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EYE CHART
The chart reads (punctuated): "Things are not what they appear to be; nor are they otherwise (Surangama Sutra)." Even if you can read this chart, don't let your eyes, or any of your senses for that matter, trip you into thinking that what you perceive is "what is."
The quote comes from the Buddha, and is found in the text called the Surangama Sutra. As an idea, it's complicated. As an experience, it's exquisitely straightforward.
Everything we process as existence, experience, feelings, etc., occur through the five senses (sight, smell, taste, hearing, touch), and, according to Buddhism, the sixth sense - mind. This means everything we experience first comes filtered through our five senses, which is one-step removed from experiencing something purely and directly. However, that experience alone isn't so erroneous until the mind uses the sensory information to brew up a storyline to that more-or-less direct experience, skewing our sense of how things are and creating our personal version of reality.
To see it another way, when we look at things, thoughts, experiences, etc., and attempt to locate their essence by deconstructing all their parts, we find that it's not possible, or inconclusive at best. This makes everything that we see, experience and feel as solid and real to be basically insubstantial.
But the fact is, no matter how questionable the actual existence of things really are, they still appear the way they do, and we feel them to be truly there. Buddhism refers to this as appearance-emptiness, in which both the ultimate and relative truths of all things - without essence but still appearing to exist - are inseparable, without struggle, non-dual. Things are not one way, nor the other, both, or neither: It just simply is.
