I'll be the first to admit that some of the stuff I write about on this blog isn't very understandable. Partly that's due to my limitations as a writer. Partly it's because of often esoteric subject matter.
Whatever the reason, I sympathized with a comment sant64 left on my previous post, "Why we'll never agree about what is real, and what isn't."
I have no idea what you're trying to say here. "Reality" is far too broad a term.
Well, I disagreed with the notion that reality is far too broad a term. Seems pretty simple to me: reality is what we humans consider to be real, whether that be a personal experience or a collective understanding.
But since my post sort of nibbled around the edges of what I was trying to get at, I took a stab at being more direct in my comment reply.
sant64, as I noted in this post, reality isn't something that is beamed directly into our mind/brain. It is a simulation of one sort or another, because the mind/brain is locked inside the dark confines of our head with no direct connection to the outside world that constitutes our shared reality.
Without our senses -- sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell -- there's no knowledge of the world for us, so no reality.
The Matrix provides an extreme thought experiment along this line. People's bodies are in a warehouse, while powerful computers manufacture reality for them that seems real, except it is a virtual simulation. So this is an example of living in an immersive spatial reality where experienced reality is disconnected from a separate aspect of reality that produces a simulated reality.
That disconnect, as noted in the post, makes it impossible to determine where that separate aspect of reality, in this case a warehouse with stored bodies, exists, or even if it exists. The reason is that reality isn't connected between all of its parts. The creators of the Matrix have the full picture, but the people experiencing the virtual reality don't, because the simulation doesn't contain knowledge of how the simulation is being produced.
Maybe I could have been clearer about this, but I tried to relate Ron's comment about not being attracted to the offerings in metaphysical sections of bookstores, where he said that the "final conclusion" about reality probably is simply our ordinary life -- that which we're experiencing now via our senses.
This is different from how most religions view reality, which supposedly has an extra unperceived dimension akin to the Matrix having a secret: experienced reality is being produced by a un-experienced reality that only a red pill can divulge.
Religions, mystical practices, spiritual paths... they all claim, pretty much, that they possess a red pill that, if taken through a certain discipline, will reveal the hidden truth about reality: God, heaven, spirit, soul, enlightenment, whatever. But they all differ in what the discipline consists of, and what supposedly will be revealed.
So since most people believe in some sort of hidden reality separate from what is perceived by the bodily senses, this creates a situation where humans are assuming different realities that can't be proven to be real, because part of the assumption is that the hidden reality can only be known by those who take the "red pill."
For example, abortion would be much easier to discuss and form policies about if everybody focused on the physical characteristics of an embryo or fetus. When does it have a nervous system that can feel pain? What sorts of congenital abnormalities make it impossible for the unborn child to survive after birth? Among other questions.
But assuming that a soul is part of the embryo at the moment of conception complicates matters. This introduces an unprovable assumption about reality, as does the assumption that God opposes abortion because only He/She can decide whether an embryo grows to maturity and is born alive.
Basically I tried to argue that it would be better if we all agreed that reality is what can be known via the senses (which naturally includes scientific observations that amplify what our senses can perceive), because then we'd just have to deal with the thorny, but more resolvable, problem of how different people "simulate" physical reality through their unique mind/brain.
Hope this further explanation helps to get across my point.
Put even more simply, but echoing what I said above, if the universe truly is one, a single spatial reality where there are connections between everything that exists within it (for example, physics says that quantum fields are present in every corner of the universe), then the sort of disconnectedness posited by the Matrix, or by religions that posit a supernatural realm separate from materiality, isn't an aspect of reality.
I find this inspiring. Also, reassuring.
Because even though it may seem impossible that we can be affected by, or affect, galaxies billions of light years distant from us, or goings-on at the exceedingly miniscule level of the Planck scale, in principle both the extremely large and the extremely small are part of our human reality, because there is no division anywhere in the universe that inescapably walls some of it off.
(Black holes might seem to be an exception, but matter obviously is drawn into black holes, and Stephen Hawking demonstrated mathematically that black holes radiate matter/energy.)
If all this is still too abstract, or irrelevant, for you, here's an easier-to-read essay by Joan Tollifson that popped into my email inbox recently. I really like both her message and her style. One of her paragraphs is right in line with what I've been trying to say in my previous two posts.
For me, the most liberating realization has been that nothing can be other than how it is, that everything is one undivided and indivisible whole that can never be grasped, pinned down or pulled apart, and that each of us is a unique and unrepeatable movement of the whole.
