Reality is that it is there and that it is not me. I look at a teacup. Is it a teacup or is it just my seeing a teacup? If it is a teacup it is real. If it is just my seeing a teacup then it is not real.
This is the typical way of looking at reality. The problem with this is revealed in the mystic traditions. If abstraction is the process of thinking of something that cannot exist without something else, as existing without that something else, then the idea of reality becomes an abstraction. The experienced is not conceivable apart from experiencing of some kind and reality and to the extent that it is conceived of that way, becomes the illusion of worlds behind the scenes. Now this abstraction lies so deep in our ideas that all of us are capable of imagining the universe with no one in it, no one experiencing it. We do that easily and we ascribe the term reality to that abstraction. That is "the universe" and the fact that it is experienced is considered a contingent fact that might have been otherwise. It is just luck that we experience the universe. If evolution had gone the other way then .... Its simple, just imagine the world before people or sentient beings evolved or imagine it after they are gone. We are almost completely unaware of the how our real absence (not just a temporal structure with a point that has us arrive and end - but complete absence) would erode the hypothetical nature of "it". It is easy to see how its color would be undefinable but much harder to see how its spatial material structure, the stuff of set theory and mathematical modeling, would become equally meaningless. Only in the mystical traditions are the notions of reality appreciated and the presenting of already-merging-originally is experienced. The world is correctly experienced as a verb and the meaning of its reality -or perhaps better "reality-ing" becomes clear. Here the notion of reality is seen as being meaningful, as having meaning and therefore is not separate from, nor reducible to, mind. It is meaning- ing itself around us and throughout us. This does not then exclude our temporalizing and spatially abstracting the essent, of recognizing material structures and of understanding the relationship of those structures to our own incarnation, but all of this becomes essential material and is not the One reality at the center. It is just contingent structure. Those states of conscious are hard to come by but their insight is invaluable in comprehending the meaning of reality. While the notion of reality as being that which is "other than thought" has uses the problem with it is that it cannot handle the mystical experience of reality. It is ignorant of the Tao. Consider these two statements: "When we say something is a fantasy, we mean that it isn't a part of the world of our natural senses. It exists soley in the subjective mind." "When we say something is real we seem to be implying that the object is perceived through senses other than pure thought" The first problem is that reality as it is usually meant is not ascribed to something that is seen sensually as opposed to cognitively. For example if I induce the sight of a cow electrically by stimulating the right neurons (or even by projecting light in a realistic way into our eyes, we would usually say that the cow that I experienced is not real even though I saw it. Alternatively we may say that it was a "real experience" but not a "real cow". My "just seeing it" means that it was subjective and therefore not real. So the distinction between mind and senses is not the key. It is the distinction between that which is "purely subjective" and that which is not that is the key. However, the problem is that in reality itself the meaning and being are kind of the same thing. It is the meaning-ing of being and the being of the meaning-ing of being originally as one experience. Otherwise being becomes roughly "that which is not meaning", or at least "that which is not just meaning" - something again other to pure meaning - and becomes something other, something necessarily meaningless. I am sure that I am being clumsy here but the essence of my comment is that a notion of reality that makes distinction between either sensory vs cognitive content or objective vs subjective entities will not work because of its failure to realize the Tao. Being in reality is completely meaningful. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups ""Minds Eye"" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/Minds-Eye?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
