The 7th Fetter pairs with the 6th Fetter, and it builds on the realizations that have come from questioning fundamental aspects of our reality, such as distance, subject-hood, and an inside and outside to experience.

The 7th Fetter is where we recognize that we are constantly creating things from nothing. The world, and all of its supposed objects that we interact with on a daily basis, do exist in one manner of speaking, all on their own. But they do not exist the way we interpret them with names, functions, judgments about them, memories and stories about their history, or relation to me and my story.

This is how we go from experiencing a constantly changing panorama of shapes, colors, sounds, scents, and other sensations, to experiencing a concrete world where we can place and name every object in it. And this includes those aspects of what we take to be an enduring self, our personality, and our interactions with others. This is the mechanism that lead to believing that the self existed, because a collection of thoughts and physical sensations were continuously being turned from fleeting appearances into a seemingly stable form.

But this process is subtle, and it is easier to see it in action once the individual self is no longer believed in.

Even though we have felt that there is no subject inside of a body with the 6th Fetter, it might still feel like there is something that is not the raw sensations themselves. It can feel like there is still perception happening. It might no longer feel like a “you” who is seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling the world, but it is in the 7th where it becomes completely clear that all senses are self-illuminating. There is no such process as perception in the first place. That too was another assumption based on misunderstood evidence.

Lastly, because again, the 7th is about creating form (something) out of nothing, this is where we start to encounter the malleable, and often arbitrary, nature of our experience of time. Time is not simply the unbroken arrow, moving at a steady rate, and aimed in a single direction that it sometimes feels that it is.

We might have some sense of whether a memory is about an event that happened seconds, hours, months, or decades ago. But as strong as that feeling might be, we have no way of knowing with certainty. The appearance of the memory is always happening right in this one and only present. And your feeling of time passing is often unreliable, and subject to a host of factors that can easily trick and manipulate it to give incorrect estimates of how long it has been since a specific event occurred.

In short, seeing through the 7th Fetter is when you realize that whatever you assume, evaluate, judge and interpret about yourself, about others, about the world, and even about your past, was all nothing more than thought labels upon thought labels.