Realities
Scene One :
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It is dark. you approach an open doorway of a mansion. You are wearing a wrist watch which flashes a pulse of light at fixed rate. I am watching from a distance. As you approach the doorway I see the flashes from your watch slow down and stay on for longer with each pulse. You also seem to move slower than before. At the mouth of the doorway I see your light turn slowly on and permanently stay on as you stand motionless about to enter. But you never do. You stand still at the door. As if frozen.
You see something totally different. The lights on your wrist continues to flash at the same rate and you step through the doorway as you had expected noticing nothing unusual whatsoever.
Which one is really happening? Do you step through the door or not?
From your point of view, your experience of what you see yourself do is the real one, the one that matters. The rest is an illusion that has no real existence.
Your knowledge is the only true knowledge because you know what you are doing.
Scene Two :
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It is a clear moonless October night. You look up at the sky and see the pair of planets Jupiter and Saturn hanging low on the southern horizon against the backdrop of stars.
Right above the tip of the "teapot" in the sky, the constellation of Sagittarius, you see a little cloud-like against the black. A pair of binoculars reveals a circular patch of stars. Messier 22.
But should you believe your eyes?
Saturn is not where you see it. It was there an hour and a half ago and has moved along it’s path like you entered through that door. The top star of the "teapot" looked like that, 77 years ago. The year was 1942. India was under British rule. That little circular cloud above Sagittarius- Messier 22 looked like so some 10,000 years ago.
In northern Mesopotamia, now northern Iraq, cultivation of barley and wheat had just begun. Many of the ice age megafauna had just gone extinct, including last of the sabre-toothed cats.
.......................................................................
If I subscribe to your point of view in scene 1; that you went through the door as the absolute truth; then your point of view in scene 2 is absolutely false.
The you in scene two is like the me in scene one; living under an “illusion”. The others. Who can not see the real thing. Is there a single reality? ...that is really real?
Did you go through the doorway? It was the event horizon of a black hole. The point of no return, where time slows down to a stop for distant observers.
.......................................................................
The universe exists the way it does only to me. The act of experiencing reality is like a science experiment involving your sense organs as probes. Therefore, the only reality you can ever perceive is empirical. This is referred to in modern day as "model-dependent realism" . Reality "out there" necessarily manifests to me via a model in my mind. There is no escaping a model that stands between me and the world "out there".
Every model of reality, whether that of a black hole faring human with its five senses, or a bat using acoustic echolocation, or a snake seeing in infra-red, creates a reality of its own. Each one true in the reference frame of the observer (and there are no preferred reference frames), but never provable to be the ultimate all encompassing truth.
Just like the me and you in the scenes above, if the human, the bat and the snake compared notes, they would realize that each of their own mental models of the world, is a slice of a greater reality, the true extent of which is unknowable. In fact talking about a true extent of reality is meaningless. It is a perpetually moving target. Any model of reality is by definition, a subjective, transient illusion of the whole truth. The ancients referred to the same phenomenon as "Maya".
I, the experiencer (or experiementer), am the only reality I can ever know to truly exist. In a way, I am the cause of my reality as it presents itself to me.
Jogoth mithya, Brohmo shotyo. Said In reverse.
----------------
It is dark. you approach an open doorway of a mansion. You are wearing a wrist watch which flashes a pulse of light at fixed rate. I am watching from a distance. As you approach the doorway I see the flashes from your watch slow down and stay on for longer with each pulse. You also seem to move slower than before. At the mouth of the doorway I see your light turn slowly on and permanently stay on as you stand motionless about to enter. But you never do. You stand still at the door. As if frozen.
You see something totally different. The lights on your wrist continues to flash at the same rate and you step through the doorway as you had expected noticing nothing unusual whatsoever.
Which one is really happening? Do you step through the door or not?
From your point of view, your experience of what you see yourself do is the real one, the one that matters. The rest is an illusion that has no real existence.
Your knowledge is the only true knowledge because you know what you are doing.
Scene Two :
----------------
It is a clear moonless October night. You look up at the sky and see the pair of planets Jupiter and Saturn hanging low on the southern horizon against the backdrop of stars.
Right above the tip of the "teapot" in the sky, the constellation of Sagittarius, you see a little cloud-like against the black. A pair of binoculars reveals a circular patch of stars. Messier 22.
But should you believe your eyes?
Saturn is not where you see it. It was there an hour and a half ago and has moved along it’s path like you entered through that door. The top star of the "teapot" looked like that, 77 years ago. The year was 1942. India was under British rule. That little circular cloud above Sagittarius- Messier 22 looked like so some 10,000 years ago.
