I feel a little timid about trying to answer this because at this point, I know that people can talk about these things intellectually forever and it just won’t… click. It’s so hard to write about too because if I tried to write in a way that very perfectly reflects my experience, the text becomes weird and cumbersome ( and then when I don’t, people try some gotchas like “ahaa but you refer yourself as “I”, doesn’t that mean you still believe in an individual self”, no but writing more precisely gets in the way of the message ).

First, believing whatever I want to believe is definitely a danger and actually you see this a lot in spiritual discourse that leans towards Buddhism, especially via New Age stuff and “McMindfulness”. Many people happily discard the mainstream beliefs but then they get hooked on their idea of what is true. But the merciless approach that Zen Buddhism has is that nothing you think about is totally true. It’s more like a reflection in a mirror ( Interestingly Plato was also alluding to this in his Allegory of The Cave, so this realization isn’t unique to Zen ).

That includes the concept of “objectivity”. Objectivity relies on the idea that there is some external third party to human experience. But once I looked, or more like was forced to face it, I realized that there is no such thing. I can exchange ideas with what appear to be other people and have an agreement. Like we can probably both agree that we’re looking at a screen now. I anticipate an objection here on the “other people”. I don’t know if “other people” exist outside of me but I know that I don’t have control over anything that appears in my mind. Something that I can call “other people” appears, and they have their likes and dislikes and it can be painful if I’m not respectful of that. This is where compassion teachings come in.

Oh and I’m not anti-science at all. Science is great at revealing patterns in the way things appear. Happy to go get my vaccinations and all that.