Everytime you blink, do you see your nose? But the nose is there.
Below is a part of a discussion happened between Ven. K. Nanananda and Bhikku Yogananda. I think it's relevent to both OP and Imohteps reply.
And then Bhante falls silent, and looks on with a smile.
After a few moments, he asks: “What do you hear?”
There is a bird singing in the distance.
“Did it start singing only now?”
It probably had started earlier (and now that I am listening to the tapes as I transcribe this, I know that it had started manyminutes earlier).
“It must have been singing all this while, but only now…”
I say.
“Only now…?”
“Only now did the attention go there.”
“There you have tajjo samannāhāra! So is it only because
of the sound of the bird that you heard it? Didn’t you hear it only after I stopped talking? There could be other reasons too: had there been louder noises, you may not have heard it. So we see that it is circumstantial. That is why we mentioned in our writings:
everything is circumstantial; nothing is substantial.
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It is because of this nature of the Buddhadhamma that the
later Indian philosophers called it a saṅghātavāda – pluralism, or a theory of aggregates, where the causes are not limited to one or two or none. So my silence paṭicca, the sound of the bird paṭicca, absence of other sounds paṭicca etc. there was the arising of a different ear-consciousness.
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Here I ask a recurring question, probably because I still can’t bring myself to accept the already given answers due to my own materialistic tendencies (of those days): what would one see if one looks at the world ‘objectively*’ – if such a thing were possible? Perhaps this is another way of asking what one sees in the arahattaphala samādhi.
“Suññatā” comes the quick reply.
- Heretic Sage, Chapter 5.
* I am unsure of authors use of the word "objective" here. I think he himself saw that word as problematic.