In northern Mesopotamia, now northern Iraq, cultivation of barley and wheat had just begun. Many of the ice age megafauna had just gone extinct, including last of the sabre-toothed cats.
.......................................................................
If I subscribe to your point of view in scene 1; that you went through the door as the absolute truth; then your point of view in scene 2 is absolutely false.
The you in scene two is like the me in scene one; living under an “illusion”. The others. Who can not see the real thing. Is there a single reality? ...that is really real?
Did you go through the doorway? It was the event horizon of a black hole. The point of no return, where time slows down to a stop for distant observers.
.......................................................................
The universe exists the way it does only to me. The act of experiencing reality is like a science experiment involving your sense organs as probes. Therefore, the only reality you can ever perceive is empirical. This is referred to in modern day as "model-dependent realism" . Reality "out there" necessarily manifests to me via a model in my mind. There is no escaping a model that stands between me and the world "out there".
Every model of reality, whether that of a black hole faring human with its five senses, or a bat using acoustic echolocation, or a snake seeing in infra-red, creates a reality of its own. Each one true in the reference frame of the observer (and there are no preferred reference frames), but never provable to be the ultimate all encompassing truth.
Just like the me and you in the scenes above, if the human, the bat and the snake compared notes, they would realize that each of their own mental models of the world, is a slice of a greater reality, the true extent of which is unknowable. In fact talking about a true extent of reality is meaningless. It is a perpetually moving target. Any model of reality is by definition, a subjective, transient illusion of the whole truth. The ancients referred to the same phenomenon as "Maya".
I, the experiencer (or experiementer), am the only reality I can ever know to truly exist. In a way, I am the cause of my reality as it presents itself to me.
Jogoth mithya, Brohmo shotyo. Said In reverse.
The first scene acts as mnemonic for Fahrenheit 451, especially the beginning. The dualistic illusion, being an attribute of an individual rather than collective, which to me serves as an extension of individualism.
ReplyDeleteNothing stimulates our appetite for the simple joys of life more than the starvation caused by sadness or desperation. Put light against light - you have nothing. Put dark against dark - you have nothing. It's the contrast of light and dark that each give the other one meaning. The dualism itself becomes a sort of presupposition or datum; it terms the condition that instigates burgeoning evolution.
This is transforms, rather jump cuts to the second scene. Two is a reflection or duplication of one, the most perfect of the natural numbers. Two is all echo and counterpoise; two is the beginning of multiplicity, the way the universal oneness differentiates itself and breaks apart into strings and quarks and photons, all the separate and component pieces of life. Two is a symbol of becoming as opposed to individual being.
Personally, I've been able to relate as a reader to this part. It is scientifically proven that we all live in past , due to the lag of 80 ms that is taken by average human brain to process sensory information; leave alone starlight from distant galaxies observing us from thousands or millions of light years away.
The dualism of feeling and thinking must be resolved to a state of unity in which one thinks with the heart and feels with the brain.
Third part tries to unify these two apparent antithesis. The dialectic dualism which has been the content of discussion for major part of vedanta. On one side we have chandogya upanishad which reflects upon tattvamasi i.e.
tatt-tvam-asi
sa ya eso nimaitadatmyamidang sarvang tatsatyang sa atma tattvamasi svetaketo iti bhuya eva ma bhagavanvijnapayatviti tatha somyeti hovacha
Achrya Shankar philisophy of illusion or the ineffable and inexplicable maya takes sheds another dimension on this philosophy in Brahmajnanavalimala
brahma satyam jaganmithya jivo brahmaiva naparah
anena vedyam sacchastram iti vedantadindimah
I do concur that the very act of experiencing reality is a lot like conducting a scientific experiment that employs ones own sensory organs as exploratory probe . The reality one can perceive is empirical up to a certain point of time, but 'only' and 'ever'? I beg to differ.
As a reader, there was a expectation for the conclusion to be manifested...perhaps a bit more luminouspaint...maybe. But again, that may only be bewildered me.
I've just on curiosity , if I may -
What's the significance of the wrist watch? Does it represent time being the only all knowing truth? If yes, then what is the significance of it flashing?
To end with, the eternal conflict between illusion and reality has been best explained in the Mandukya upanishad. In my humble opinion, this one single verse summaries the whole philosophy of vendanta into one
nantahpragyang na bahishpragyang nobhayatapragyang
na pragyanaghanang na pragya napragyam
adrishtambyaboharyamgrahamlakshyamchintyambyapodeshmekatmpratyaysarang prapachopshmong
santam sivamadwaitang caturthang
manyante sa atma sa bigyeyah
Why am I?