Inside the hall of mirrors
Imagine realising that what you had always thought to be yourself was only a reflection in a mirror. This post is about a way of looking at the elements of human experience as mutually dependent on each other, like a hall of mirrors.
The analogy of a mysterious machine
Imagine you are on a beautiful deserted island and you find a machine not far from the beach, nestled in a grove of palm trees. The machine is in pieces and it's hard to tell what its intended effect is. Some of the pieces you recognise. There's a funnel, a flask, some kind of heating apparatus, levers and dials, various pipes. But you can't figure out the process, what goes where, what depends on what, what has an effect on what.
As you make your way further into the island, you find a cave, and in that cave is another machine. This one has the same pieces as the first, but it's intact. Now you can see that there is a receptacle for water, you can see that dependent on sea water entering the system steam can be created and cooled, and dependent on cooling the steam, fresh water is produced. It's a desalination device.
Understanding the human experience
The Buddha described human experience with a list of five "aggregates", five key features of our experience we can recognise: form, feeling tone, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. Like the machine on the desert island, they are parts of a complex system.
This teaching on the aggregates is often given as a list, and the instruction is to relate to each of the five things in that list as not constituting an unchanging self. But I think that doesn't really capture the dynamic, systemic nature of Buddhist thought. One of the Buddha's key insights was that of dependent arising: that everything depends on at least one other condition for its existence. For example, the sight of a flower arises dependent on the eye, the light, the flower, and consciousness.
It recently struck me that we can see the aggregates as a chain of dependencies. This was very much how the Buddha thought. Each of these is not a self because it depends on the other aggregates, which also do not constitute a self in the way that we imagine. And when we say that these elements of our experience do not add up to a self, it's like saying that experience is mutable, and empty of thingness. Things change. There is no label on atoms and molecules declaring them to be inherently part of a lamppost or a coffee mug. But we forget this. We see in conceptual categories and not the reality as it is.
The aggregates as dependencies
Let's take a look at the aggregates through the lens of dependent arising. Even though they are all mutually dependent, I think it can be helpful to run through them in order as part of our meditation practice.
- Form is not self. For example, think of the hardness of your teeth: they are physical matter, bone. But what does our experience of form depend on? Consciousness: we need to be aware to experience this perception of form.
- Dependent on form (and other factors) there are feeling tones.
- Dependent on feeling tones we make all kinds of perceptions.
- Dependent on the perceptions we have, all kinds of thoughts, feelings, views, mental models arise.
- Dependent on these mental formations—and all of the above—we experience consciousness. Consciousness depends on something to be conscious of, therefore consciousness cannot be a self. It is another dependently arisen phenomenon.
And then we might ask what depends on consciousness? One answer might be our experience of form. So the whole thing is circular, a snake eating its own tail.
When we look at the constituent parts of our experience we find a hall of mirrors. Each mirror is dependent on the image in another mirror, and when you take that away the whole illusion collapses.
This is the same circularity we find in the teaching on dependent arising, in which consciousness and nama-rupa (name and form) are mutually dependent. And what is mutually dependent is a kind of magic trick. There isn't a foundational reality to it.
I feel that this is the heart of the Buddha's teaching, and what has historically been unique to Buddhism. In practising this way, meditating and reflecting on it, we experience a kind of coolness and peace. It is a state of less fabrication. Instead of our usual habit of creating a self out of our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions we see the machine at work fabricating its conceptual illusions. The reality is more open and alive.