Vērum

Someone asked, "How does Ghost see the world?"

"Countless descriptions of reality fail to scratch the surface," and yet ...

I wanted to try something called the coffee shop test with this question. I proceeded to fail immediately by opening with a story about some dudes who lived 1500 years ago:

In the ancient Chinese tradition some Zen masters had a custom. They would ask newcomers "Where have you just come from?" They were basically asking what school, tradition, path, or teaching you come from. The traveler would say something like "I'm coming from master xyz's place" and the master (let's call him Z) would ask "What does master xyz teach?" And depending on the traveler's answer, he might fail, fail both himself and the master, or pass and establish himself as a man of the Way, so to speak. If his answer was bad enough, master Z might embark on a journey to go see master xyz and investigate his teaching in person. And if master xyz was a fraud, he's about to be exposed in front of his whole school. Or he may turn out to be superior and humble master Z instead. They might also test each other a bit and find each other equal to the task. "You are quite alright," master xyz might say. "I see that you got nothing but buddhas hanging out here," master Z responds. And then master Z might return to his own place and scold the student, "Master xyz is an absolute unit. It's you who is beyond helping." And if the student didn't have the self-determination to take a stand and say "I'm going to do this if it's the last thing I do”, he was getting shown to the door immediately if his resolve was anything less than that.

The point of sharing this story is to convey that there is a certain gravitas to this question and the way it's answered, which is what makes it worth having a discussion about.

I'm always coming from the source. The source is the inherent unblemished reality. By inherent I mean that it precedes and is implicit in everything else. By unblemished I mean that it's not distorted or obscured by mental fabrication. I'm always coming from the source ... in the midst of seeing and hearing. Zen master Dahui said "For one who has attained the path, there is nothing that is not it."

I see and hear just fine. Obviously, obviously. When we say "the world" we're talking about sights, sounds, thoughts, sensations, measurements, and so forth. All of that stuff is your mind. The mind works in mysterious ways. It's doing all this stuff, but this stuff is matrix-like. There has been some discussion lately by some very respectable individuals (the likes of Donald Hoffman, David Deutsch, and Sam Harris) about our experienced reality having the quality of being like a simulation or like a projection of a more fundamental reality or source code.

The source is not some special thing or place, or some mysterious third thing. It's just the place where "the duality of subject and object is gone." Self and otherness merge back into a formless primordial essence—which in some places they call buddha nature, and call people who have directly experienced this return to the "source reality" buddhas and bodhisattvas among other things. We disregard its primacy out of convenience because our primary concern as organisms is attending to our biological and social needs. All sentient beings have the buddha nature. It's just that they are caught up in the grind that they don't realize that they have it.

And you can't really fault them because being a buddha doesn't pay bills.

This buddha nature is the very same "stuff" that we experience as sights, sounds, and the myriad other ways that it presents itself. That is why Mazu said "Mind is the Buddha." On the surface of it, this realization doesn't change anything. You are free to do whatever you want to do. Perhaps now you realize that this is the case. But now everything that you do is informed by that insight into [self] nature. This changes everything. What that looks like? It takes one to know one.