Have you ever eaten strawberries and wondered whether everybody else experiences the same taste as you do? Or looked at your fine blue blazer and asked yourself if your girlfriend also pictures blue the same way you do? If you have, then you have already been confronted with the puzzling undeniable fact that, as long as we interpret everything consistently, there is no way to know what blue actually looks like. Blue as you perceive it, is a mental illustration of signals sent by the eye to your brain when its light receptors are stimulated by electromagnetic radiation within a determined range of energy. This is nothing more than what a lineage rooted in ancient tantric hindu traditions, retaken by buddhism and recently preached in The Matrix, has been trying to figure out.
The concept itself is quite easy to understand. Our experience is made of nothing more but mental interpretations of electrical activity in our cerebrum induced by a foreign reality of some unknown nature. This is a modern reinterpretation of written texts such as the Abhidharma or the Prajñaparamita, which try to explain the theory of voidness. This doesn´t mean the world does not exist - as in the nihilist meaning of voidness, it only says the world as we see it is not the real world, it is only an illusion built upon a limited perception of reality. What you think to be your hand is not you hand, it is not part of you, it is brain activity. Somewhere, beyond this veil of illusion, in the outer reality, is the real hand, the one we can't access, an impressive agglomerate of cells, molecules, atoms, elementary particles which have nothing to do with what a hand really is. By 'really' I mean what for us is a hand. It's skin-colored, it is connected to our body (hopefully), it has five fingers which can wriggle happily or grasp angrily, it has nails which can elegantly pluck a string or be nervously bitten. A hand is far from being a one-piece concept and you will find that everything is in fact a collection of simpler concepts which may be recursively subdivided in our mind. And all that is in our head. Your friends, your house, your sweetheart, they're all in your head, they are ions being transfered inside a complex neural network. I don't mean to say you're making it all up, that there is nothing there to be perceived and that you're simply nuts; that's nihilism. I'm saying it really is there, it's just not what you consider to be 'it'. Reality is only experienced through perception and interpretation. That may be seen as the veil and the illusion.
Now once you have successfully realised things are so, you start wondering what you might do reagrding such a shocking revelation. And that's when one undertakes the path to enlightenment, the Dharma, the road to absolute freedom from illusion, the ultimate liberation from your own mind. If our mind is providing us with this world we care for and suffer for, thinking it is the real thing and that pain is more than just neurotransmitters (it feels more than neurotransmitters) then let's be free from it, let's tear down the veil of illusion, let's behold percepted phenomena as mere illustrations. These are the teachings you may find in the Abidharma which is the foundation for Hinayana buddhism practised in South-East Asia. Every man, should he whish to cease his suffering permanently (of course, when they say permanently they mean throughout your endless cycle of reincarnations and not just one lifetime), must walk the path to nirvana to be free from all illusion and never suffer again. This is the path Neo walks in The Matrix until he atains nirvana after Trinity kisses him (so would I attain...). He follows a master (Morpheus) and an oracle who lead him to realise all he perceives isn´t there, that his brain is making thin computer code into big 'real' things.
The Prajñaparamita sutras, the corresponding texts for Mahayana and Vajrayana buddhisms practised throughout Asia from Tibet to Japan, take it a little further. A Zen master once said:
Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains,
and waters as waters.
When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point
where I saw that mountains are not mountains,
and waters are not waters.
But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest.
For it's just that I see mountains once again as mountains,
and waters once again as waters.
Hope. Till this very moment, life was like a dream in which sense was mistaken. You knew it was there but it wriggled and squirted like an eel, dark and misterious, eluding your mind's cluch, slipped and crawled out of your feeble logic back to that black pool, unknown. Now, you've found it, it jumped right into your arms like a foolish pet, peirced the cristaline surface of the water that preserved its mystery, and there you held it, divine, shinning in your strong grasp, hand in your hand, the king of all thoughts, now subdued to your master, to your mind, to reason's rules, like an innocent child, the key to the door... out. Victorious, in your head ring the bells of pride, ancient men dance in your imagination upon sacred dirt, calling for the world - '
The savior has found the key!', you, you knows.
You light its flare but it points at nothing. Nothing changes. No key hole. You weave it high on the shadows of this new-found illusion, hoping to tear the veil, to burn it down in glorious vengeful flames the lie that keeps us bound. But they don't move or even faint. The illusion remains. Mad, your power screams in pain, starting to feel its logic rotting from inside, consumed by doubt, growing within like a cancer threatning to shatter down the bridge across the river. And so the beast stirs again, out of its fallen corpse comes a stronger stench, bleached and permanent, and you hit it with your mind, but it rises back up, and you bash it, strike it, hammer it down under your reason's mallet, strirring thin air only to swirl it hard enough so the stench comes closer to your nose, bragging like a clever girl crying out laughter in your beard.
Defeated, the eyes that once saw now watch pointlessly as the walls fall back in, suffocating, driving air into concrete which you breathe, shear illusion filling your lungs like metal, and the flame goes dead under its bricks.
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
What comes next is irrelevant. Because after what comes next, everything is. Your mind with its rightful rules of logics - that pit of divine where all phenomena falls in to become true and real, even yourself, are too that same illusion. Brain signals if you wish to believe what you see, what your mind makes out from it. It doesn't matter what you believe, what you do, if you get out or stay. There is no illusion for there is no one to be illuded. There is no difference between what you see, what you hear and your thoughts, your feelings, the very sense of yourself. Existence is a mind's deal. Accept it or not, it won't leave. You rely on it to be. You are what it is.
Nothing matters anymore. Morality, faith and science are comfortable buildings in which we rest, putting away behind its walls the truth which we dare not check it has left. You come to me, with your frail principles and your common sense, but I am beyond it. Your angered blows are like tasteless kisses on a dry veil separating our mouths. You will never meet me, and I will never meet you, for we both exist.
The Path is over before it started; there is no one to be freed.
The horror.... the Horror.
Heiemo kvad, det song i li.
