Mi'sen

14/ Emotion is a good example for people to access these ideas. It sounds a lot, a lot like form/emptiness. I have a reasonable contact with the somatic experience of emotion, but I really struggle to slap a symbol onto that. I can conceptually identify some big ones though.

15/ Eg: Most people think anger is really real...and it is, kind of. What is anger actually? Anger is a fixated symbol of a sensory reality. That sensory experience itself is not ‘anger’.

16/ In fact, some emotional experience goes unnoticed precisely because you don't have a symbol for it. I suspect it's the same for neurotypicals: psychologists call it alexithymia IIRC.

17/ This area of symbol and reality kind of makes sense when we consider it from a meditative point of view - but it gets a bit weirder when you see the same patterns at work in different contexts.

18/ As this is supposed to somehow relate to mediation, I'll close with an experiment for you: when you look at a flower, what is symbol and what is reality? Look at the visual experience, look at the emotional sensations, look look look!

19/ Now, think of someone heart-quakingly inspirational to you, or someone who you have deep gratitude perhaps. What is symbol and what is reality here? How is the person different from the flower?

20/ Last step - take the flower as a symbolic representation of that person. Do the same exercise. It is shocking the degree to which your entire experience is saturated with/as symbol. Imagination is a powerful thing.

21/ I've had someone get viscerally angry at me for talking like this. They dismissed my claims as 'social-contructivist crap' when we ventured into the 'War on Terror' and other symbolically justified horrors of humanity. People like their symbolic reality non-symbolic, thanks.