What are the stories and metaphors we use, knowingly or unknowingly, to understand Buddhist practice?
One of the most common metaphors has to do with seeing reality directly. In this view, relying on eyeglasses that, in one way or another, color or distort everything we see, we enter meditation practice to remove these filters and for the first time see things as they are.
In this metaphor, the lenses are faulty by virtue of being conceptual: we distort reality by pigeon-holing it into arbitrary categories, especially dualistic categories of self and other. In addition, we add further overlays of judgment, of likes and dislikes, good and bad. All of this prevents us from actually seeing reality directly, nakedly, free of our self-centered conceptual overlays.
But what if there is no such thing as pure, conceptually unadulterated sense data? What if concepts shape all perception from the very start? We will explore challenges to the metaphor of what Nietzsche called “immaculate perception” from both the Mahayana view of emptiness and the Western philosophical perspective of Wilfred Sellars, who called it “the Myth of the Given.”