I'll share her essay as a continuation to this post.
The Freedom to Be As You Are
No Way to Get It Wrong
As I've shared before, my mother said more than once in the last year that she was alive, "It's so freeing to realize that nothing really matters." My mother was a very big-hearted woman who loved animals, visited sick friends and relatives even in her nineties in the dead of winter in Chicago, and cared deeply about the injustices and suffering in the world. She did not say this nihilistically or cynically. She said it with relief as if an immense burden had dropped.
At Peter Brown's final zoom before he died, the zoom where he said goodbye, he reiterated very emphatically what he’d said many times before: “It doesn't matter what you do. It does not matter what you do!”
That sounds outrageous because, of course, in everyday life, things do seem to matter—whether we’re rich or poor, healthy or ill, whether we’re a child sex trafficker or someone rescuing animals and planting gardens—these things matter in terms of both what our our own experience will be and how we will affect others and the world. Being hideously tortured in a dungeon is undeniably a very different experience from drinking margaritas in the garden with the love of your life. So what on earth did Peter mean by this? What did my mother mean?
I’d say it’s about not taking our conceptual maps and narratives seriously and not mistaking them for the living actuality. Thought automatically and choicelessly divides unbroken wholeness into imaginary categories like subject and object, inside and outside, cause and effect, here and there, good and bad, enlightened and deluded, success and failure. We imagine a fractured world in which one thing causes another thing, but all the “things” are imaginary. They only exist conceptually.
Thought poses as “me,” the thinker of my thoughts, the maker of my choices, and then takes what happens personally (“my” mistakes, “my” successes). We judge ourselves and others, often very harshly, and think that we and everyone else and the world could and should be different from how we are. This is all very painful.
But while reality is infinitely varied and ever-changing in appearance, it is seamless and inseparable, and it never departs from here and now. And while experiences can have many different textures and flavors, the common factor in every different experience is the sheer presence of it. Peter often calls it the radiance.
Different experiences are like different waves in a singular ocean. You can’t extract a wave from the ocean. All the waves are a movement of the whole. No wave can go off in “the wrong” direction, and no human can either. You can’t have the light without the dark. The light turns into the dark and the dark turns into the light. In some unfathomable way, everything is included. It all goes together. It might be compared to a dream in which every part is equally nothing other than the dreaming consciousness.
Furthermore, we don’t get to decide our fate or the fate of the world or the universe. By fate, I simply mean what happens in THIS ever-present, bottomless moment Here-Now. This moment cannot be other than exactly how it is, and we’re not something separate from or other than this instantaneous presence that is as it is.
Our individual lack of control can certainly seem like bad news, and most humans cling to the illusion of personal free will. It’s a powerful illusion, and we certainly seem to make choices. But when we look very carefully, we find no “me” at the helm. Our next thought, our next urge, our next desire, our next experience, our next emotion, our next carefully considered move, our next action all emerge unbidden. Thought, posing as “me,” takes credit or blame before or after the fact.
When this lack of control is deeply realized, it puts an end to guilt and blame and the endless suffering that comes from judging what is and trying to fix ourselves and save the world. We may still be moved to go into a recovery program, see a therapist or demonstrate for social justice—but it will be clear that this action emerges unbidden and that the results of it are not in our hands.
For me, the most liberating realization has been that nothing can be other than how it is, that everything is one undivided and indivisible whole that can never be grasped, pinned down or pulled apart, and that each of us is a unique and unrepeatable movement of the whole.
We might fear that realizing that we have no control and that it doesn’t matter what we do would free us all up to be serial killers. It can sound like a very dangerous and threatening idea, as if the social order would completely collapse if this were widely realized. It flies in the face of everything we’ve been told all our lives.
But actually, there’s no way we can be a serial killer unless that is our fate. Most of us couldn’t be serial killers even if we tried. We really can’t do anything other than exactly what life moves us to do in each moment. If that were widely realized, it would eliminate a great deal of the violence and conflict that comes from the opposite assumptions, the violence of blame and revenge, the self-hatred that consumes so many humans, the guilt and regret, the self-righteous certainty about how everything ‘should’ be. This realization would give us compassion for ourselves and everyone else. It would free us to be at peace with being exactly as we are in each moment.
