Notes

Reality -- ie, the world “out there”, that exists regardless of who’s looking at it -- is an undifferentiated totality, an all-encompassing whole unity, unqualified and unpredicated -- a single unfolding, trans-spatiotemporal, interpenetrating energy process. There is nothing that it is not, and nothing is not it, at any time or place -- how could it be otherwise? For this reason it can also be said that Reality is nothing, for its presence cannot be distinguished from its absence. Something which is everywhere and everywhen is in fact nowhere at all because there is nothing to mark its boundaries, nothing to shape it and make it definite. Pure being *is* pure nothing. Another way to put it is that Reality is not a “thing”. There is no “outside” perspective from which to approach and grasp it, because it is all there is. By definition, there simply is no “outside” of Reality, which means there is equally no “inside”. In Sanskrit it is said to be “sunyata” -- emptiness -- lacking any fixed or definite nature, and therefore infinitely pliable and pregnant with possibility.
The tricky bit starts when the Reality-process develops into human brains. And what are human brains, anyway? They are Reality Simulators. Driven by evolutionary forces, they have developed as an extremely robust and complex survival strategy to create a representation of the world which is most ideal for survival and reproduction in a particular environment. Our Reality Simulators have been trained over many eons into a particular kind of focus because it makes us successful in the game of life and death. So we perceive the visible light spectrum instead of gamma rays, and we only hear sounds in the small range that matters to our daily survival, and so on. Our Reality Simulators aren’t rewarded for creating the most “accurate” representation, they are rewarded for creating the most successful one. And herein lies the rub: part of a successful representation of Reality (at least for humans), is the separation of phenomena into “self” and “other”. In other words, our Reality Simulators are programmed to give us the impression that fundamentally, there is a “me” and there is an “everything else that’s not me.” And for extra points, we’ve become extremely adept at noticing all kinds of variations and patterns in the “everything else” category, such that we perceive it as being composed of separate, independently existing “things” which are interacting in complex ways.
This is both incalculably valuable and immeasurably problematic. On the one hand, of course, it is the key to our survival. If your Reality Simulator doesn’t think “you” are different from the sabre tooth tiger, it doesn’t get to go on being a Reality Simulator for very long (which is basically all it wants to do). On the other hand, if we forget (or never realize) that the subject/object structure of our Reality Simulation is really only just a part of the simulation, then it can lead to great pain and suffering as we categorize the world and the people around us into “us” and “them” groups.
The claim of the Buddha, and others, is that all our suffering fundamentally boils down to mistakenly identifying our Reality Simulation *as* Reality. We think the world *really is* composed of a big collection of separate things, including certain special types of things called people, one of whom is myself, some of whom are my friends and allies, and fuck the rest. But of course, as I’ve already said, Reality is *not* differentiated -- it is a completely unified totality, from the very beginning. The singularity of the big bang never went anywhere, it just got bigger. So our basic problem is a mismatch of our expectation or our supposition about the way things are on the one hand, and then the way things really are on the other. This is the very core of all dissatisfaction and suffering.
Our task, then, if we want respite from suffering and dissatisfaction, is not necessarily to escape from or give up the Reality Simulation we have (especially since it comes to us automatically), but instead to fully understand what it is, so that we can use it skillfully rather than reflexively and reactively. We have to come to recognize our “reality habit”, or the process by which we go about mistaking our Reality Simulation for what actually is. This habit is built into us at a very fundamental level, and reinforced in very nearly all of our language, action and interaction, so it is an exceedingly difficult one to break. This is why we must practice, and why community (sangha) is so important in this work.