reality
really?
Reading time...
“Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.”
This morning I woke up. And there it was: the stable, well known, familiar, reality of my life: the dark room with the clothes over the chair, my body, the sound of one of our dogs in her bench, wanting to come out. Daylight is peeping from under the blinds. In the distance one of our roosters crows. Time to get up and do my usual routine. This is reality, this is real. But is it?
“What is spacetime? [...] Spacetime is your virtual reality, a headset of your own making. The objects you see are your own invention. You create them with a glance and destroy them with a blink. You have worn this headset all your life. What happens if you take it off?”
In his book the cognitive scientist Donald D. Hoffman asserts that bodies, roosters and light are not objects in space and time. He further argues that time and space themselves are symbolic categories that set up a kind of container similar to the graphic "desktop" of a computer. The things we perceive are then mere "icons" on this desktop.
The propagation of DNA, or "evolution" is the force behind this development. It creates an environment for us that is not in the first place a truthful representation of the outside world, but one that is the most fitting for our survival.
We don't know what is really out there, not even that anything is "out there" at all. All we know originates in the mind/brain. The "outside world" is a projection of images, a mindset, created in the brain, based on "quantum field excitations" (whatever that means) modeled by evolution. Culture then adds another layer by naming and thereby separating 'things' out from the flow of the experiential field of our "4D desktop".
“What we call reality, consists of an elaborate papier-mâché construction of imagination and theory filled in between a few iron posts of observation." We don't according to Wheeler, passively observe a preexisting objective reality, we actively participate in constructing reality by our acts of observation. "Quantum mechanics evidences that there is no such thing as a mere "observer (or register) of reality". The observing equipment, the registering device, "participates in the defining of reality." In this sense the universe does not sit "out there".”
Besides the fact that reality might be a construction set up by evolution, the separate "things" we think we see are the result of naming, something we all learn, from birth on.
“There are no actual separate things, only appearances. The names you have for 'things' are simply useful fictions that arise to help you navigate through the world of appearances. This includes the idea of "you" as well as the idea of a "tree" or whatever appears.
Though we are not gathering "evidence" for nonduality, as that is simply one more concept, as I have often suggested, physics, neuroscience, and postmodernism and other philosophers say this very same thing in the more radical interpretations of these apparent subjects.
All there is, is this world of appearances. Hence "this is it". There is no beyond, outside, inside, or "other" than what appears, and there is no "you" separate from what appears.
As this is the case, ANY CLAIM to knowledge, truth or accurate information about this world of appearances is unobtainable and is simply what is sometimes called a "story". The point is that these concepts themselves — knowledge, truth or ultimate and accurate information — are also appearances.
Thus nonduality ultimately extinguishes even itself. As all that appears can not be "known" and the interpretation of what you call "the world" is seen as similar to the way the human appears to create "color", no human thought about "reality" (including the thought called "reality") can be said to be accurate.”
We cannot escape our mind or brain, standing "outside" of it. And so it is clear we do not know, we cannot know, what's "really real". In fact this is proven by the German mathematician Kurt Gödel, who argued that any formal system will contain propositions that cannot be proven within that system. All systems are incomplete. Gödel of course talked about formal, mathematical logic, but his statement is easily transportable to whatever theory we have about this so called "reality". Languages and knowledge have their built-in limits. Beyond that we can only speculate. So any "ultimate" metaphysics or theology, anything we say about what's really real is nothing more than a belief, not "Truth".
And that includes the statements being said here.
At last:
“It is known that this mentally fabricated worded world is the only world we exist in, that we are the dream, that there is no outside to the dream, as inside and outside, like all this and that is made up. This is it, Coyote. This is it, whatever it looks and feels like.”
