Emptiness

I live in my fantasy, in the world of closed eyes. I live in Intentional or Verbal world. The "I" that I see in my mind was neither the body or mind because I can't see neither. This "emergent self" and other "objects" were created as part of Being Human. The last chain of evolution that can reflect back on the creation. They are created to create symbols to communicate and create Art-ifacts or tools to manipulate environments. These symbols are not created after each perception of objects because we don't have enough capacity or speed to deal with all information we receive each seconds. Rather, this "emergent objects" are created separate from the reality. What is reality but visual creation? Lights hit objects that reflects the light to our visual receptors and send the signal to our brain? It is absurd to think that an image is printed in our brain like an image is printed inside a camera. Those images are the "emergent objects" that I create when I rationalize or create a story of so called my life. Just like our brain create our visual perception, it also create a story or symbolic perception. Just like visual illusion, it also has symbolic illusion. When we watch a movie or TV show or magic show, they create an appearance but we are the one who create the story in our head or we deceive our self based on the appearance of light, sound, and expression. We identify this appearance as real. All appearance are false, all phenomena are false, they are not what they seems to be. It seems empty. All suffering is experiencing small emptiness in life; losing something, not having something that I want, having something that I don't want, not doing something that I want, and doing something that I don't want. Experiencing this emptiness makes us question the whole structures or trying to understand the big picture, an invitation to a spiritual journey. Until we realize that this small emptiness is an expression of big emptiness.

We create phenomena or concepts and merge them with the things that we see. We predispose/put them together, add a concept of time (past) and call it memory. We predispose, add a future, and call it planning. In the movie Changed Up, the two actors switch their life with each other. Is Mitch and Dave the body or the self? Is it the case of their selves in the wrong body or their body has the wrong selves? We sometimes hear people talking about John's person in "alcohol came out of John's person" What are we talking about here?

The best explaination for this dual identity between body and self is that the self is the identity of the body, name, personality, age, gender, etc. I agree with the interpretion, but we don't act like it is. We mostly treat this self as the real person and treat the body as part of the self, my body, her body, my face, my mind, etc. \

When we like someone, what we like is what we think about that person or my idea about that person. When I hate someone, what I hate is my idea about that person. And the opposite is true. So, in a way, I am not angry AT her, I am angry NEAR her. He is not angry AT me, he is angry NEAR me.

Our idea of our self is what we have been telling ourselves about our self all our life. There is ongoing conflicts of Self vs Others, individual vs society in our mind that create suffering in life. Self follows the Pleasure principle: pain or pleasure, Society follows the morality principles: right or wrong. There are 4 possibilities: Self - pleasure/Society - right; Self - pleasure/Society - wrong; Self - pain/Society - right; and Self - pain/Society - wrong. We usually don't have problem with the first and the fourth. Our problems/suffering occur in the second and third possibilities, either we do what we like but it's wrong OR we have to do what we don't like but it's right. That's why it is much easier to do the wrong things than to do the right things due to pleasure principles. This is also why people wear mask of Social Desirable Image or the right image. Right and wrong is conception or convention for the benefit of the group. Pleasure and pain is our emotional alarm system for the benefit of the individual. Happiness has nothing to do with both of them.