How do things exist for us? As Lama Zopa Rinoche says, “The way the world out there appears back to us is in the aspect of what’s in our mind.” Depending on our past karmic imprints and what’s in our mind now, things appear to us a certain way.
And, of course, we think things exist exactly in the way they appear to us. Buddha points this out as our essential problem. It’s just not true, he says. And this is why we suffer.
But bad enough, as Rinpoche says, that things appear wrongly to us; the worst thing is that we believe it.
Let’s take the chocolate cake. Our eye consciousness cognizes shape and the color, which in an instant – not kidding, quicker than Google – triggers the mental consciousness, where the memories are stored from having eaten and seen and touched and tasted this thing before. As Rinpoche says, that’s where the workshop is: all the thoughts and feelings and emotions – and nothing goes astray; everything stays there.
Up comes the label “chocolate cake.” You might even be a professional cook and with just a glance, triggering your memory and your knowledge, you could actually deduce that it’s a really good chocolate cake. That’s a relative reality; nothing wrong with that.
Then what it triggers is pleasure, a pleasant feeling. In this case, for you, the more familiar you are with it from past experience, the more pleasure you’ve had, the more pleasure is triggered now.
Conventionally speaking, so far, so good. None of these many thoughts that have arisen in the mind are delusions. This is fact: It’s a fact it’s chocolate cake; it’s a fact its shape is a round thing; it’s a triangle; it’s this, it’s a good one. It’s a fact you’ve had it before, had pleasure from it.
Now the trouble starts, the delusions, the misconceptions, the fantasies. After the pleasure, what is now triggered instantly is attachment. The second the pleasure arises, attachment kicks in. And, by the way, there’s nothing wrong with pleasant feelings! But we conflate pleasure and attachment– big mistake.
And it’s so powerful, this attachment, it permeates everything. Attachment makes it look delicious: it appears so incredibly delicious, over there on the plate, as if when we made it we put a spoonful of deliciousness in it along with the chocolate and the flour and the eggs. And it’s just begging us to eat it, isn’t it?
And it seems as if it’s got nothing to do with me! I’m this innocent victim: what choice to I have but to eat it? And we believe all this a hundred percent, right? We believe it. In other words, not for one split second does it occur to us that the delicious cake is a story that attachment is making up.
But that’s what Buddha’s saying. We are making up an elaborate story. We can’t argue that it’s a cake. It is a cake. It is a chocolate cake. It is even a very good chocolate cake, professionally speaking. These are conventional facts.
But our experience of these facts is overwhelmed by the lie of attachment. It dominates completely. And that attachment, energetically speaking, is a powerful emotional hunger, a sense of not having enough, of dissatisfaction: the stronger that is, the more exaggeratedly delicious the cake appears to us.
Let’s say you have aversion to chocolate cake; let’s say you get really sick if you eat chocolate cake. For you it’ll be a whole other story. The eye consciousness perceives shape and color; then comes the label “chocolate cake” from the memory of having had it. Then comes disgust from the memory of the horrible experience that was triggered by the having of it. Right?
The overall experience that you will have will be informed by the aversion that is triggered instantly. Now the cake appears to you as disgusting, as if you had put a spoonful of disgustingness into it when you made it. That’s how it appears to you.
Each of us believes our own story, our own fabrication, don’t we? It’s a fabrication because clearly the cake can’t be simultaneously disgusting and delicious, can it? It is chocolate cake. We’ve got that right. But, then one person puts a lie onto it and says it’s ugly, another person puts another lie onto it and says it’s delicious – it can’t be both, just not possible.
When a racist sees a person of another race, they see somebody ugly. When a person of that race sees that person, they see a person who is lovely. As our mothers would tell us, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Deliciousness is in the eye of the beholder. Ugliness is in the eye of the beholder. It is so obvious. It’s profound, that statement, but we hear it as cute. But it’s absolutely the point.
Of course we don’t think it’s like this. We can hear it now, rationally. But, because we’re brainwashed with attachment – our attachment; don’t blame anyone else! – we just rush to it; it’s the default mode. There’s no questioning. We’re totally programmed to see it like this.
As Rinpoche says, “Everything is your own karmic appearance.” And then we believe it. That’s what keeps us locked into samsara.
We need to be on the case all the time – not just every now and again, sitting on our cushion, being holy. This is our full-on day-to-day job, because delusions are occurring all the time. Being your own therapist, as Lama Yeshe puts it, is what we are supposed to be doing all day.
And like any job we start to do, it’s difficult in the beginning. We stumble and feel very tired doing it. But eventually we get used to it, and that’s when we really get some experience from the practice, when we really can see our mind, have the courage to see it, change it right there, or struggle with it, work with it, and move forward.
Encouragingly, as the Tibetans so nicely put it, “Nothing gets more difficult with practice.”