One third of our brain's cortex is engaged in vision—that's a lot of brain! Our vision in this regard can't be simple like a camera. In fact, the camera theory of vision is not a good analogy. Vision is really a process of construction. Our visual world is a construction which takes about 1/10th of a second to create. Prior to this, there are no ready-made fixed objects out there, as we imagine, not even the 3D state which we take for granted.
The pizza we are eating right now is a construction—in fact, the world we perceive is such a construction including space and time and all that falls within it. We have not evolved to see reality as it is; instead we see constructed useful illusions. Our human perceptual system (the Five Aggregates) is incapable of seeing true reality according to the Buddha. As a psychophysical construct (the five skandhas) we see only our constructed all-too-human world with which we are deeply entangled and identified.
When it comes to human evolution it has never been other than about fitness instead of seeking enlightenment. What advances we’ve made in technology still revolve around Darwinian fitness. We live, so to speak, still entrapped within the human biological sphere. This sphere can be thought of as samsara.
The escape from this sphere, naturally, demands that we ‘see through it’ so to speak. If we don’t, then we are still living within the world of the human species, only to be reborn in it again and again. But enlightenment is about seeing beyond this human sphere, or the same, seeing through it such that it is seen to be a composition of the One Mind. It has no real existence—it’s an illusion. Unfortunately, this is not were modern Buddhism is or wishes to go. The prithagjana (profane) run the show, not the arya (spiritual persons). Buddhism has been turned into a tool for the Darwinian fitness toolbox; another way to help us cope with our species-specific world which, at bottom, we still enjoy. What the Buddha taught is still too advanced for us.
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