“Pursue not conditioned existence,
Neither dwell on Emptiness,
But stilling all discriminations,
Duality of it’s own accord will cease“
Thus wrote the 6th century Chinese monk Sengcan.
When we examine our bodily existence we find it as a composite of forms and their functioning.
To objectify ourselves in this way is to see that our subjectivity is dependent on what it is not.
Most of what goes on in our body is not in the purview of what we usually take to be our personal consciousness, or ego self. We might say the ego consciousness emerges from the matrix of bodily composition, but here we should be careful; what is objectified by the ego consciousness as a body, including ‘its’ own body, is a representation and is dependent on that ego consciousness. How so?
To objectify anything presupposes a subjective view. What appears to our ordinary consciousness, or ego consciousness, as our body is a subjective representation of that body; either directly ours, or based on the (also objectifying, and hence subjective) understanding of others. This latter is what science, anatomy and medicine are about. The subject cannot arise out of the objective; they must both appear together. So in looking for the self as the self, or the source of the self, it cannot hope to find it in anything that appears objective to it. It always retreats as the subjective viewpoint.
Even if we say that the subject is an emergent property, it cannot be said to be emergent of anything objective. It depends on conditions, is inseparable from conditions, but those conditions if pursued objectively do not, cannot account for it’s subjectivity. It is entirely dependent on conditions, but as those conditions appear objectively, they are themselves dependent on it.
Even breaking down the body anatomically, or examining the functioning of the senses together with the central nervous system, or in terms of the admittedly fabulous and beneficial advances in neuroscience; these are all objective abstractions from subjective, or collectively subjective, experience.
And further – no body exists apart from it’s entire circumstance. To identify a particular body is to abstract it from is background, which includes the entire rest of the cosmos, now and for its entire prior existence. In the sense that everything is interdependent, so too is everything interpenetrating everything else.
Reality is certainly a unity in that it is the one and only reality. But this one reality, this One is, if we want to put it like that, a One that exists as the immensity of differentiated phenomena, each both entirely unique (when particularised) and yet entirely dependent.
Neither is this grand integration called reality static. It is dynamic and creative. It’s creativity in fact is continued in each and every sentient being. Every person is both a created instantiation and a creating instantiation of this One.
Yet, for all that, for all our discursive thinking, our objective logic, our intellectual functioning, our work in understanding the phenomena of the universe and of life in all its complexity, in every interaction of our days and nights, in our ‘inner’ awareness of our own self and it’s stories about itself and it’s world, insofar as they are bound up with objectifying the world (both external and internal), all are of only practical value – in the sense that they are all tools predicated on the needs and wants of embodied sentiences.
Ultimate questions cannot be answered (or even easily asked) in objective terms. Reality may express itself through our intellects, but they can never grasp Reality. So whether we try to objectify the totality as One, or to break it apart into it’s myriad phenomena, to components and processes, the objectified reality is just that. Dependent on a subject. And the subject is bottomless, ungraspable when it is pursued objectively.
Life is suffering
The self ungraspable
Existence is wonderful,
Reality is sacred.
I think you would enjoy this video. To try to understand reality, it's important to start at how your mind creates your perception of it. Surprisingly little of what's in the outside world is actually in the outside world. Our mind generates anywhere from 20% to 80% of our perceived reality, depending on circumstances. The more familiar the environment or the stimuli, the higher the percentage. Our mind is an active agent in creating reality rather than the passive observer of it that most people perceive it to be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXcH26M7PQM
All of Anil Seth's videos are worth watching. He is at the forefront of neuroscience.