The ordinary peson (P., puthujjana) does not see the world as a unified whole this being the way it really is. The ordinary person knows the world through their senses; moreover, they are conditioned to see certain things and react to them in certain ways. Such a visible world is a plurality of many different things. Some things are useful for us, some things are not. By no means can we say that this plurality is a unified whole. Through what is it unified so it is one? We have no answers. Our ordinary world of biological fitness has no need of a unified whole. Our needs are simple. I just graduated. I need a job. I want a family. Now I need to find a suitable sex partner.
But however much the ordinary person dismisses a unified world and shows almost no interest in it, in Buddhism it does exist. By intuition, the Buddhist mystic becomes one with this world rather than observing it in its pluralized form wherein takes place biological fitness. For the Buddhist, such a world as the unified world, which is monistic, contains no absolute barriers between things—even down to the smallest particles. What these particles are is through this unified field; not through themselves.
The unified world cannot be comprehended through the pluralized world the ordinary person lives in since such a world only consists of discrete boundaries. It is all a convenient fiction which if we are to realize what is ultimately true, has to be shattered by the Buddhist mystic. The mystic has to see, firsthand, the essence or substance the pluralistic world is composed from.
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