one of my teachers, Geshe Gelek, often says, “We see what isn’t there and we don’t see what is there.” He is telling us that we superimpose and exaggerate qualities onto an object that are pure fabrications. Something fabricated can’t hold the label of being “real”—fabricated and real are mutually exclusive terms. To be clear, when we discuss that we do not experience or perceive things as they really are, we are not saying they don’t exist at all. In Buddhist thought there is conventional reality, a reality that is established by agreement and shared perception and the function of whatever thing we are referring to in particular. We say that conventional reality is valid, the coffee mug on the table is not a clock because it functions as a mug, but the way we perceive the true nature of the mug is erroneous. So while we say that what we perceive conventionally is valid, it is still perceived erroneously with respect to its actual nature.

What we are saying is things don’t exist in the way we are experiencing them. When we see a coiled hose as a snake, that snake does not exist; it is still, on some level, a coiled hose. But that hose does not exist “out there,” either, as an independently existing hose. There is a hose that functions to deliver water, but we never see or 37experience the real hose or the real person or the real world that my father wanted me to return to.

This is what I mean by a double projection. Not only do we not see the true nature of what we perceive, we also project a nature or a reality on top of the thing we perceive. I think that matters when we begin to look at it that way. What matters is that not only when we see, or perceive, something we immediately see it “not as it is,” but then on top of that bare perception, we then elaborate with all kinds of assumptions, projections, and further observations. So we think we perceive our experience correctly, and then further believe in all the embellishments we ascribe to that experience. It’s like a double false misinterpretation. By perception, what is meant is any experience of the five senses: eye (sights), ear (sounds), nose (smells), tongue (tastes), or body (tactile sensations). Additionally, we say that the mind also has a sense, since it perceives thoughts, images, dreams, and so on. But the mind’s sense power is not physical, like the rest. Each of these sense experiences, all of the time, are perceived in ways that do not actually exist.

Why is that so important to understand? Because suffering in Buddhism is not about pain only. It is at least as much about confusion and ignorance. Here, confusion refers to the fact that we do not see reality, not even for a single instant, in our entire life. Exploring suffering is important because it gets us to realize the things with which we are constantly in relationship—objects, people, thoughts, emotions, even ourselves—don’t exist the way we perceive them . . . at all.

Traditional sources often explain that we are constantly hallucinating our world, our experience, as if it 38is like a dream. That means we’re never touching the essence of life—we are always in relationship with a fantasy we’ve created, and we not only don’t know this, we actually firmly believe that what we see really exists, just as it appears. There are just two things we are hallucinating: our sense of self or identity or personality (as we will explore in the next chapter) and, then, the entire external world that is entirely engaged with through our five senses as well as our mind. It’s as if we’re in relationship with a hologram, and we call that hologram our wife/husband/partner and believe we’re relating with something real and solid when, in fact, it’s nothing but a projection. So we fight with this hologram. We make love with this hologram. We go to war for this hologram and fight against other holograms. We yell at holograms in their hologram cars for driving stupidly. Of course, a hologram or an illusion or a hallucination or a dream is not exactly the same as a person or phenomena. But the way we experience them is similar. And this way of thinking is often recommended by Buddhist teachers as a way for us to wake up to the fact that what we see and experience is not real, but some form of projection. “Awaken,” remember, is the translation of the word buddha. All of these philosophical ideas are actually experienced when one develops a mind that is sharpened through the practice of meditation. Then, these philosophical and psychological ideas become experiences—valid experiences.

CELLULOID HEROES

In some of the examples we discussed earlier, whether David Copperfield or Ahmaud Arbery, we saw that the perception of an individual creates the prism or conditions through which something is taken to be real. In truth, everything we experience is conditional, but we think it exists exactly as we see it. Our life then is much more akin to a movie than it is to “reality.” Movies are illusions that appear as real. They appear as a flowing movement, a stream of images without any space or break between them. In fact, filmmakers have discovered they only need to project twenty-four frames per second to give the illusion of a constant flow of perception when, in fact, it is really simply a series of fast-moving slides.

There are many, many levels of misperception of reality, just like this example of film. These are the myths we live by. While everything is in the nature of movement, we see things as frozen. Reality is a constant flow of images, experiences, feelings, sensations, reactions, and so on, but we only perceive a frozen image before we move on to the next frozen image. This is not in accord with reality, and yet we totally believe it.

The first step is to know that we are watching a movie, something that is a mere construction of interdependent parts and causes. That is extremely powerful and life-changing knowledge. This conceptual perspective starts as an intellectual process, but through reflection and meditation, a correct understanding of reality can be cultivated. At first, this direct perception of reality will be mixed, at varying levels, with conception. When a practitioner begins to cultivate a conceptual experience 40of reality mixed with a bit of nonconceptual perception, it is at that time that one is considered to have actually entered the path to full awakening. As the conceptions become less solid, one is led to a nonconceptual, direct perception of reality. Such direct perception is beyond words because it is beyond concept. This is the actual spiritual path to awakening. When a person has the direct nonconceptual insight into reality, they never, ever, not for one instant, can regress into the realms of confusion. They are now an awakened being, but more properly, we should say an “awakening” being. This is because the person is not fully awakened, not a complete buddha. The process of full awakening, as we have seen, can now take billions of years or a single lifetime. But one thing is for sure, the awakening being is no longer, nor ever will be, an ordinary being subject to negative states of mind—even as there is still a process that needs to be undertaken where the past negative mind-states need to be purified or dissolved from their mindstream.

