What is reality? Who are you?
In Buddhist psychology there are eight levels of consciousness. The Buddhist way of understanding the totality of human experience is based on the fact that the organs of perception (eyes, ears, nose , tongue, body and mind) and the objects of perception (form, sound, smell, taste, touch and thought) give rise to visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile and mental consciousness and thus together create what we call "reality". When you sleep and dream you may go through all of the experiences of reality in that dream. You may dream that you are being chased by someone, and in the dream, you break out into a sweat, you are out of breath, panting - suddenly the shock of the dream will bring you into wakefulness. Then you say, "Whew, that was only a dream; it was only my mind that was doing that." I tell you this is only a dream; this is only "your mind doing that." That is the teaching of the Buddha. What is real? What is reality? What is truth? Who are you?
Each of the six levels of consciousness needs an object of perception. In the case of mind, the object of perception is thought. The thought may be a dream, an idea, an opinion, or something that has been "programmed" into you. When you combine that with consciousness, you have what we call reality. What you believe and what you think is who you are; it is what you manifest. That is why it is necessary to get underneath that program. You practice zazen to make yourself empty, to peel back the layers of conditioning your parents, teachers and culture and to reach that ground of being. Underneath all of those layers is a person - that's what it is to be realized. Once having realized it, we begin manifesting our life out of this realization, not out of the preconditioned ideas that have been fed to us. Every single one of us is conditioned from birth in one way or another, and that conditioning defines our life whether we like it or not. The conditioning is largely arbitrary, yet by the time we reach adulthood, we find ourselves functioning like robots. We don't know who we are, what our life is, or what its direction is. The liberation of the Buddha is to find that ground of being, to experience it intimately, and out of that experience to manifest one's life.
- Mountain Records of Zen Talks by John Daido Loori
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