Vividness Without a Viewer

When the witness is not found, experience does not go blank. This is the first thing the reader needs to see, and it is easy to miss. The habit of looking for a witness often comes with a fear that its absence will leave a void: nothing to see, nothing to hear, a dim unfelt world. The looking shows the opposite. The tree is more vivid, not less. The rain sounds more immediate, not more distant.

What changes is not the vividness. What changes is the architecture. Ordinary experience is arranged as a set of subjects and objects: a viewer and a view, a hearer and a sound, a thinker and a thought. Each object is placed at a distance from the one to whom it appears. Remove the viewer, and the distance goes with it. The sound of rain is no longer the sound that reaches someone. It is simply the radiance of hearing, heard as it is. The warmth of the sun is the immediacy of warmth. Nothing stands at the window and receives these appearances, because nothing was ever standing there. The appearances are not less real for it. They are less mediated.

Think of the colour red. A patch of red is seen in ordinary light. Ask what the red is. It is not the wavelength of the light, which is a quantity measured on instruments. It is not the cone cells in the eye, which respond to the light in ways that can be described. It is not the surface, which reflects the light but has no colour of its own in the dark. It is not the attention that picks it out. And yet the red is not apart from any of these. Change the light and the red changes. Change the eye and it changes. Change the attention and what stands out changes with it.

The same gray looks lighter against a dark surround and darker against a bright one. The redness is not in the gray, and not in the surround. It appears in a relation among them. This is what dependence looks like when it is seen directly. The red is dependent on its conditions, and it is vivid in itself. It does not need a viewer behind it to be red. It needs the light, the eye, the surround and the seeing, and once they are present it is complete as the appearance it is.

A reader may reasonably ask whether this dependence is itself a kind of inner fact. Does the red depend on the mind, and is the mind then the ground? That question leads back to the witness, and it will be answered more fully in later chapters. For now the reader should see that the dependence is visible in the appearing. The red does not need an argument to be shown dependent. It shows itself that way in the same moment that it shows itself as red.

What, then, is the vividness? The Dzogchen tradition uses the word luminosity for the clarity of an appearance, and the word can be misread. It sounds as if there were a bright substance behind the display, shining through it the way a lamp shines through a window. Looked at carefully, the clarity is not behind the display. It is the knowing clarity of the display itself. A sound is heard as sound. A cold is felt as cold. The knowing and the known are not two things, and the clarity is what the appearance is when it is not being held at a distance. This identification of appearing with its knowing clarity is the book's reading of the luminosity tradition. Chapter 19 sets out the objection it faces.

This matters because it removes the need for a carrier. Every candidate that might be offered as the bearer of vividness, whether a soul, a stream of consciousness, a neural core or a store of potentials, is itself something that appears. It is seen, named, picked out by criteria. So it is designated like everything else, and it would need a carrier of its own. Luminosity is not that kind of object. It is the clarity by which an appearance is known as it appears. The reliability of the appearance is accounted for by its conditions, and its clarity by its own being clear. Nothing further is needed. A reader who tries to say what the clarity requires beyond these will find that each attempt turns the clarity into a thing, and each thing is again an appearance.

Two consequences follow, and both should be stated plainly. The first is that experience can be vivid and complete without being owned. The second is that experience can end without being taken from anyone. A vivid appearance does not belong to a holder, so nothing is lost when it passes. It passes because its conditions change.

There is one more thing to see before the chapter closes. The vividness of an appearance is not a quality that makes it more real than the dull and the ordinary. A dull grey wall is as vivid as a sunset in the sense that matters here: it appears, it is clear, and it is not found standing apart from its appearing. The difference between them is only a difference in how the mind has been taught to look.

The immediacy this describes has a classical formulation. The Bahiya sutta puts it this way: "In reference to the seen, there will be only the seen. In reference to the heard, only the heard." The phrase is short and easily misread, and it will return in the last part of the book, where it can be read properly. For now it can be held as a pointer. It names the vividness this chapter has described, with no one standing behind it to receive it.

Once the witness has gone and the vividness is left, a question remains that the first chapter could not settle. If the appearance does not rest on a viewer, what does it rest on? The chariot had no chariot-itself beneath the wood. Does the red, and the rain, and the tree, have a ground beneath them that the viewer was only standing in for? The next part of the book takes that question up in the form it most often takes, which is the search for a substrate.

Toward Part II

The witness was looked for and not found. Vividness was looked at and found without a viewer. What remains is the suspicion that appearance must rest on something beneath it. Part II begins with the habit that keeps that suspicion alive, takes it through the logics that produce it, and then through the three candidates most often offered as the ground: the Given, energy, and a store of possibility.