DIRECT INSIGHT INTO REALITY

Can we ever see what isn’t there, what lies between the gaps of the movie slides? That’s a good question to ask ourselves, and one that is rather deep. Different philosophical schools get into extensive discussions about this very question. These gaps are like space. Can you see space? Or can you only infer what is filling the space?

There are those in the Buddhist tradition, and most likely outside the tradition as well, who have had a direct insight into reality. This direct insight is what 41the Buddhist practitioner is seeking. Once a person has this direct insight, their life is permanently changed. In the Zen Buddhist tradition this experience is called satori. In other Buddhist traditions it is referred to as the insight into emptiness, or suchness, or thusness. We’ll talk about the details of this experience later. But at this stage I want to make it clear that this experience is not nirvana or the final attainment of awakening or enlightenment. It is just the beginning of the process of becoming fully liberated, enlightened, free.

Over the millennia, thousands upon thousands of individuals who have pursued the spiritual path, the path of awakening to one’s highest potential, have had this insight into reality. From the Buddhist master’s perspective, while this experience is life-altering, it is not the place to stop. And yet many do, having thought they have now attained liberation from the world of problems and suffering. This is a big mistake.

When we speak of such an experience as direct insight into reality, we are speaking about an event that has many levels of depth. It does not happen randomly; rather, various causes and conditions allow the experience to arise. The spiritual path, in Buddhism at least, is a structured, calculated methodology that allows this experience of reality to occur. It does not come through prayer, asceticism, or study, although each of these may contribute at different stages. It cannot happen through reading a book or listening to a lecture. It can only really happen in direct experience, typically in meditation.

We all know what it takes to train for a marathon. If we are longtime couch potatoes who never do more exercise than walking from the car to the grocery store, it would 42be unreasonable to think we could run a marathon after a few weeks of training or less—by simply having the wish to do so. It takes a lot of hard work to get in shape. It takes training because we have habituated ourselves to be a “non-marathon-runner,” the antithesis of a marathon runner.

The same is true for developing insight into reality. In fact, the challenge is much more daunting than training to run a marathon. In terms of effort, they are not really comparable. Theoretically, one might be able to run a marathon, or the equivalent for our age, after training for perhaps a year. But according to Buddhist thought, we have had countless previous lifetimes to train the mind and have not really made much progress. We have actually trained our mind to see the opposite of reality. Through all of our incarnations, while having varied and different personalities, we have had the same mind. So all the habits we have generated for countless incarnations, similar to the creation of the neuropathways of this life, are embedded in our minds. We have become habituated, day after day, year after year, and lifetime after lifetime, to see unreality.

It is a massively strenuous effort to overcome this false perception, but it is worth it. When we fully understand and accept that an afflicted mind, a mind adhering to the disturbing emotions, is a mind that creates unhappiness, discontent, and imbalance, then we can begin to understand the purpose and effectiveness of seeing things how they truly are. When we explore, study, reflect upon, and meditate on the nature of reality, we have at our disposal the nuclear warhead to obliterate the destructive processes explained above. And it does 43not matter in the least if we are speaking about marriage dramas, work dramas, political dramas, or even internal dramas. When the problem is seen as a misperception of reality, then all dramas’ support systems are the same; just their content differs.

ONE MORE ANGLE ON THE MYTH OF REALITY

A primary challenge to our concept of reality is the idea that “what you see is what you get.” This is not only a conception, meaning a thought, but it is also a perception that happens in real time. Well, that “real time” is the whole problem. Recently, in the field of neuropsychology, the whole understanding of perception is being turned on its head. Perception and experience within consciousness are being observed and measured quite differently than what has been understood previously. And this new realization in the science community has been a basic understanding within Buddhist psychology for millennia.

Thanks to recent research, it is now understood that what is actually perceived by the senses—and it can vary depending on the sense organ—is not actually incorporated into conscious awareness for five hundred milliseconds. That’s about a half of a second. This may not seem long, but what it means is that while we think we are interacting with the present moment, we are in fact interacting, always, with the past. So again, “reality” is not what we are dealing with.

As we touched upon earlier, in Buddhist psychology it is explained that we interact with the world through our five senses: eyes/sight (visual), ears/sound (auditory), 44nose/smell (odors), tongue/taste (gustatory), and body/touch (sensation). When we perceive something, say our coffee mug, we actually do not experience the mug itself. Rather, the mug appears to our consciousness through the interaction of the mug—its shape, color, and so on—and the eye organ, and then the consciousness, or mind and brain. But what the mind and brain cognize or experience is an image of the mug, not the mug itself. It is like interacting with a photograph of the mug. While we may have a raw, bare, or pure perception of the mug, this is not what we experience in our consciousness and not what we interact with. When we comment to the person handing us our cup of coffee that we actually wanted the bigge