Buddha and the Fanta Drinking 8 yo

In his excellent book on meditation and enlightenment using Buddhism as the medium, Why Buddhism is True, Robert Wright says our experience of a thing (in the un-enlightened state) is never of that thing’s essence. Rather:

“The stories we tell about things, and thus the beliefs we have about their history and their nature, shape our experience of them.”

The beaten to death example of this is, yes, wine tasting. Tell someone the bottle of wine is a premium one (“That was a very good year”) v/s just a “table wine”, and most people will say they felt the former tasted far better. Even when both bottles contained the same wine.

This suggests there is a superficiality to our pleasures. Conversely:

“A deeper pleasure would come if we could somehow taste the wine itself, unencumbered by beliefs about it that may or may not be true.”

That, as Wright puts it, is “closer to the Buddhist view of the matter”, since the point being made applies to pretty much everything, not just wine tasting. For pretty much everything we experience or interact with:

“There is always… an implied narrative.”

This, as Wright says, is yet another example of what the Hindus/Buddhists call maya: a delusion not always in the extreme form of hallucinations, or even well-known examples like mirages, but also the far more common unconscious yet partially incorrect view of things, feelings and perceptions.

My 8 yo daughter is very far from the Buddha on this front. If she has Coke/Fanta at home with her pizza, the beverage must be served in a glass (a nicely shaped one at that), never in a steel tumbler. Her experience of the Fanta obviously includes the ambience and this-is-special narrative.

As she gets (a lot) older, she may have the erroneous idea that I had (until I read the book) that throwing away all those surrounding stories would kill, or severely reduce, the pleasure, and hey, what’s the harm in deluding yourself with a harmless Fanta story? Aha, says the author, but that’s not true:

“There is a kind of pleasure that you can derive via your senses that does not constitute emotional involvement of a problematic kind.”

Rodney Smith, one of the many people the author consults, has this to say:

“It’s a much cleaner perception… By getting this thought out of the way, this emotional thought of the way, I have a much higher likelihood of directly perceiving whatever the sensation is.”

One of the veils of maya would have been lifted, and no, it wouldn’t kill the pleasure.

Well, ok, I guess that’s way beyond an 8 yo… Just kidding, that’s far beyond most people to understand, let alone internalize.