But there has been inspiration. There have been things lurking in the depths of my psyche that seemed to need saying, but then one would have to find words. Finding words means more than just finding words. It means using words as a bridge to cross the g and perception, so that someone else might approximately see through my eyes.
Ok, here goes. When I wrote two posts on types of reality, I was planning to solve major unsolved questions which are bugging the world in this 21st century. Perhaps they are not recognized as unsolved questions. They are seen as incompatible disagreements, wherein my being right in my impeccable rightness necessarily means that someone else (millions of people) are wrong in their misguidedness—or at worst are evil to the bone for failing to recognize my rightness, so that they shall go to hell, whether or not I help send them there first.
These disagreements have a common form. “This is how it is.” “No, this is how it is.” I am proposing that the big issues of the world boil down to disagreements as to the content of reality. Many people say that these issues boil down to morality: that it is necessary to temper our selfishness and consider the welfare of others: other humans, other species, the whole finely balanced Earth (if not the Universe in which it hangs suspended). Morality is too big a challenge for me. There are millions who have answers to it but I don’t.
Where I wanted to go, in turning inspiration to words, I can now try to summarise as possible. (I couldn’t have done this before.)
1) There is an objective reality. This is fully established in our modern understanding, which is not distracted by Aboriginal Dreamtime, African pantheism, any pantheon of squabbling gods, or even one centralized Almighty Father who rules the whole lot in his highly mysterious way (with the right to lay miracles on us when he feels like it).
2) These distractions from objective reality we are fully justified in calling unreality, along with pulp fiction, dreams, frauds, lies, hallucinations and the like.
3) Nevertheless our perception of objective reality is subjective. When I first sat on a cushion and took LSD, I noticed things crawling on the carpet. They were actually bits of stationary fluff. My eyes were working properly and sent electrical messages to my brain as normal. But the chemicals in my brain must have inhibited the operation that steadies the picture I see when my eyeballs jump about, and created the illusion of crawling.
4) Human perception of reality is affected in so many millions of ways, apart from taking drugs, that it can never be possible to say “I am now seeing unaffected reality, reality as it is.” I am seeing what my humanness allows me to see.
5) People have experiences of Heaven and Hell on this earth. My friend Raymond Sigrist has published a book In Love with Everything subtitled apophatic mysticism, the benefits and dangers of love without reason.
6) I would like to call “being in love with everything” a form of magical reality. You might call it illusion, especially as someone who’s in love with everything is more likely to get hit by a truck crossing the road than someone who’s suspicious of everything.
7) I believe that having false beliefs, such as “Jesus died on the cross to wash away my sins”, doesn’t prevent the believer benefiting from a magical reality that may help his path through life.
8) I am not interested in any false beliefs, but I embrace the way people are and the way that they want to be.
9) I have a normal sense of self, aware of my limitations (geographical, psychological, mortal etc) but in magical moments I know that I am part of everything and that the separation is illusion. It’s not being in love with everything but it might be growing in that direction.
10) I want to occupy a conceptual framework, or dwell in a word-web, if that makes any sense, which acknowledges a wider reality than one rooted in the 21st century and watered by the ongoing zeitgeist.
11) Getting to that wider verbal space may or may not be possible via philosophy.
This, dear Bryan, is the nearest I can get in an impromptu hour or so to setting out my stall, my plan, if you will.
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ReplyDelete"The Possible Phoenix", huh? You crack me up.
ReplyDeleteOddly enough, I don't see anything here that I have an substantial disagreement with.
I do have some thoughts, though:
3.) I had some strange experience with LSD myself. Your rug example reminds me of a time when I was in my friend's room, and he had this picture of a tiger on the wall; the kind of thing where the head and the body and the eyes are turned at opposing angles to each other so that it looks like the picture is "following you." You've seen that sort of thing, I'm sure. At any rate, I kept staring at the picture imagining that the tiger was going to lean out and look both ways, and after a while it seemed like I really saw it do that, but at the same time I saw that it didn't move. It was like one image super-imposed over the other.
