4.5. Creating the World

sabbalokaṃ abhiññāya, sabbaloke yathātathaṃ, sabbalokavisaṃyutto, sabbaloke anūpayo.
ITI112 Itivuttaka 112

Deeply understanding the whole world, The whole world as it truly is, Disentangled from the whole world, Not drawn into the whole world.

All you touch and all you see Is all your life will ever be
Pink Floyd "Breath"

As we are exploring this world of the senses, it should become apparent that the world is not something 'out there', but really something that is continually being manufactured 'in here'.

We always assume that we are experiencing reality, what we are seeing is what's really out there. We assume that what we are hearing are sounds that exist out in the world, independent of ourselves. We assume that everything that is coming through the senses has, what is called in Sanskrit, svabhāva, its own independent existence. This misconception is almost universal, an extremely persistent illusion.

But as we go deeper into exploring this process of sense experience, it becomes obvious that we are not experiencing reality, we are experiencing an aspect of something that is really out there, let us say a vibration in the air, which gets filtered through the sense organ of the ear, reduced into a small frequency band, turned into an electrical signal which gets passed onto and processed by the brain, which we have no experience of, until it appears in the mind and gets evaluated according to everything that we've ever heard previously. That's an entirely different scenario from hearing what's 'out there'.

In one way, our senses give us a lot of information about the outside world. But another way of looking at it is they really limit what we experience into a small, narrow band, and bin the rest as irrelevant.

Do we ever notice that we hear nothing below 20-25 Hz? There is a whole world of sound information happening in that range, but we are deaf to it. Do we notice that we hear nothing over 22 kHz? Dogs may wonder why we humans are so deaf to the loudest and most obvious sounds. Rather than hearing what's out there, we are actually being presented with a small slither of the available sonic frequencies by the ear.

Science tells us how mechanical impulses get converted into electrical impulses in the inner ear, but we have no experience of that, or what's happening to that electrical signal in the brain. The first time we become aware of it is when the mind manufactures a little theatre set, presenting us with a semi-realistic, internally created scene of something that happened out in the world a few moments earlier. With hearing, there is a 30-50 milliseconds delay, according to the latest research. And what's the first thing we do in response to that? Ignore it! Unless of course it is loud enough to capture out attention, or offers some advantage or disadvantage to us.

Another example. We have the very distinct impression that we are looking out onto the world. But actually the inverse is true, the world is coming into us. Science tells us that light hits the retina and gets converted into some chemical signal, which becomes an electrical signal, which gets processed in the brain somewhere near the back of the head, in darkness and upside down apparently, but that too is not available to experience. The first thing that we know about it is when the picture appears in the mind a short time later, a very realistic simulation of looking out onto the world. The delay between the actual event and out perception of it is as much as 100-150 milliseconds. The illusion is amazingly persistent, despite the fact that we know science and introspection are both saying the same thing, in different ways—we are constructing the world.

So we are never seeing or hearing the world out there, we are seeing and hearing our own locally manufactured facsimile of a small slice of the world out there. That's what we are responding to. That's what we are loving and hating—a reconstructed image in the mind.

There is been a lot of talk in the last few years about a philosophical idea called simulation theory, which suggests our reality might be an advanced computer simulation. What we experience as the physical universe is actually a sophisticated digital construct created by a technologically superior civilisation. In this simulation nothing is real, hence the name, everything is part of the digital simulation.

From the saḷāyatana point of view there, there is no need to imagine a vast digital simulation. We are already each living in our own little organic simulation of the world. We manufacture the world in real time as we pass through it, an entirely believable simulation, so real that we actually ascribe qualities of the experiences occurring in our minds to the objects 'out there' in the world, going as far as to love and hate the simulated phenomena within our own minds.

We are living in the age where people are very confident about perceiving the world correctly and perceiving it a certain way, which is obviously a true and accurate reflection of reality. But it should be obvious to any meditator how seemingly rational adults can come to such outrageously different conclusions about what is actually happening in the world. Nobody is seeing anything which even comes close to resembling objective reality. Everybody is creating their own version of the world and taking that as some kind of given truth. What is really amazing is that there is any consensus at all among people—that is much more surprising!

You might argue that there is an external world, there are overseas countries, people on the other side of the world, other planets and distant galaxies. Certainly there are, and many things outside the range of the senses, and scientific instruments too! But look carefully where the 'outside world' is actually happening. It occurs as a mental phenomenon happening in the mind, as we are thinking about those things. Without the subjective aspect, it simply does not exist.

This is what the Buddha was pointing at when he talked about sabbaṃ, which in Pāḷi means 'all of it', 'everything'.

sabbaṃ vo, bhikkhave, desessāmi. taṃ suṇātha. kiñca, bhikkhave, sabbaṃ? cakkhuñceva rūpā ca, sotañca saddā ca, ghānañca gandhā ca, jivhā ca rasā ca, kāyo ca phoṭṭhabbā ca, mano ca dhammā ca – idaṃ vuccati, bhikkhave, sabbaṃ. yo, bhikkhave, evaṃ vadeyya – ahametaṃ sabbaṃ paccakkhāya aññaṃ sabbaṃ paññāpessāmī’ti, tassa vācāvatthukamevassa, puṭṭho ca na sampāyeyya, uttariñca vighātaṃ āpajjeyya. taṃ kissa hetu? yathā taṃ, bhikkhave, avisayasminti.
SN35.23 sabbasuttaṃ

Monks let me tell you about everything. Listen up. What is everything? The eye and forms, the ear and sounds, the nose and scents, the tongue and flavours, the body and tangible sensations, the mind and mental phenomena, this is what's called everything. Anyone who says, "I reject this everything and will tell you about another everything", that would merely be baseless talk. Questioned further, he would struggle to answer, and would fall into some further difficulty. Why is that? Because it is outside of his domain.

In that same way that a six-piece band can play hundreds, thousands of different pieces of music, these six senses produce all the experiences in our entire life.

A simple question: have you ever experienced a single thing in your entire existence that is outside the field of the six senses?

The Buddhist version of simulation theory has been around for two and a half thousand years, except it posits that we are living in a small organic simulation of the world, produced on our local hardware with bits of the world, which we have never seen independently. Unlike simulation theory, this kind of simulation is entirely real, and is all we've even known our whole life.

The world does not have sights. Sights are created by visual forms, the eyes and the mind.

The world does not have sounds. Sounds are created by audible frequencies, the ears and the mind.

The world does not have smell. Smells are created by the aromatic chemicals, the nose and the mind.

The world does not have tastes. Tastes are created by the taste-able chemicals, the tongue and the mind.

The world does not have tactile sensations. Tactile sensations are created by physical contact, the body and the mind.

And it goes without saying that all mental phenomena are created by qualia and the mind.

What we are engaging in here is a process of deconstructing the way that we habitually see the world, in order to see clearly that we are not really responding to the world, but responding to our internally generated construction of the world. Everyone we have ever loved, everything we have ever hated, everything that we've ever been indifferent to was not 'out there'. We are loving, hating and ignoring our own minds. In a way, we are just loving, hating and indifferent to ourselves. In another way, it is all just empty phenomena arising and passing away.

Now we should be able to definitively answer the philosophical question, "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" Without ears and ear consciousness, no, of course not. More importantly, there is also no tree and no forest either, without an observer to see them.

Each conscious experience simultaneously creates the illusion of a pre-existing experiencer, experiencing and a pre-existing world. But nothing could be further from the truth. The self and the world get created together anew with each sense experience.

Chew on this for a bit.

Meditation on creating the world

Q&A

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