36b | CR Book XI, Chapter 4

next insert its appearance into our property, as a part
of the skandhas. To do this one must take the risk of
inhibiting motor-reactions, volitions and thoughts which
flow in the direction of "this-over-there-doing-this-
to-me". One stresses that aspect of the appearance in
which I could claim it as my own. My self becomes the
new centre of the re-shaped appearance, only to be
dropped again. Then the occurrence can be seen as a
conglomeration of the 5 skandhas; as bodily process
(familiarity with behaviourism should help), as feel-
ings, perceptions, self-willed formative forces and acts
of consciousness.

One more step: One assumes that an occurrence deser-
ves attention only if and insofar as it affects our
karma. One further assumes that our reactions to it
should not concern themselves with those of its feat-
ures which affect our survival, comfort or discom-
fort, danger or security, but with those which make it
into an occasion for liberation from karma. In conse-
quence, the data which analysis of the "appearance" dis-
covers are re-arranged round an (karmically wholesome,
or unwholesome, or neutral) impulse, as the factor of cen-
tral interest, as the basis of the salvational signifi-
cance of the experience.

When we ask for the causes which made a commonsense
thing into what it is, the thing (e.g. a chair) stands out
"as the result, against what made it (II, 4,  ). When we
take it, not as itself (for that means nothing really),
but as something else - e.g. as a sensory appearance, as
a physical process, as that which fills this space the-
re, as defined by this word - the fact can be dissolved
into its conditions. The impression does, however, very of-
ten persist that the conditions elicited are the condi-
tions of that fact, responsible for it, and somehow mee-
ting in this oneness of its own-being. It is when we
patiently learn to see it as a karmically relevant
appearance that the thought of a collection, or set, or
interplay of countless conditions replaces the image
of the commonsense thing, and is regarded as a more ade-
quate approach to what is really there, as obviously
much more real.

Insight into the emptiness of the occurrence grows
as we proceed to conceive it on those 4 levels: First
we perceive A; the A as caused; then A, qua a, b, …, as
conditioned; then as conditions, empty of self-being.