And that in turn reminds me of when I was a kid and I used to stare at the doorway to my room, or the doorway of my closet and try to imagine the worst thing that could appear from around the corner, and I felt like if I stared long enough and imagined hard enough, somehow the thing would manifest itself.
4.) I'm very interested in this idea of what our perception brings to the the table of experience. I think science is able to some degree to overcome the limitations of our immediate perceptions and explain how they work, like the the Doppler Effect and the shimmering air that we talked about before. But I admit that there are limitations to this, since even science obviously relies on some element of perception. But they do occasionally find ways of "getting around" our senses, so to speak.
ReplyDeleteTake radio waves. We can't see them, but science has found a way to detect them. On the other hand, we fall into the habit of talking about "visible light", and we tend to forget that we mean visible to us. We like to think that there is this thin, privileged band of the electro-magnetic spectrum that the universe dresses up in and appears on the stage of existence, and that radio waves and x-rays and so on are like stagehands working the props behind the scenes. But this is all in our eyes. "Visible" light is no more visible than radio waves outside of our eyes. But yet, the very fact that we can discuss these things shows that the limitations can be transcended to some degree, although it's difficult for our imagination to grasp. For instance, there's an app on my iPad that can show the night sky in "X-Ray" spectrum, or "Infrared" and although it gives us a chance to "see" these things, at the same time it reinforces the illusion that we're actually seeing what these bands look like. We're not. We're only seeing a representation in visible light. It moves the problem back one degree, perhaps, but it does also help to bring more things into the domain of our experience.
As fascinating at these things are, my real interest, however, is how our emotions bring our perception of the world to life. This was part of our communication breakdown before. When you mentioned an emotional element to our perception, I took this to mean the old "rose-colored glasses" cliche', or the idea of people believing what they want to believe and seeing what they want to see. But you're talking about...say, beauty being in the eye of the beholder...in a more literal sense than the coiner of the saying perhaps intended. I would speculate that all this ties into the fact that we naturally, irresistibly see the world in terms of its value to us. It's like the "cold, inhospitable" cosmos beyond our planet. It's "cold"...for us. It's "inhospitable"...for us.
6.) This "being in love with everything" or "magical reality" as you call it, ties in ,I think with my other monk, who as you rightly pointed out, doesn't have to be a literal monk. Yes, I was thinking more a...type. Some people would call such a person a "dreamer", but that's never sounded quite right to me and plus the term has been almost completely devalued. If such a person is "dreaming" of anything, it's of the world before their eyes (although they bring plenty of imagination to bear on it.) They have that poetic quality of vision. They hear the music changing with the passing seasons. (naturally, all this refers us strongly back to point #4.)
ReplyDeleteI'm so glad we're on a track where we can talk on these things, and that they are of interest to us both.
ReplyDeleteToday I went on a walk, it was actually an errand in support of some DIY efforts, but enough things happened to be woven into another magical reality post: one that will go on Wayfarer's Notes and complement the above, but in different style; and explore some things further.
To me it's a topic which grows and grows.
As for the "other monk" I was fascinated with him at the time and later felt i had betrayed him by choosing that very moment to back off.
I shall astonish you, or try to do so, in the very breadth I assign to that category of "other monk". It may be a foolish belief, but I think everyone is a part-time other monk. Or possibly a full-time one. I don't believe in judging. (I can't help judging but I don't believe in judging.)
"... everyone is a part-time other monk."
ReplyDeleteI like that. I'd like to believe that about people as well (at the very least, in varying degrees, and in certain moments.)
9.)There's another side to this as well. When I take a nap before work, I tend to set the alarm early, and this gives me the chance to hit the snooze bar a couple of times before I wake up. My wife has put the clock over on the dresser to purposely force me out of bed to get to the clock, thus causing me to gradually become more awake. It works out fairly well, actually, but there's one thing that bothers me. There is a large mirror mounted on the back of the dresser. I try to avoid catching a glimpse of myself in this mirror, but sometimes I can't help it. Every time I see myself in this mirror, I'm struck with a sudden stabbing sense of my own mortality. Not even a thought, just like a cold shudder. There's just something about seeing myself, half-asleep in the dark like that. It's like seeing myself as a thing in the world. There's that guy, stumbling over to the alarm clock, and it's me! It hits me with such a disturbing force.
