As a thinker and philosopher I am often confronted with the gap between my thoughts/theories/beliefs and what appears to me to be a separate reality.
For the record, I’ve accepted that there is no proof and never will be of an external reality, I’m even starting to come to grips with the fact that what I percieve to be ‘me’ may not even exist. But my comfort with these ideas, is just that, comfort with ideas. I still function like the average joe, mingling with reality in speech and action. I mean, I’m writing on this forum aren’t I.
The point is, I think, that I know that these markings on the page (let’s pretend its not an online forum!) are unable to convey what I mean to any satisfactory level, and even if I was completely convinced that these markings did fully reflect what I feel, there is no way that you, ‘the other’, could ever understand it in the way I intended it.
Sure we can chat, but we can’t truely understand each other. Given this, I would postulate that it follows logically, that I also can not understand myself for the very same reason.
So herein lies the rub. I have no way of understanding either myself or the other, I have no proof of the existence of anything, and in the end, what I am now experiencing may in fact just be a butterfly’s dream. So, why does it feel so damn real? why doesn’t the acceptance of various beliefs and theories override the sense that there is a real world out there?
Well there’s a significant difference in communication with yourself, and communication with external persons, namely emotions. You get a lot of feedback thats solely directed at you and that incredibly enriches communication with yourself. I think that’s what the whole sense of “realness” comes down too.
You also know that the human body, like any kingdom that wants to survive, has many natural buffers and safeguards set up against its ruling Monarch and any possible stupidities that His Royal Highness may deign to bless His loyal subjects with.
Is it not equally natural, that the Royal Palace - the mind - would have the most refined (invisible, almost undetectable) safeguards of all?
When the continuity of thought dies, what you experience is the emptiness of the void. Just wanting to be free of self-absorption is insufficient. You are trying to capture and give expression to what you hope is clarity. It is an absurd exercise. What is there is only the movement to capture, nothing else. All the rest is speculation.
If you would think that your conceptions are abstractions of and reactions to your experience, you would think that ‘real’ doesn’t mean ‘logically verifiable’, but something much more urgent.
And that it’s your thoughts on the matter of reality which seem real, but aren’t necessarily so.
