What is primary, the root of everything we know, the only thing we can be sure of, is sensory appearances.
Secondary to this is the interpretation of these as being the view of the world experienced by an individual continuing self.
So there are two possible points of view we can take on experience:
that of “me in the world”, a thing experiencing its environment, physical and mental,
or “there is appearance”.
Everything, even the idea of a self and a world, is primarily appearance. Sight appears, sound appears, physical sensation appears, and thinking appears. Taste and odour appears. Appearing is knowing, direct knowing.
Feeling appears too, we cannot avoid feeling. But sight does not suffer when “unpleasant” sights appear. When we suffer, there is the thought that we are suffering, but the pure thinking itself does not suffer. Similarly with the other ways appearance presents, the appearance itself is not suffering. Suffering is the relationship between a conceived thing or situation and a conceived self which does not want that situation. A self suffers, not a sensory appearance.
concepts are thinking
If we can get back to simple appearance, free of conceptual interpretation, it is obvious that appearance is not still, never fixed. It is never divided either. Thinking makes concepts which divide appearance into fixed objects. Conceptualising creates the notions of a world divisble into things, and of those things being inherently that thing. When we realise that conceptualising is thinking, that realisation undermines belief in the solidity and truth of those concepts.
When we make appearance into concepts there is bound to be a mismatch: we miss seeing the utter unfixity of experience. How fleeting is pure appearance?
Seeing in terms of concepts, we miss appearance’s primary undivided nature, especially the lack of division into a self and its perceived objects. A photograph or a sound recording shows how vision is an undivided picture, sound is all sound.
what is it all?
What is appearance in itself? If a sound is not identified as being its cause, what is sound? If sight is not conceived as a material world, what is the pure experience of sight? Sensations are taken to be a body producing sensations, but primarily they are merely sensations: what is that? Thoughts are a clear demonstration of this unfathomable nature of appearance: what is thinking? What is dreaming?
Is thinking a parade of individual thoughts? Is sight the display of individual objects? How many physical sensations are experienced? Is the world of sounds really a panoply of separate sounds, or is it just a soundscape? We cannot say these senses represent one thing or many things. Can we say that they are even divided into separate senses, or is it all simply “appearance”?
no arising, no beginnings, no endings
Our reality, all we ever know, is so unfixed as to be nothing we can name as the arising of anything; it is so mysterious that we cannot say what it is, and if we divide it into conceptual objects there is suffering. Buddha named these basic distinctions between pure appearance and our conceived world as three laksanas, three marks of seeing in terms of a world which depends upon conditions.
Becoming sure of the inherent qualities of appearance on the one hand, and the results of dependence upon a conditional world on the other, is our path to Awakening from unreality and its consequent suffering.
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Pieces of Five 