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.
