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