If you haven’t already, before reading this article, read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, & Part 4 of the What is Real series for context.
The great Buddhist Masters say all that is actually happening in the life experience of a human being is seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, and thinking. Mind creates everything else.
That may boggle the mind so allow me to explain the Buddhist understanding of the process the body goes through to experience things by presenting what’s called the 24 ayatanas.
The 24 ayatanas are the 6 senses organs, 6 sense doors, 6 sense objects, and the 6 sense consciousnesses:
The 6 sense organs receive or sense the raw energetic data which is what we typically call our experience. The 6 sense organs are the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind.
The 6 sense doors are the act of receiving or sensing the raw energetic data (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and thinking).
The 6 sense objects are those things which are being sensed (seen things, heard things, smelled things, tasted things, touched/felt things, and thoughts).
The 6 sense consciousnesses are the awareness of the act of sensing (the awareness of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching/feeling, and thinking).
Let’s take visual perception as an example: the sense organs are the eyes, the sense door is seeing, the sense object is that which is being seen, and the sense consciousness is the awareness of seeing a thing.
The Sense Consciousnesses
The first five consciousnesses or sense consciousnesses (the awareness of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching) are non-conceptual. The sixth, or mind, consciousness (the awareness of thinking), is divided into conceptual and non-conceptual aspects.
The first five sense consciousnesses (the awareness of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching) are like a person who can not talk but who can see. They see everything clearly, directly but can not evaluate, organize, label, or judge them.
The conceptual mind is like someone who is really good at talking—a real ‘sweet-talker,’ in fact — but who is completely blind and can not see anything at all. The mental consciousness (the awareness of thinking) does not actually perceive anything but is the connector between the other five sense consciousnesses and the conceptual mind.
To explain the difference between conceptual and non-conceptual aspects of the 6th or mind consciousness, we can use the example of seeing a cup. First of all, we see the form, which is a non-conceptual perception. The eye sees the form and in that instant there is mere seeing of the form - clear, direct, and unadulterated. There is no labeling, no analysis, no evaluation, or judgment of it as good or bad or anything else.
Then it is as if the sense consciousness sends a report of what it has seen to the mental consciousness. The mental consciousness then gets involved in all kinds of speculation about the form: What’s it called? Is it a good cup or a bad one? Where did it come from? Who bought it? How much was it? What is the design like? Do I like it? Will I fight to the death to keep it? and so on.
Now that you have the foundational Buddhist understanding, let’s talk about science’s understanding of the process the body goes through to experience things.
If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody is there, does it make a sound? We’ve all heard this Koan-like inquiry. If we conduct a quick survey of friends and family, we shall find that the vast majority of people answer decisively in the affirmative.
But what is the process that produces sound? Sound is created by a disturbance in some medium, usually air, although sound travels even faster and more efficiently through denser materials such as water or steel. Tree limbs, branches, and trunks violently striking the ground create rapid pulses of air. A deaf person can readily feel some of these pulsations if they repeat with a frequency of five to 30 times a second.
So, what we have with the tumbling tree, in actuality, are rapid air-pressure variations, which spread out by traveling through the surrounding medium at around 750 mph. As they do so, they lose their coherency until the background evenness of the air is re-established. This, according to simple science, is what occurs even when a brain-ear mechanism is absent—a series of greater and lesser air-pressure passages. Tiny, rapid, puffs of wind. There is no sound attached to them.
Now, if someone is nearby the falling tree, the tiny air puffs physically cause the ear's tympanic membrane (eardrum) to vibrate, which then stimulates nerves only if the air is pulsing between 20 and 20,000 times a second (with an upper limit more like 10,000 for people of a certain age, and even less for those of us whose misspent youth included ear-splitting rock concerts). Air that puffs 15 times a second is not intrinsically different from air that pulses 30 times, yet the 15 times a second will never result in a human perception of sound because of how our neural architecture is designed. In any case, nerves stimulated by the moving eardrum send electrical signals to a section of the brain, resulting in the cognition of a noise.
Only when a specific range of pulses are present is the ear's neural architecture designed to conjure the noise experience in the brain which is then registered by awareness. In short, an observer, an ear, and a brain are every bit as necessary for the experience of sound as are the air pulses and Awareness.
A tree that falls in an empty forest creates only silent air pulses-tiny puffs of wind.
Let’s consider a lit candle. Does the flame have intrinsic brightness and a yellow color when no one's watching?