ReplyDeleteSo, this Zen "oneness" with everything can be very sublime and beatific, but there are moments when it can be terrifying as well.
10.) This one I'm still a little hazy on. I get what you're saying...to a certain extent...maybe (I had to look up "Zeitgeist"), but I'm not sure how one would go about this, or exactly what the confines or limitations of it are. Perhaps you mean somehow getting beyond looking at history from a strictly retrospective stand-point, evaluating everything with 21st century hindsight. But I'm sure there's more to it than this. Possibly also, not looking at our contemporary conception of the world as the final word on existence (which, of course, it isn't, but this more rough territory for the imagination to see beyond.)
ReplyDelete(Perhaps my comment on #9 would be the opposite of that "oneness." More like alienation from everything. Still, it would be the other side of the same basic coin, so it could still be relevant.)
ReplyDeleteYes, I think that view of yourself in the mirror and feeling the stab of mortality is precisely the opposite of that oneness. If it wasn't for that mortality, it would be possible to feel the oneness all the time.
ReplyDeleteIf we didn't die, living on planet earth would feel like a team thing. We would be members of the crew. We'd keep it shipshape, not pollute it with our garbage, learn to get along with one another because we're together forever.
I think I introduced a red herring by talking about being in love with everything as somehow connected with what I meant by magical reality, & connecting that with your idea of the other monk, as if we are talking about some enlightened state of consciousness without the religious belief underpinning it. That is certainly a topic well worth pursuing.
ReplyDeleteBut I want to present a different idea about "magic reality", if necessary finding a different name for it.
So are you saying that our conflicts, suspicions, and disconnections from one another are largely rooted in our mortality? You may be on to something there. Take war. Not only would the actual practice of war between immortal beings be rendered completely pointless, but most of the practical and ideological reasons for war would be rendered pointless as well.
ReplyDeleteDo you have any idea, though, why this thing happens with the mirror? Have you had any similar experiences?
The two points you raise here, mortality and your self-glimpse-in-mirror, jolted my brain to see a common source: self-image.
ReplyDeleteFirst, let’s see how it plays out in the feeling of our own mortality:
I think that each of us has to try and construct a self-image that we can live with. Strangely, it precedes physical survival as the No. 1 priority in a certain class of person. (When it doesn’t, we say that the person “has no shame”.) When self-image is so damaged that we feel it cannot be repaired, we commit suicide. We can do this two ways. a) literally, by destroying the body; b) metaphorically, by destroying the part of us that feels the pain. Hence the popularity of drink, drugs, compulsive gambling, dangerous lifestyle etc – which have the additional merit (to a person thus afflicted) of being risky to life.
Since we each have the burden of an acceptable self-image as a kind of private god to whom we must make sacrifice as necessary until it is assuaged, we may find ourselves impelled to i) lie to ourselves and others and/or ii) perform irrational acts - things which go contrary to our own comfort and survival, which are normally primary motivations.
So there are two kinds of person: α) the one who says “death before dishonour”; β) the person who has no shame. This was well known in the days when men challenged one another to a duel.
Second, let’s try and see what happens when you glimpse yourself in the mirror in the circumstance you described:
I imagine that it’s like suddenly surprising an intruder your own bedroom. In dreams you may have regressed to an earlier stage in your life, so when you wake, unknown to your conscious mind, you are expecting to see a younger Bryan, whose face is different.
One of the things we have to do every time we awaken is to reacquaint ourselves with the reality we temporary relinquished in sleep. This takes a little time. By placing the snooze button out of reach, your wife compels you to get up before this reacquaintance process is complete. The dreaming Bryan suddenly sees the waking Bryan.