Day 30 of 365: Perceiver and Perceived

The one who experiences perceptions does not exist
Before, during, or after the experiences of seeing and so forth.
Knowing this, all thoughts of an experiencer of perceptions either existing or not existing are reversed.

Perceptions can be a continuous experience of self-validation.  However, the Middle Way tells us this does not have to be the case and that both the perceptions and the perceiver are appearance-emptiness.  Can the seer of the text on this screen exist before the text itself?  No, because then that person would always see text  independent of the text itself.  What about the seer existing after the experience of seeing?  That doesn't make sense either because then the seer would be seeing text after the experience.  If they independently arose at the same time, there would be no connection between them which is not the case.  The only possible scenario is that the seer and text that is seen arise in mutual dependence.  Thus, neither can have an independent existence.

Could the experiencer who is seeing this moment be the same as the experiencer who is hearing the next moment?  The logics would say no, because the hearer does not exist in the moment of seeing.  What is the commonality that we take as the self?  Some vague sense of consciousness?  Can we differentiate consciousness from the experiences themselves?  It's an interesting experiment.