I wrote this because I was getting upset at people referring to certain sensual experiences as illusions…
The sentence “Reality is an Illusion” means completely nothing.
Truth is and can only be experience. You cannot have a “false experience” — If you experience it, it is the truth. If we are talking about a heat haze for example, what you experienced wasn’t an illusion, because all the conditions for you to experience that existed in reality so for you to see it makes complete sense. If all that we are experiencing is the fabrication of the matrix, what we are experiencing is still reality, it’s just the reality of our brains being connected to a machine and being fed information. That’s what we are experiencing, and it is still true regardless of whether we know it’s being done in that manner or not. Dreams are an experience. Are they also “true”? While we experience them, yes. There is little difference between the reality of experiencing while awake and experiencing while asleep. The differences are that the former lasts much longer and has chronological consistency. When we compare what we experience when we dream with what we experience when we sleep, there is no consistent “story” in the lifespan of dreaming. We “awake” from dreaming but we don’t “awake” from being awake into dreaming because it’s not a parallel consistency, it’s usually a new and unique experience. When we awake, we easily reassure ourselves that the experience we just had wasn’t true. It’s not actually the case the the experience wasn’t “real”, it’s just that it isn’t apart of our waking life’s consistency, of it’s story, of it’s chronology. That is the nature of what it means for something to be “true.” If it is persistent, then it is true. If I throw a ball in the air a hundred times and it descends a hundred times, then it is true that it will do it again (inasmuch as the word “true” has meaning). Truth is thereby just a matter of probability. If the probability of something occurring has been %100 thus far over the course of many many trials, it is deemed “true.” Truths are events with a history of %100 probability that have yet to be disrupted.
yes, perhaps it is presumptuous of me , but i can only assume that you are responding to my thread - in which case, i don’t necessarily disagree with anything you’ve said - i think you are just misinterpreting me . . .
Is it what you see? Is it what most see? Is it what humans see, not animals and insects, nor aliens (if they exist)?
The truth is that grass has no color, the color it appears to us depends solely on us (mostly on how our eyes and brains work).
There are no universal absolute truths in a relative existence.
Re your example… if there would be magnetic floor and magnetic ball, the ball you’d throw up may as well not fall down in the first drop - it might even go higher from the height you’d throw it. To not mention if ball would be made of anti-matter, or if there would be dark energy involved. Silly examples, but possible.
Just wanted to point out nothing is absolutely sure in relative existance such as ours. And again, truth is personsl (in many cases we can agree upon it, but not always).
I agree though, that personal experience is best teacher and best guide to Truth, all else is belief (which too has its value).
They made a tremendous structure out of that philosophical thought. They talked of the void. They talked of emptiness. The whole Buddhist philosophy is built on the foundation of that ‘no mind’. Yet they have created tremendous techniques of freeing themselves from the mind. All the Zen techniques of meditation try to free you from the mind. The very instrument that we are using to free ourselves from the thing called ‘mind’ is the mind. Mind is nothing other than what you are doing to free yourself from the mind. But when it once dawns on you, by some strange chance or miracle, that the instrument that you are using to understand everything is not the instrument, and that there is no other instrument, it hits you like a jolt of lightning.
Your tendency is to fill the void by asking the question, ‘could I be right?’ The question is also part of the attempt of thought to continue itself.
In fact we already know the answers to a lot of questions inasmuch as we only accept those answers which suit our predilections and reject the others. But these answers cannot, and in fact no answers can satisfy us. If they did, thought would have to rest in the answer, but that would destroy the process of thought because then it cannot seek an answer any more in its attempt to perpetuate itself. In other words, thought does not want any answer to put an end to itself. If any answer really satisfies the question, it must end the question. But if the question is the thinker, then with the end of the question the questioner must end, and that is the last the thing we want. Do we really want an answer to our questions?
We hope that by doing something, by trying to give up thinking or whatever, we can make some “dawning” happen. But unfortunately we cannot do anything to make this “dawning” happen either. You have to accept the fact that this life of thought, so-called unfreedom, may be all there is, and there may be, as far as you are concerned, no other life. This again gives us hope, and we start our “travel” again: What can we do to accept this life as it is? To ask that question is to want to change what is, and not accept what we in fact are. Obviously we missed the point again. Why do we, in spite of guarantees to the contrary, keep trying to change the given? Or, Why do we think we can use something to get to a “better” state?
Couldn’t it be said that all the knowledge we have acquired from various outside sources is independent of the body?
Is the mind part of you or separate from you?
Is the memory stored in the brain what you physically are?
How much of the physical and how much of the things of the mind constitute what you are? Both?
Why has it been claimed that the body cannot survive without the mind? Isn’t the mind independent of the body? What is there in it that without it the body cannot survive?
From what I’ve read on the brain, the neural processes for waking experience and dream and imaginative experience are the same, meaning that the brain essentially makes no distinction between them. I find that very interesting. I’m not really sure why that is, but it does give new nuance to the word “reality” in my view.
That would have to be true in a limited sense at first, but then that would be contingent on holding the view that the mind is contained within the brain. However, I would expect serious, consistent meditation to put paid to that notion as it has done for so many. That fantastic jolt of lightning would then transform into another kind of illumination, I think.
