You see a rainbow over the field.
It is unmistakably there. You can point at it. You can take a photograph. Other people standing near you see it. A child runs toward it.
There is nothing imaginary about a rainbow.
Now walk toward it.
The rainbow moves.
Not because it is shy. Because you are changing the angle at which the light enters your eye, and the rainbow is exactly that angle made visible.
The rainbow is not standing in the field waiting for you.
The rainbow is standing wherever you are standing, made of where you are standing.
Try to find the place where the rainbow is.
There is no place.
The rainbow is not at a coordinate. It is not three hundred meters away. It is not over the oak tree. The colors are happening in the air between the sun, the water droplets, and your eye, and they happen freshly for every person who looks.
The person next to you is seeing a different rainbow, by a few degrees.
And yet the rainbow is real.
The light is real. The water is real. The arc you see is being seen.
If you said the rainbow was imaginary, you would be lying.
If you said the rainbow was a solid object you could touch, you would also be lying.
The rainbow is doing something most things do.
Most things hide it better.
You have a name.
You have been told your name since before you could remember being told it.
Your name feels like it points at something solid. A core. An essence that has carried you from childhood to this morning.
Find that core.
Look for it the way you would walk toward a rainbow.
The thoughts you are having now are not the thoughts you were having last year. The body you are sitting in has replaced most of its cells since the last time you used your name on a form. The opinions you would defend to the death today are not the opinions you would have defended ten years ago.
What is the thing your name is pointing at.
The closer you look, the more it moves.
You can find experiences. You can find sensations. You can find a stream of moments that have a kind of family resemblance.
You cannot find a thing standing in the field, waiting for you to arrive at it.
The Tibetan teachers had a word for this kind of appearance.
They said phenomena are like a rainbow. Vivid, undeniable, available to the senses, and not made of any substance you can isolate.
Longchenpa, writing in the fourteenth century, said:
Since everything is but an apparition, having nothing to do with good or bad, acceptance or rejection, one may well burst out in laughter.
The laughter is the point.
It is not the laughter of finding out things are fake. The rainbow is not fake.
It is the laughter of finding out that the realness you had been demanding was the wrong kind of realness.
You wanted things to be solid like stones.
They are real like rainbows.
This is not a downgrade.
A stone sits in one place and resists you. A rainbow appears wherever the conditions for it meet, and it appears as itself, fully, every time.
The rainbow is not less real for being unfindable.
The rainbow is more real, in some sense, because it cannot be reduced to a substance and stored.
Your love for the person you love is a rainbow.
Not a substance in your chest that exists when they are away. A thing that happens when the conditions arise. The thinking of them, the seeing of them, the remembering, the missing.
Every time it appears it is fully there. Between appearances, there is no warehouse where the love is kept.
You used to be terrified of this.
The thought that love was not stored somewhere felt like the threat of loss. If it was not solid, it could vanish. If it was not a thing, it could not be counted on.
But notice. The love appears every time.
The conditions arise and it arises. You have never had to manufacture it. You have never had to retrieve it from a vault.
It arrives, freshly, like a rainbow, every time the light hits the water.
The same is true of you.
There is no warehouse where your self is being stored between moments. There is no vault containing the essential you, waiting to be retrieved.
When the conditions arise, you arise. Hearing happens. Seeing happens. Thinking happens. The sense of being someone happens.
Then the conditions shift and another arising happens, recognizably continuous with the last but not made of the same substance.
You are not less for being like this.
You are exactly as real as a rainbow.
The mind reads this and panics.
It says, but if I am not solid, what holds me together?
The same thing that holds the rainbow together. The conditions. The light, the water, the eye, the angle. Nothing is holding the rainbow together. The rainbow is what holding-together looks like when the conditions cohere.
You have been trying to be a stone in a world made of light.
The stone strategy was always going to exhaust you. Stones require defending. Stones can be chipped, eroded, broken. A stone's job is to resist the conditions that surround it.
The rainbow does not resist anything. The rainbow is the conditions, expressed.
This is what the Heart Sutra means when it says form is emptiness.
It does not mean the rainbow is fake.
It means the rainbow is not made of what you thought it was made of, and the discovery of what it is actually made of is not a loss.
The colors are still there.
The arc is still there.
The child is still running toward it, and the running is also a rainbow, made of legs and breath and the conditions of being a child on a summer afternoon.
Walk through your day today and notice what is rainbow-like.
Your mood. Your name. The face of the person you live with, which is not the same face it was when you met them but is unmistakably the same face. The street you grew up on, which has been renumbered and resurfaced and is still the street you grew up on.
The realness was never in the substance.
The realness was in the arising.
You are arising right now.
Sources: The Heart Sutra, ~350 CE. Longchenpa, Dzogchen writings, Tibet, 14th century.