That doesn’t mean we couldn’t recognize so-called mistakes and be moved to correct them, but such actions would happen in a much different way, without the guilt, blame and regret, without taking any of it personally as “my” mistake, without imagining it all means something about “me,” such as, “I’m a good for nothing failure” or “I’m so much better than all of you,” or any of that. All of that would disappear. What a relief!
And, of course, we can also say that EVERYTHING matters! Everything is the Holy Reality, the divine expression, the unfathomable what is. For Zen teacher and psychoanalyst Barry Magid, Zen is not about detaching from life, purifying oneself, or being some kind of unchanging awareness impervious to the vulnerability and messiness of life. He speaks of Zen as “moment to moment reverence and awe, and the kind of attention that treats ordinary things as extraordinary and worthy of that kind of attention.” Instead of trying to fix ourselves or transcend our humanity, Barry invites us to be just as we are in this moment, finding the absolute in the relative, the wholeness in the particular, and the perfection in the seemingly imperfect.
These are the kinds of pointings that have been deeply liberating for me, and this is the essential message that I endeavor to convey in my own work.
I often quote others whose work resonates with me because sometimes we can hear something from one person that we can’t hear from someone else because each one puts it slightly differently. I also quote others because I see us as something akin to jazz musicians playing together, each a unique voice creating one whole song. And it’s good to remember that it’s all a playful dance, and not some deadly serious endeavor as we so often imagine it to be.
When singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen went to India to meet Ramesh Balsekar, Ramesh apparently said to Leonard: "The whole business [of seeking] is taken far too seriously. That is the ridiculous thing about it. There’s nothing serious about it, because there’s no seeker! And who is serious about it? — the seeker!" Or as Ramesh said elsewhere, “Who cares?” That caretaker is a phantom, which is why Karl Renz often spoken of liberation as care-less-ness and seemed to treat the whole spiritual endeavor as a huge joke. It’s another way of saying, nothing matters.
There’s truly nowhere to go and nothing to get. THIS really is all there is. We hear this and don’t believe it. But even that disbelief is just another meaningless waving of the ocean. Truly, nothing is lacking and nothing different or better needs to happen.
>> For me, the most liberating realization has been that
[1] nothing can be other than how it is, that everything is one undivided and indivisible whole that can never be grasped, pinned down or pulled apart,
and that
[2] each of us is a unique and unrepeatable movement of the whole.<<
{1] The crow is born as a crow, will live as a crow and come to its end as a crow.
[2] Whatever exists, is just an unique variation of the same
[3] Sameness is all there is, it just is.
[4] Sameness can only be KNOWN in its unique variation.
[5] That variation can be material, astral causal or spiritual
[6] Knowing is no union, ... hahahaha .....like coffee is no water
Language is funny sometimes.
Posted by: um | June 18, 2024 at 06:26 AM
"Put even more simply, but echoing what I said above, if the universe truly is one, a single spatial reality where there are connections between everything that exists within it (for example, physics says that quantum fields are present in every corner of the universe), then the sort of disconnectedness posited by the Matrix, or by religions that posit a supernatural realm separate from materiality, isn't an aspect of reality."
Again, I don't follow what you're saying. Or rather, I follow it, but you seem to be offering presuppositions and making a circular argument. If the universe is one, that neither affirms or negates the possibility that said universe was created by an intelligent designer, or that our consciousness is somehow of the same stuff as that cosmic designer, or any number of other "spiritual" propositions. That the laws of physics exist only proves that the laws of physics exist.
Moreover, I don't get your use of The Matrix movie as an analogy of separateness. The film suggests just the opposite: that what individuals perceive as reality is interconnected with a deeper, underlying truth. The Matrix itself is a constructed reality that is connected to and influenced by the real world. This duality implies that there is a deeper level of unity beyond the apparent separation of the virtual and real worlds. Also, the idea that all humans are connected to the Matrix through their consciousness hints at a form of collective consciousness. This could be seen as a metaphor for the idea that all beings share a fundamental unity at the level of consciousness, a theme present in various religious and philosophical traditions, such as Advaita Vedanta in Hinduism and the concept of the One in Neoplatonism.
As Pascal wrote, "I would wish a hundred times that if a God sustains nature it would reveal Him without ambiguity." This from one of the most eloquent defenders of religion, ever. Pascal was torn between ardent faith and doubt. I would argue, so are we all. At this point in humanity's journey, we don't have a theory of everything that explains and defines "reality."
Posted by: sant64 | June 18, 2024 at 02:52 PM