“It occurred to me that perhaps I’ve never truly perceived a rūpa objectively in my entire life.”
This might be a good time to bring up some of my thoughts for scrutiny.
It’s my belief / view that anything conditioned, relating to this world or “the all” (5 aggregates, 6 elements, 12 sense bases) is all based on subjectively while nibbana is the only objective reality. So it’s not only you that never truly perceived a rupa objectively in your life, the same holds true for all of us livings that have come into being in our conditioned world.
Before I asked myself if my belief or view is correct regarding that there’s no objectively reality in this world and used the Buddha dhamma as an example to evaluate if my thinking is correct since the dhamma is said to be timeless and one of the only things I can think of that might have a chance to be objective. My thinking is that if the Buddha dhamma is objective, it should mean that anyone that come across the Buddha dhamma should attain nibbana or at least should have the same interpretation and understanding of the teachings. But based on my observation this is not the case, so it makes me think that the Buddha dhamma is still based on subjective reality. If the Buddha dhamma is subjective, than I can’t think of anything else in this conditioned world that would be objective besides nibbana.
So my thinking is that this conventional reality = subjective while nibbana = objective reality.
