Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
had philosophical teachings in the West that say that's exactly how
things exist, like the Platonic forms, and there have been some
versions of the New Age teachings that say that whatever exists,
like a planet, and the Earth, a person, plan for your life, whatever
it is, exists first in the “causal” level, then in the various mental
levels, and the esoteric level, then finally the physical levels. The
things go from subtle to the gross, but they exist in this subtle way
as pre-existing templates. So that's an example of something that
would exist inherently, like the template. Nothing is helping that
template to exist, the template exists whether I think it does or
not.
So we have teachings that actually promote the notion of inherent
existence. But what the emptiness teachings do is to investigate
whether things exist inherently as we suspect they do and we find
out in every case they don't. And, Trip, you mentioned inherent
existence as opposed to existence, so is there any other kind of
existence? Well, the other existence that the teachings talk about
is conventional existence, or what we used to say in the Army,
"Good enough for Government work” kind of existence, like, I
don't care whether my car keys exist inherently, I just want to use
them to get to the store, that's all they need to do. If they can
provide that function then they're good enough for me, but I'll say
they exist. Good enough. Or like one of my heroes, Richard Rorty,
would say, "You might wonder whether you have a real Rolex, but
have you ever wondered whether your Rolex is real?" Like you
want to know that you don't have a copy or a fake or a Fugazi
Rolex, but let's say you went and bought your Rolex at an
authorised dealer, does it need to be any more real than that? Do
you ever wonder whether it's really, really, really ultra like real
inherently existent? And he was against inherent existence as
well, so people just don't need to care about that. And that's what
the emptiness teachings teach you that you don't need to care
about inherent existence.
And so doing these emptiness meditations, which is basically
another form of investigation, you look for the thing that's
supposed to exist inherently. You look for it, you look for it in
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