I don’t like honeydew. There, I said it. I don’t like it because its flavor is unpleasant to me. Some people like it a lot, the taste is pleasant to them. If I bit into a piece, my first reaction might be to say, “Ew, this is bad.” So, here I’ve got a box labeled honeydew, and inside of it there’s its unpleasantness and badness. If someone likes honeydew, maybe I judge them or cringe because, since I don’t want to open that box, I don’t them to open it either. It makes sense, right? 

 

By Johnathon Lee

In the Uraga Sutta, Buddha said, “All of this is unreal.” That’s a bold claim. 

This little Sutta points out that objectification is the source of all our problems. When we objectify something, anything, we doom it to impermanence. Then, if we crave it or cling to it, we’re destined to suffer. Objectification puts something into a little box with a lid on it, and then we label the box. Everything in the box is it, and everything outside of it isn’t. 

Buddha is asking us to do something obvious: open the lid. 

I don’t like honeydew. There, I said it. I don’t like it because its flavor is unpleasant to me. Some people like it a lot, the taste is pleasant to them. 

If I bit into a piece, my first reaction might be to say, “Ew, this is bad.” So, here I’ve got a box labeled honeydew, and inside of it there’s its unpleasantness and badness. If someone likes honeydew, maybe I judge them or cringe because, since I don’t want to open that box, I don’t them to open it either. It makes sense, right? 

Really, honeydew isn’t bad. It’s actually healthy. It isn’t unpleasant, it just tastes unpleasant—to me. 

If I opened my honeydew box, I’d see that it’s empty. Now we’re at shunyata, emptiness. 

It goes further. There’s also a box labeled, “Unpleasantness,” and it’s full of bad, aversive, horrible things. We’re humans, so we don’t just experience pleasant and unpleasant sensations, we also experience the unpleasantness of unpleasantness and the pleasantness of pleasantness. We have metacognition. 

This box is where we start to generalize feelings beyond honeydew. This is where our craving, attachment  and aversion really start to set in. Our relationships with pleasant and unpleasant feelings are in these boxes. We crave pleasant feelings because they’re pleasant. We’re averse to unpleasant ones because they’re not. 

Then, through projection, we attach these responses to everything that we’ve objectified, including ourselves. By that route, we suffer endlessly. All because this whole boxed-in system presents an inaccurate view of the way things are. If we’re curious and diligent enough, we can lift this lid too and see that there’s nothing in these boxes either. Unpleasantness isn’t actually unpleasant, pleasantness isn’t pleasant. They’re empty. 

Through meditation and mindfulness, we can start to lift these lids and see the essencelessness and  unobjectifiableness of things. 

When you feel your feelings from a point of spaciousness and stillness, you can watch them come and go without your involvement. You can see how they arise and pass away because of dozens of other things—none of them you. 

This is why these boxes are empty. If you tried to put something in one, it would immediately disappear. 

Once you’ve opened enough boxes, you’ll notice your mind seems expansive, like it’s the space that everything’s happening in. Even this is an illusion. We’ve just made another box called “mind” and we think that the whole universe is in it. 

Beyond this point, there aren’t any words to describe it. What is reality without objectification and projection? 

Nirvana. 

 

Photo: Pixabay

 

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Were you inspired by this? You may also like:

God is Emptiness, Emptiness is God: Thoughts on God Attachment

Panic Room: Creating a Safe Space from Invasive Thoughts

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