What we think, is wrong?
A Gnostic vision of reality
What do we do when we think; essentially we break things up into pieces and make a knowledgeable composition concerning how those things arrange themselves. it’s a bit like cooking, we break things down to their ingredients [math is probably the ultimate example of this] then put them together as we think they should go to make a dish.
This is fine as to describing the main part of existence, of the thing-ness, though I have noticed that we often already know the answer we were seeking to understand cognitively. In asking a question there is always - if I may, the implied answer with which we formulated or otherwise understood what the question means in the first place [otherwise we would have no idea what the question means].
To arrive at knowledge about a thing we have to bring the already ‘known’ truths about that thing into the cognitive process, such that ‘we know it’. seems pointless, yet we are ever building and increasing our database by such processes, and as I say this is adequate for understanding reality on a ‘blocky’ level. We arrive at a load of bits ‘n’ pieces with which we form our ideas about the world and what’s in it.
So is that the truth, can we ever know the truth via such methods of thinking? I’d say no.
We cannot understand reality by thinking the way we do;
We can say what objects ‘are’ but cannot denote that there are absolute objects, or what they truly are. We can say what informations ‘are’ in terms of its relationship to objects or ideas, but we cannot say what info in and of itself is.
We can say how relationships form communications between objects and informations [or object/object, info/info], but we cannot say what communications or relationships ‘are‘.
What we have to do to understand reality is not deconstruct it, or fulfil the process of that so as to reach a place where our questioning demands a greater sophistication. By that I don’t meant that we have to know everything, but just enough about our chosen field that we can stand back and view it all as a whole. The informations, objects and processes of our thoughts can be taken in and at once known.
In simplistic terms we may visualise this as a box full of objects, then once we know all the contents we may consider them as an entirety. Let us now say that the box is existence, god and all the things we think we may know about reality, does that describe reality? No. we still have a bunch of things which ultimately don’t describe themselves, a box which holds all the contents but cannot ever compose the whole. Generally we have in our minds eye a reality map that’s left wanting, and it doesn’t matter how much stuff we add.
Reality cannot be the same as existence, our thought processes cannot compose it, though naturally thought can reach it in some way otherwise I wouldn’t be able to understand this position ~ even though I cannot do it cognitively. In much the same way existence can only conceive itself conceptually, you cannot have a physical infinity or whatever, hence there can only be information concerning the conceptualisation of existence as set against an idea* of reality [hence it* is informational].
A way to visualise this further is that; ‘existence realises itself as compared to reality, and in doing so becomes’, and that is itself a false realisation.
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Conclusion; everything that is real about you now, is its own reality. Everything you know about you is no more than an idea about that and hence is not what is real about you. Same applies to things.
The reality about someone else or some given thing once ‘known’ [in this Gnostic sense], supersedes all facts [knowledge] about that person or thing.
Life/death; what is real cannot be anything other than that, an idea or an existence is not that reality.
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