The average person is completely incapable of experiencing reality directly. This isn't an indictment of them, it's just the fact of the matter. From birth in our society experience of reality is quickly and brutally quelled in favour of abstractions, frames, identities, concepts—ones which are considered irreducible by the same people teaching them. People who are also incapable of experiencing in and of itself. This is what all the talk of ziran and simplicity and uncarved blocks and returning to being wild and unlearning knowledge is about in Daoism. It's not that frames or abstracts are bad, it's not that knowledge is somehow immoral, it's that you have to learn to kill them, to shed them and discard them at will, in favour of experiencing reality directly, and reacting to it with your body's and mind's real fluid intelligence. This is why Laozi says "When the family loses its harmony, filial piety and affection arise." It's not just a dig at Confucians or a call for better days. It's the dialectic between abstract and real. Love dies where the /image/ of love blooms. Content withers and dies, frozen, wherever the form of it takes its place. Reality makes way for illusion. This is why most Buddhists, West and East, are, frankly, so incredibly shallow. From the outside, the /form/ of Buddhism appears to be a sort of rigid science of soothing yourself. A particularly detailed DBT regiment. Braindead corpos and people with hollow wholesome smiles are happy to quell away their uncomfortable emotions, sit and sit and sit for hours a day, exploring their inner worlds. That's fine, great even, certainly better than being a machinic animal chained to suffering. But it's ultimately a shallow path. From inside Buddhism is a series of see-through systems and discardable instructions meant to teach you one thing and one thing only, to be free. The science of the mind is there to guide you into freedom—on its own, it's just data—perhaps useful or beautiful data, but still just data. Mindfulness meditation for hours a day may certainly make you happy, but if it cannot crack you open and shatter your conceptions, if you cannot bring it with you everywhere in life and wield it like a blade, then you're but a small step along the long winding path. Peace and kindness and goodness are all great, enjoy clinging to them, but they're nothing next to truth, and only truth is freedom. This is the upaya of emptiness and no-self, the rhetorical point. Sure, they're both eerily accurate descriptions of the qualia of liberation, but they also betray something important of what Buddhism is as a practice, the process of freeing yourself from everything. When your self is just a paper mask, when your perception is just data, when your pain is just a signal, when everything you are and everything you know is see through like a veil of stained glass, then you are truly free. All that's left underneath it is emptiness, is will, becoming, potential. Liberation from suffering is the best pr, but it's liberation in totality that you find at the end. "It was darkness obscured by darkness A murky ocean without differentiation There was only becoming, concealed by emptiness Borne by the power of fire"