The world of duality is beginning to emerge, but not quite, for the third aspect of presentational immediacy -- and this also applies to causal efficacy itself -- is its infallibility: "Direct experience is infallible. What you have experienced, you have experienced." [76] There is no distinction here of true and deluded or illusory perception, [77] there is simply perception as an ultimate fact, for error arises only in the mixed mode of perception, symbolic reference.

　　 Symbolic reference is the normal perceptual experience of human beings. In it the mode of presentational immediacy, which in itself is little more than a "barren esthetic display," is now reassociated with perception as causal efficacy. The result is the transformation of bare immediacy into a world of meaning, containing emotions, motivations, evaluations, language, art -- as consciousness is now free to refer one component of experience to another. Thus the images of presented immediacy are used to link the "heritage from the past," the objective sources of the concrescing actual occasion, to the possible future as the occasion in turn becomes objectivity for a new occasion. Experience via symbolic reference can be delusive, for "feeling associates regions in the presented locus with inheritances from the past, which in fact have not been thus transmitted into the present regions." [78] This capacity for error is at times unfortunate in its consequences but is, from Whitehead's perspective, the

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source of evolutionary progress in that it testifies to a growing imaginative freedom. [79] Consciousness makes its gains by its gradually attained freedom from immediate perception, which it is now more and more able to manipulate and modify.

　　 From another -- Buddhist -- angle, symbolic reference is precisely the source of the problem of suffering, for now the consciously dichotomized world has fully emerged. Let us consider Candrakiirti's analysis of the genesis of suffering. [80] The starting point is "[conceptual] apprehension of an object" (vastuna upalambha), that is, an object per se and detached from its subject as well as from "other" objects. This results in "[verbal-conceptual] proliferation" (prapa~nca) which proliferates the whole "net of fabrication" (kalpanaajaala), which consists of endless discriminations (vikalpa): knowing and known, speech and speaker, actor and act, man and woman, success and failure, happiness and misery, fame and infamy, praise and blame, etc. Based upon these discriminations is the ego (aha^mmama iti) whose addiction (abhinive`sa) they are. This addiction forms the dependency (upaadaana) which is the cause of suffering. Dependency is traditionally analyzed as consisting of: (1) objects of desire (kaama), (2) ethico-religious vows (`siilavrata), (3) views (d.r.s.ti), and (4) assertion of an [essential] self (aatmavaada). These together constitute the ongoing source of suffering in human experience, and it can be alleviated radically only by dissolving the basis for dependency or addiction, namely, the discriminations growing out of conceptual apprehension.

　　 Such apprehension is from Whitehead's point of view the basis of symbolic reference and as such is a manifestation of the creative advance of consciousness, albeit an advance marred by repeated disaster. For Candrakiirti and, apparently, Naagaarjuna, it is the repeated disaster which receives all of the attention.

　　 According to Whitehead, the danger inherent in the emergence of symbolic reference is that it has the tendency to degenerate into mere reflex action: normal human perception via symbolic reference turns to some degree from the conscious linking of presented immediacy with causal efficacy to a semiconscious, reactive linking of the two. The actual effective meaning of what is symbolically perceived is eliminated:

Sometimes there does intervene some effective reference to the meaning of the symbol. But this meaning is not recalled with the particularity and definiteness which would yield any rational enlightenment as to the specific action required to secure the final end. The meaning is vague but insistent. Its insistence plays the part of hypnotizing the individual to complete the specific action associated with the symbol. [81]

Thus when a car horn sounds, my symbolically referred perception projects upon the bare, presented auditory sense-data my entire causal heritage as it concresces into this actual experience and on toward the future. The spatially localized sound symbolizes its meaning for me, in other words, and I get out of the way. On the other hand reflex action results when I perceive the same sound

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as symbol but bypass its actual meaning, that is, the total prehension which constitutes my experience at that moment, and instead I refer it to a stereotyped pattern within my causal heritage. The result is a reflex response which may be "out of touch" with actuality: the car horn, blocks away, triggers in me an overwhelming fear and I spill my coffee on the cat. The determining factor here may lie in a childhood trauma involving a bad experience with a horn, but the present result is that my experience is dominated by a disproportionate ingression of the old pattern into novel conscious occasions.