12/05/2025
Some have extremely acute hearing and then there are other beings who don’t have the colour range we have, and those who maybe have even more colour range than we have. We only perceive what our senses can receive and like a computer, the brain interprets rapidly, works it all out and comes up with a picture for us. Moreover, what is actually out there, we can never know since it all depends on the kind of sense organs and brain mechanism which as human beings we share.
The rest is just our preconceptions, our judgments and tastes - meaning what we like and what we don’t like. Sometimes things which a while back were considered so beautiful and aesthetically pleasing are now considered ridiculous. We look at old photos and exclaim, “Goodness, did I really wear that?!!”
The fact is that we don’t really know what is out there definitively. We only know what we perceive with the limited senses that we have. If we had different kinds of senses, or extra senses or less senses, the picture would change. Even scientists are only using the kind of senses and brains which - as human beings - they have and so they also have their limitations. We can’t imagine what other kinds of senses might be like because we have never had them.
Therefore, on one level everything which we perceive is our own inner movie show. In fact we don’t even know what is going on in here, not to speak of what is going on out there! So all our perceptions are gathered and interpreted by the thinking mind, our conceptual mind. But our conceptual mind is dualistic by its very nature. That means it naturally makes a division into subject and object.
When I went to get my first meditation instruction from an old Yogi called Togden Choelek Rinpoche, he said to me, “This table, is it empty?”
I said, “…Yes!” He asked, “Do you see it as empty?” “Noooo…”
“The mind. Is it empty?” So I said, with a bit more confidence, “Yes!”
“Do you see it as empty?” “No.”
“Which do you think is easier, to see the table as empty or your mind as empty?”
I said, “Oh, the mind.” Then he said, “Okay, you belong to us.” Next I asked, “If I had said ‘the table’?” “Then I’d have sent you to Sera monastery down the road!” In other words, the scholastic approach is to analyse the emptiness of external phenomena while the yogic tradition is to examine the emptiness of mind. The mind is empty by its nature. What does it mean?
The classical description is that all phenomena are empty of inherent existence. Which means that we cannot find anything existing independently and say that this is the thing in itself, whether a “table” or “the mind” or anything. We can never find the actual thing in itself. Everything is made up of bits and pieces and space, put together and labeled.
Where is the tableness of a table? It cannot be found. After all, anything can be used as a table if it is slightly flat. Yesterday maybe it was a box, today it is a table.
Even though that is a simplistic explanation of a profound understanding, it carries an important meaning because we do label everything and then believe our labels instead of recognizing that this is merely a label, just a convenience.
The Buddha said, “I, too, use conceptual language, but I am not fooled by it.”
And that is the difference: we are fooled by it and we think that if we give something a name, it exists. And unlike the Buddha, we tend to believe everything we label as truly existing.
But here we are dealing specifically with the mind, not tables, and so the point is, what is the mind? Why is the mind empty?
🔸 Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
🔸 The Heart of Compassion: The Thirty-seven Verses on the Practice of a Bodhisattva
