First, let me ask you all a question—don’t worry, it’s not a test:

Is the world you see right now really ‘the world itself’?

I. Your eyes have been ‘tricking’ you from the very beginning

What our eyes receive is, in fact, merely light reflected from objects. The image formed by this beam of light on the retina is inverted—that’s right, upside down. Your brain then automatically flips the image the right way up, adds colour, and thoughtfully fills in the visual blind spots.

Only at this stage do you actually ‘see’ everything.

In other words, what you see is never the world itself, but rather an image rendered on the spot by your brain based on the raw data from the light.

The same goes for your ears. They merely capture vibrations in the air; it is your brain that decodes this jumble of random vibrations into sounds of varying pitches. The nose receives chemical molecules in the air; the brain translates these into scents and odours. The taste buds on the tongue identify chemical compounds; the brain generates the sensations of sour, sweet, bitter and salty.

The most extraordinary of all is the sense of touch. Do you think you’ve ‘touched’ something? What you perceive as soft, hard, cold or hot is, in essence, merely the electromagnetic repulsion between microscopic particles.

We have never truly touched the essence of any material substance.

II. The most deeply concealed ‘boss’ is ‘consciousness’

The first five—sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch—merely passively receive signals; consciousness is the ultimate processor and definer.

It re-interprets everything: distinguishing, judging, associating, labelling, storing memories and fostering likes and dislikes.

Take a gust of wind, for instance: whilst the body merely senses warmth or cold, consciousness judges it to be ‘so pleasant’ or ‘so bleak’. When encountering the same person, the eyes see only their appearance, yet consciousness gives rise to likes, dislikes, nostalgia and prejudice. Faced with the same event, the five senses merely experience it as it is, whilst consciousness constantly superimposes thoughts: imagining scenarios, clinging to notions of right and wrong, and magnifying gains and losses.

The first five sense faculties create tangible illusions; consciousness creates intangible attachments.

The eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind—the six sense faculties—work in concert to take five entirely different physical signals, compiling, embellishing and defining them layer by layer, before finally forcing them to coalesce into a coherent, three-dimensional world, distinct in colour, with notions of good and bad, right and wrong, and filled with love, hate, gain and loss.

We believe we live in an objective world. In reality, we have always lived in a subjective, projected world rendered collectively by the six sense organs.

To put it in modern terms: every person is born wearing a VR headset that cannot be removed; the graphics card is the brain, and the screenwriter is consciousness.

III. What, then, is this ‘objective world’ really?

Let us break it down further.

On a macroscopic level, all things are composed of molecules; molecules break down into atoms; atoms into protons, neutrons and electrons; and if we continue to subdivide to the very limit, we arrive at quarks. Quarks cannot exist independently; they are bound together by the forces of interaction mediated by gluons; gluons, in turn, coalesce with one another and can even form gluon spheres composed purely of ‘fields’.

When you break it down to the very end, you will discover that there is fundamentally no solid, fixed, or eternal entity called ‘matter’.

Tables, chairs, mountains, rivers, and all things are merely a dynamic equilibrium temporarily maintained by energy and fields through the interplay of causes and conditions. They manifest as real in the present moment, yet possess not a shred of inherent nature that is constant, unchanging, or independently existent.

This is the truth expressed in the line ‘Form is emptiness’ from the *Heart Sutra*.

IV. Emptiness is not ‘nothingness’

Many people, upon hearing ‘Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form’, assume it refers to nihilism. It truly does not.

Everything perceived by our six sense faculties—tangible phenomena and intangible thoughts—is collectively termed ‘form’. Yet all of this depends on external conditions, the body’s senses and the interpretation of consciousness to come into being; were any one of these elements missing, the world would instantly collapse. Hence, ‘Form is Emptiness’.

Conversely, it is precisely because all things lack a rigid, fixed essence and have no absolute, unchanging definition that they can flow with causes and conditions and shift with the mind, manifesting in myriad forms and countless circumstances. This is ‘Emptiness is Form’.

Emptiness is not nothingness, but rather the absence of attachment, rigidity, and inherent fixed nature.

It is like water: precisely because it has no fixed shape, it can be ice, mist, waves, or vapour.

V. Suffering is something we create ourselves

Why do people suffer, cling and become deluded?

It is never that there is anything wrong with the world itself; rather, it is that our six sense faculties never cease: the eyes ceaselessly distinguish between beauty and ugliness; the ears ceaselessly distinguish between right and wrong; the body ceaselessly craves comfort; and the mind ceaselessly creates attachments, fixates on what is real or false, and binds the self.

We mistakenly take the projections compiled by the six sense organs as the truth of the world; we mistakenly take the thoughts fabricated by the mind as our true selves.

True awakening is not about overturning the world before our eyes.

Rather, it is about stepping outside the filter of the six sense organs, seeing clearly that all phenomena are projections, and that all forms of attachment are fabrications of the mind. And that ‘awareness’ capable of perceiving all this—unburdened by the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body and mind—is the world’s most primordial and authentic form.

The next time you find yourself swept up in your emotions, pause for a second and remind yourself:

What I am seeing now is merely a projection coloured by the six sense organs; what I am clinging to is merely a narrative conjured by the mind.

The world remains the same. But you, perhaps, can live a little more lightly.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)