Chap, that is a very sophisticated response. Thank you for taking the time to really engage with what I'm attempting to articulate.
First of all, though, I want to clear something up. It's not exactly the case that what I'm saying concerns "bad" situations. It is true that I gave you that example, because you asked for a practical example, and it seemed like a good example of an everyday situation where a lack of the cognitive habit of realism would be useful.
But it's important to remember what I started with, which is the underlying construction of
duality. "Good" and "bad" are just another dualistic opposition like "subject" and "object" or "existence" and "nonexistence." (Yes this raises separate questions related to ethics, but let's bracket those for now). You are absolutely right to call attention to the fact that it would be inconsistent to ignore "bad" experiences as being unreal while clinging to "good" experiences as being real. But that's not really what I'm saying; you asked for an example, and I gave you one, but it's only a single example and a relatively basic one at that. At a more advanced level, you could say, what causes (or: what creates the conditions for) suffering is exactly the tendency to think that "good" experiences are real/not illusory. In other words, even experiences that we think of as "good" or "pleasurable" create further suffering for ourselves, even while we're experiencing them. (More precisely, the underlying cognitive habit to bifurcate experience means that even as a "good" experience arises, the fact that it is being experienced as "good" and "existent" means that we are still trapped within a dualistic framework and thus are still suffering, even if only at a very subtle level). It's not possible to break the cognitive habit of realism by simply saying to yourself, when something goes wrong, "It's okay, this isn't real," but then really enjoying good experiences and forgetting all about the prior insight when things go your way. That's not how it works!
Chap wrote:How about taking the point of view related to what I believe Buddhists call Pratītyasamutpāda, 'dependent origination'? That is, when confronted with what appears to be an object with the characteristics 'nagging, unreasonable and unloving wife', one follows your line of saying that this is not a 'self-natured' thing, that is, a wife who is in some absolute way nagging, unreasonable and unloving, but is instead something that has arisen as part of a web of cause and effect in which one is oneself both a cause and an effect, as well as the wife? That means that one has the possibility to change the unpleasant object perceived into a different one - perhaps an anxious, stressed-out and scared wife in need of love and reassurance? And of course, since as you would put it the husband is without self-nature, the identity of 'overworked, misunderstood and unloved husband' is not itself an absolute one, and is subject, like all things, to change.
Can you use any of that, do you think?
Yes, absolutely, we can use that!
I think what you've hit on is one of the main points of contention between Great Vehicle or Mahāyāna Buddhism and 'Mainstream' (sometimes called Theravāda) Buddhism. What you've outlined above is classical Mainstream Buddhism, and certainly also works within a Mahāyāna framework
in general. But the Great Vehicle goes above and beyond this framework. From a Mahāyāna perspective, what is dependently-originated is necessarily lacking in self-nature, and there literally could not be any dependent-origination if entities had self-nature. Sometimes it's said that "emptiness is form, form is emptiness." Appearance and the lack of self-nature are two sides of the same coin.
In Mainstream Buddhism, this is basically heretical, since the teaching is that partless particles really exist, really have their own self-nature, and although things like husbands and wives and pots and mountains are only "designated to exist" on top of those particles, those particles themselves are real. From a Mahāyāna perspective, though, those partless particles can't be real, for any number of reasons; some critiques focus on the impossibility of maintaining that they can agglomerate while remaining partless, other critiques focus on the precise mechanics of their causal interaction in a way that is reminiscent of Zeno's Paradox (e.g., at the time of the cause, there is no effect, and at the time of the effect, there is no cause; so how can we speak of a "cause" that is really truly established as a "cause"? It doesn't make any sense).
If you'd like, we can walk through some of those critiques. Obviously, I find them compelling, and not at all contradictory with the insights of contemporary particle physics. The bottom line, though, is that (from a Mahāyāna perspective) the thought that what is dependently-originated--
even if "what is dependently-originated" only refers to partless particles--is real, is a cause for future suffering. Until or unless we break the cognitive habit of realism, we are bound to become attached to "good" experiences and averse to "bad" experiences, with all the negative consequences this entails.