NotesOnAppearances

philosophy, meditation

Disclaimer

What I'm presenting here is: A simplified, personally-interpreted framework inspired by YogacaraSchool insights, rather than a scholarly exposition of the school itself. I'm using Yogacara-influenced phenomenological observation as a practical tool for understanding mind, without claiming to represent the full philosophical system.

Goal

The goal I'm interested in is the reduction of suffering and clarity of awareness. To do this, I like approaching the mind from a practical point of view, the same way that a programmer approaches software, or the way a jeweller approaches a gemstone. We sit and we watch our minds, and we work with our minds directly.

There seems to be no experience outside of appearance

When you look at the mind long enough, a strange thing happens: you realize that everything you experience has an appearance.

For example, let's say you see a rainbow. Then you should ask yourself: "Well, I know this rainbow APPEARS to exist. But does it really exist?" And then you dig into whether the rainbow exists or not. Underneath the initial appearance of the rainbow, you will find nothing but more experiences. It's appearances all the way down.

Seen directly, the nature of the mind can be said to be all appearance. There is no experience that occurs outside of appearance, because experience itself is that-which-appears.

Sure, there seems to be a physical reality -- but that physical reality is always experienced by the subjective observer, and so the mind is primary in this way of looking at things; the physical world comes afterwards. (If you look at the YogacaraSchool you'll see more extreme points of view, but MadhyamakaSchool has interesting rebuttals of this perspective).

Breaking down appearances

Appearance can be sliced up in many ways. One way to slice it up would be by the FiveAggregatesPancaSkandha, you have at all times the following:

If you decide to slice it up according to the SensoryOrgans then you might have the following:

These categorizations of experience are useful for different reasons. The FiveAggregatesPancaSkandha categorization schema helps us reason about the mind in terms of the internal processes, while the SensoryOrgans perspective flattens things out a bit more in terms of the senses (and also helps us see that thoughts could be thought of as a sensory experience).

A more fundamental breakdown?

I personally prefer breaking it down into simpler categorizations based on EmptinessShunyata. A very simple categorization is a two-fold categorization:

Seen from this perspective, it is difficult to find things in the 2nd category (Things that don't change). But if we look long and hard enough, we start seeing that some things don't really change.

So, change and awareness of the change seem to be permanent, having no beginning and no end. But these changes seem to be appearances, only.

TODO: