62 Interpretation

62 Interpretation

"All that we experience is subjective.
There is no sensation without interpretation.
We create the world and ourselves;
Only when we stop do we see the truth."

I think of it as veils we are looking through. Whatever we think we are seeing, hearing, sensing is actually a series of alchemical process we are creating. What and how we are processing is constantly being updated based on experience of perceived rewards and punishments. Meditation is a way of cleaning out the hopper, the filtration system. We need to clear out this muck because it is representations of representations soon enough entirely illusory. When we see a thing it is replaced by the nearest known representation in our memory. We are not constantly taking in all this information, that would fry our processing unit, instead our minds reflect the nearest proximation and fills in patterns of all kinds. Our memory is akin to the Telephone game, each representation becomes increasingly simplified. Think of times you run on "autopilot" like driving home or some task you've done a heap of times; in such cases you can become aware that you really aren't seeing what you are looking at just a stripped down base root of it. This phenomena exists with conversations, reactions, interpretation, kind of a zombified sleepwalking.

Brief commentary/review on the book 365 TAO Daily Meditations by Deng Ming Dao.