The Disease in the Black Box

So-called illness is nothing but the disharmony of the four great elements — the earth, water, fire, and wind elements out of balance — where the organizational structure undergoes changes, causing the fundamental particles of the material body to change, and pathological changes to appear in the five gross sense faculties (floating-dust faculties) such as the body faculty, possibly including pathological changes in the five supreme faculties (indriya), and also possibly pathological changes in the inner object-aspects (nimitta) of the five faculties within the black box. The pathological changes perceived by sentient beings' six consciousnesses are all pathological changes within the black box, never beyond the black box; therefore they are illusory illnesses, false illnesses, not real illnesses. For example, when you feel eye pain, it is not the eyes on the face — the gross sense faculty — that hurt, but rather you feel the pain of the image of the eyes within the black box. What pain or non-pain could an image possibly have? It is all just electrical signals. By the same token, the feeling of muscle pain or bone pain is not the pain of the body as a gross sense faculty; it is all feeling the pain of electrical signals within the black box. What is there to hurt about electrical signals? What is there to hurt about images? It is merely illusion.

Even the feeling of a headache is just a false headache within the black box, composed of electrical current signals — what real pain is there? The head on your shoulders does not hurt at all. The feelings of the six consciousnesses are all unreliable, because they are all awareness of illusory and false appearances, all awareness of the electrical signals within the black box. What is being perceived is nothing but unpredictable, virtual scenarios. Then what reality is there in the feeling that arises after that awareness? What difference is there between feeling and not feeling? No matter what you do toward these conjured false appearances, doing or not doing is both empty. Aware or unaware, feeling or not feeling — the dharmas are inherently thus; it only adds to one's own bondage of birth and death, and apart from that, what else is there?

When one is ill, the five faculties do not hurt, the six sense objects do not hurt — do the six consciousnesses hurt? What is there for the six consciousnesses to hurt about? They have no nature of sense objects. Birth and death is the great illness — everyone is gravely ill and needs treatment.