Contemplate all phenomena as devoid of inherent nature.

The same is true of their arising and cessation.

False  designations are merely used to describe them.

All phenomena do not come into being; all phenomena do not cease to exist.

If we understand in this way, all the Buddhas appear before us.

Avatamsaka Sutra

i. What does this mean to me?

If we were to “contemplate all phenomena” as having no “inherent nature”, what would that look like? We can start with the most basic of teachings about phenomena: all phenomena are internal mental representations. What does this mean? It pretty much means you can’t fit an elephant inside your head. It’s too big, right?

But yet, most people know what an elephant looks like. Why?  Because we’ve seen many, many elephants on television, in movies and in online media. Disney even has a flying elephant. At some point in our past, we saw an elephant or someone identified an image for us, and we labeled that phenomenon as ‘elephant’. This is why we don’t need to fit an elephant inside our head. All phenomena are internal mental representations from our past.

Have you had the experience of seeing something you’ve never seen before? Immediately, your mind will say something like, “That looks like…” and the mind will ‘flip through’ thousands of internal mental representations from our past, looking for the closest match.

If we stop to think about it, do any of the internal mental representations have an existence from their own side? Or, as the scripture puts it, can an internal mental representation have an “inherent nature”? It couldn’t, right, otherwise we’d all have thousands of things rattling around inside our head.

No. That’s not how things work. Instead the moment we turn our attention to something else, the previous internal mental representation is simply no longer there, replaced by a new thought, a new idea, a new phenomenon.

If, as the scripture suggests, we contemplate “all phenomena as devoid of inherent nature”, our reality becomes much more malleable. That doesn’t mean that we can imagine things into being. But it does mean we become aware that there must be an ultimate reality. Our internal mental representations do not describe ultimate truth, they reference ultimate truth.

ii. How would I explain this to someone else?

I would ask if they’d ever seen a magic show. As an adult, I find magic shows fascinating. It’s one of the few times we are aware that we’re experiencing two realities at the same time. There’s the ‘magic’ of a woman being sawed in half, and there’s the reality of a contortionist in just one side of the box completely unharmed.

None of us in the audience cringe in horror at the sight of a human being sawed in half. There’s no blood, no gore, nothing like that. Why not? Because it’s ‘magic’, an illusion.

Our experience of the world is the same way. There’s a reality that we ‘see’ , but like a magician’s trick it masks an underlying reality. If we contemplate our experience, realizing that all “phenomena are devoid of inherent nature”, then what we consider ‘reality’ becomes much less fixed and we realize that ‘reality’ arises wherever we focus the mind.

iii. How do I bring this into my life?

Ever have one of those days where reality feels like it weighs you down? Those days when you feel the weight of the world on your shoulders? This happens to me mostly at work. Some days it can feel like a Twilight Zone episode where one day takes a year to go by. I find that on these days reality seems particularly dense and unyielding.

When this happens I take a few slow deep breaths. This helps me to experience reality as less dense. I take a few moments to realize that reality has no meaning from its own side, no “inherent nature”. This doesn’t magically make my day better. Outwardly nothing has changed. The emails are still there, the phone still rings, and my teammates still message me.

But the point is that there doesn’t need to be any change in external circumstances. What changes is how I internally experience reality. I can zoom out from the emails and everything else.

This makes a slow but steady change in my life. The more often I do this practice, the less I feel caught up in samsara. We all have the capacity to do this. Why? Because all that we experience is an internal mental representation that has no “inherent nature”. The more we can realize this, the less caught up we’ll feel in samsara. Like any magic show, we are always free to disregard the trick and contemplate the underlying reality.