PadmaVonSamba wrote:Consider consciousness as perhaps not a single thing at all, but as a series of separate events, lots and lots of separate events all moving together at once, like a garbage truck unloading a big haul of trash into a landfill. From a distance, all that garbage looks like one big mass of stuff. All connected. This is usually the way we perceive the activity of the mind. But upon closer scrutiny we see that the garbage comes from all different places, is made up of all different stuff, lots of things that actually don't have anything to do with each other at all, and the fact that it all arrived in one truck turns out really to be irrelevant.
The difficulty with this approach is that we naturally assume that if we relax enough to loosen our grip on such a disjointed collection together, then it will naturally fall apart and we will be left with nothing - just a bereft sentience drifting in mind-resistant nothingness
{Ego might act out this scenario as a way of apparently proving its necessity, of course
}
Something I'm coming to understand about sunyata, though, is that it leaves things without their needing to work that way - The space between things is enough to connect them, since there's nothing inside the 'things' to separate them at a fundamental level, or to subject them to any kind of metaphysical gravity by which they'd quickly fall apart. For that reason, only the most basic, unintentional level of subjective tension (i.e. samsara) is needed to keep all our 'garbage' together, to the point that it couldn't be prized apart.
Unless this kind of perspective is applied, it's hard to explain how our minds could hold together in the absence of either a God or a superhuman force of will.
From an everyday point of view outside this kind of insight, though, the claim that the different kinds of garbage have nothing to do with each other (in either nature or origins) sounds odd, since -for the unenlightened- 'the fact that it all arrived in one truck' is the fact that we're apparently all individual beings. That's not irrelevant
yet, though we can always aspire to greater things _ _