36c | CR Book XI, Chapter 4

As a result, the thing stands out as a mere chip or
fragment, isolated by attention and abstracted by a
name, when we see it whole, surrounding it with its con-
comitants. Its evanescent inanity is shown up when
we call to mind in detail how much it depends on the
co-operation of others as props or supports for its
persistence, as aids to its origin and happening. Thus
the datum "itself" merges with its circumstances to such
an extent that no idea derived from sense perception
could any longer separate the two.

The experience of the original datum is weakened, when
it is seen as an insignificant part of those conditions.
The conviction of its unity cannot stand up to insight
into the manifoldness of conditions, as attention is
dispersed among them. As the original emotional conno-
tations are replaced by others, principally weary dis-
gust, we long less and less for the reality of an own-
being in such things. As the experience advances, it
becomes increasingly difficult to lay one's hands on
those features in the crude original datum which creat-
ed the appearance of an own-being.

Skill in emptying the contents of an object into its
conditions, is not, by itself, however, sufficient to com-
pletely dispel or abolish the illusion. In spite of it
noise continues to emerge as noise, cold as cold, hate as
hate, - although more weakly than before. The conditio-
ned does no longer emerge at all only after its condi-
tions are overcome, and the conditions of that etc, and,
in ultimate analysis, the nidanas themselves.

As long as this meditation makes use of words, a
patch of being designated by a word is replaced by a
network designated by words. As the original word pro-
ved unsatisfactory, so, on principle, each of the new
links. What was seen with regard to the conditioned does
as well apply to the conditions. The dissolution of
the one implies that of the others as well. Beyond ver-
bal illusions, speechless awareness, in a void Ease.
Through the network of conditions, a full emptiness, in
a virtual intention.

In some periods of Buddhist tradition the absence of
own-being in all conditioned things was stated, as a
result more of meditational experience than
of logical deduction, by saying that they (as they) never
emerge from the conditions, that therefore they never