The flame is still merely a hot gas. Like any source of light, it emits photons or tiny packets of waves of electromagnetic energy. Each consists of electrical and magnetic pulses. These momentary exhibitions of electricity and magnetism are the whole show, the nature of light itself.
Neither electricity nor magnetism have visual properties. So, on its own, it's not hard to grasp that there is nothing inherently visual, nothing bright or colored about the candle flame. Let these same invisible electromagnetic waves strike a human retina and we have a visual experience - if (and only if) the waves each happen to measure between 400 and 700 nanometers in length from crest to crest, then their energy is just right to deliver a stimulus to the 8 million cone-shaped cells in the retina. Each of these in turn sends an electrical pulse to a neighbor neuron, and on up the line this goes, at 250 mph, until it reaches the warm, wet occipital lobe of the brain, in the back of the head.
There, a cascading complex of neurons fire from the incoming stimuli, which is then registered by awareness and perceived by the mind as a yellow brightness occurring in a place we have been conditioned to call "the external world." Other creatures receiving the identical stimulus will experience something altogether different, such as a perception of gray, or even have an entirely dissimilar sensation. The point is, there isn't a "bright yellow" light "out there" at all. At most, there is an invisible stream of electrical and magnetic pulses. We are totally necessary for the experience of what we'd call a yellow flame.
And what if you touch something? Isn't it solid? Push on the trunk of the fallen tree and you feel pressure. But this too is a sensation registered by Awareness, interpreted by the mind via workings inside your brain, and only "projected" to your hand and fingers, whose existence also lies within the mind. Moreover, that sensation of pressure is caused not by any contact with a solid, but by the fact that every atom has negatively charged electrons in its outer shells.
As we all know from playing with magnets, charges of the same type repel each other, so the bark's electrons repel yours, and you feel this electrical repulsive force stopping your fingers from penetrating any further. Nothing solid ever meets any other solids when you push on a tree. The atoms in your fingers are each as empty as a vacant football stadium in which a single fly sits on the fifty-yard line.
We could continue with smelling and tasting but suffice it to say, for the purpose of limiting the length of this article, that they are very similar in process.
Conclusion
So, what we perceive as “reality” is a process that involves our 6 senses organs, 6 sense doors (the act of sensing), 6 sense objects (or sense perceptions), OUR BRAIN (which receives the neurological imprint of what is sensed), the first 5 sense consciousnesses, and the 6th (or mental) consciousness which interprets the raw sense data according to our conditioning.
There just isn’t anything we’ve been referring to as “real” out there.
“Listen monks, attend carefully, and I will teach you the totality [of things]. What is the totality? It is simply the eye and sights, the ear and sounds, the nose and smells, the tongue and tastes, the body and sensations, the mind and mind objects. If anyone were to proclaim a totality beyond this, that person would be speaking of something outside their knowledge.”
~ Siddhartha Gautama, the Historic Buddha
"As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”
~ Max Planck, Founding Father of Quantum Mechanics
“All descriptions of reality are limited expressions of the world of emptiness. Yet we attach to the descriptions and think they are reality. That is a mistake.”
~ Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, Zen Master of the 20th Century
“When it is said that the world is an illusion, it means that the world as it is normally conceived to be is an illusion. The world is normally conceived to exist in its own right, separate from and independent of the awareness or consciousness that knows or experiences it.
Nobody has ever experienced such a world, because it would be impossible to have an experience without consciousness. Hence it is said to be an illusion. However, this does not mean that experience is an illusion.
We are not a human being. We are simply being itself, that is, the knowing presence in all experience. We limit ourself to being a human when we exclusively identify this being which we are with a little cluster of sensations called the body.
The ego is the entity that is imagined to exist when awareness or being is believed to be limited to a body. Look for that entity and you will not find it. Hence it is said to be an illusion.”
~ Rupert Spira, British Non-Dualist Teacher
Watch Rupert Spira - Belief Goes; Illusion Remains (16 min):
Watch Rupert Spira - Awareness Cannot Know Itself as an Object but Is Never Not Known (13 min):
Much of the scientific explanation of the senses is from Robert Lanza’s book called Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe.
Next, look for the sixth and final article of the What is Real series called The Power of Intention and Action.
If any of these articles strikes your interest or curiosity, consider enrolling in my course which unpacks these and many other fascinating topics about reality: The Path Of Meditation that Leads to Living ALOHA.
It is amazing to me how I can read the same material multiple times, and take away additional/different insights on each reading. If that isn't proof that "we" are not fixed entities, but changing in each moment, I don't know what is. Remarkable. Thanks Kit!