You are in an endless white room with no walls and no ceiling. The lighting is diffuse and uniform. As unadorned as any space can be. There are no particular feelings or natural inclinations that arise here. It’s completely neutral.
In front of you, on the ground, is a cup.
(Before we get into this next bit, I invite you to not scroll past each question or prompt if you want to answer interactively. You can also just read the answers I provided, in grey.
I’m also going to encourage you to take the most obvious, natural perspective here. Don’t go looking for trick questions or otherwise try to see through to the lesson underneath. Humor me and take what I say exactly as it’s presented, even if you think you know where I’m going with it refrain from casting your mind ahead and choose to stay with me.
The magic works better that way.)
If you have trouble with visual imagination, let’s say it is an empty, red, plastic Solo cup standing upright. There is nothing else here besides you and the cup. Pretend you are actually here. It is not imagination.
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Do you see anything in here?
(This is an easy one. Don’t overthink it)
Yeah. There’s a cup.
How do you know?
Because I can see it.
What is seeing and why does that mean there is a cup here?
It’s a way of experiencing stuff in real-time at a distance. I don’t have to touch it to know what something is. I can tell what it is by what it looks like. It looks like a cup.
How do you know what a cup looks like?
I’ve seen them before and now I just know. It’s automatic. It fits the pattern of being a cup, basically.
If something fits the pattern of being a cup, does that make it a cup?
No. I can be tricked or make mistakes. I have other senses to help me be sure. Also, cups are defined by their function (holding liquids for sipping) — not just their appearance alone.
Can you imagine something that has the appearance of a cup and the function of a cup, but is still not a cup?
A shoe with a little handle. It’s not exactly a cup, but you could call it one and use it like one. Close enough.
If we take your last example but give it the label “cup”, does that make more of a cup or less of a cup?
I guess it’s a cup if we all say it is. But also, kinda not. The thing we used to call “cup” would still exist without a name. It’s sort of its own thing regardless of what everyone calls it now.
So what the hell is a cup?
Listen man, I don’t know where you’re going with this anymore.
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A cup has a form. It has general properties. It has a function. It has a name (”cup”). There’s even the idea of a cup (which we’re using right now) that we can reference in conversation, imagination, etc. without an actual cup being present.
But none of these are the cup itself. Eastern philosophy posits there is a cup beneath all that is the true cup. A thing without names, attachments like function, appearance, or ideas we have about cups.
Who cares?
That crap is probably true. Honestly, I just don’t care. You care?
You want to know what I really care about? Here’s what I care about:
There’s a cup here.
How the hell is that possible!?
Like… at all?
Sure, there is some essence of an object besides all the names and ideas we have about it. Obviously the way we feel about cups and how we perceive it changes things. If you’re blind then your experience of cups is totally different.
BUT THERE’S STILL A CUP! HOW!?
You can see it. Touch it. Taste and smell the lemonade inside it, if there were any. You can flick the side of it and hear it. …How?
I think I know the answer and it’s deceptively, almost infuratingly simple.
Because it’s telling you, and you believe it.
Think on that for a moment. Take it literally.
The cup itself is telling you: “I am a cup and I am here. I look like this. My liquids taste like this. I feel and sound like this.”
And you fell for it. You totally bought it. You believe this cup 100%. You’d bet your life on it. That’s how convinced you are.
We didn’t even think to question it. But now that you see it, you begin to realize…
Hey, wait a minute. Everything is telling me what it is, how it is, what it’s doing.
It’s all telling me all the time. The trees. The rocks. The people. My own hands. They’re all screaming at me:
I am real. This is what’s happening. I’m what’s happening. Believe it. Believe it. Believe it.
And that’s what physical reality is — and not much more than that!
It’s a bunch of stuff shouting its identity, properties, and rules at you so loudly, so convincingly that you never even thought to question it.
You, like me, never even realized it was happening. Until now.
What… what do you think would happen if you just stopped believing everything this cup told you?
Would it still exist?
It’s a tough habit to break. You’ve been listening to what cups tell you to do your entire life. Surely there’s an adjustment period where you believe now that the cup is pushing its own existence onto you. Forcing its way into your experience somehow, but you can’t quite unsee it. Can’t quite, at a deeper level, accept that it isn’t actually there.
But what if you could? Somehow let that new truth sink all the way down. Now you know.
If you could do that for cups, for trees, for rocks, for people then you would find that your entire reality is being dictated to you. All the time.
You’d begin to see through the illusion just enough to realize that you are currently little more than the receiver of reality yelling itself at you. Whatever is left is what you’ve been reduced to. What we’ve all been reduced to. The sliver of space for agency that remains once everything else has had its say.
When we go about in the world asking what things are we are actually subtly, but unknowingly allowing everything else to define our experience for us. We’re a kid in the backseat with a plastic steering wheel that believes we’re driving the car. Asking questions is a great way to learn about all the stuff yelling its existence at you. It’s happy to answer. To define itself in greater detail for you.
I’m trying to move beyond asking. Asking implies that I do not have a vision for my own experience. It implies that I want, or need everything else to tell me what’s possible, how it works, what’s real. I am finding that reality opens itself up to direct and unlimited authorship when we stop listening, stop asking, and start telling it instead.
Turns out, we can actually do that.
Let all the things, people, and rules rest as defaults in your reality. Because it is yours. They are lovely placeholders until you come up with something better, something of your own. You don’t have to author everything. That’s exhausting, isolating, and frankly not as much fun. That’s how I’m trying to see the world. Day by day, a little deeper. It’s all just suggestion now.
“This is a cup.”
Says who?
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