Reference: How to Make Our Ideas Clear
Reality is essentially what is there.
Reality may be distorted by the personal filters (biases, prejudices, fixed ideas, etc.) being used by the observer. But then such filters shall also be part of the reality.
So, the reality is made up of what is observed by the observer, whether it is straight or distorted. But then the observer also should be included in that reality!
The filter separates what is observed from the observer, while modulating the observations.
But when the filter is gone then that which is observed and that which is observing are gone too.
In a sense, the very existence of what is observed, and the observer, depends on the existence of the filter.
Thus, reality is the filter that is observing itself.
The ultimate reality remaining after the filter is gone is something else.
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Comments
Reblogged this on Chris Thompson and commented:
Vinaire had some very good insights regarding seeing reality clearly. I wonder how deeply into reality it may be possible to see and also how that week look.
I reblogged this in case someone might catch it from my blog and miss it from yours.
I wonder if a very direct, very clear look at reality will reveal a more raw version than we are used to, some type of matrix or other mathematical abstraction?
Thanks, but I doubt if it will be popular. It goes too much against the grain.
I showed this essay to my friend Ivan Doskocil today and got an immediate reaction against including the observer as part of reality.
I bet you did! Observer as a component part of what is being observed strikes at the heart of the self-centric view of life – the very heart.
I wonder if this reality-centric view exists anywhere in the Western philosophy. I doubt if it does.
This reality-centric view is the core of Eastern philosophy but many might disagree if they haven’t looked at Eastern philosophy deeply enough. Just think of “neti-neti.”
Haha!
This was the earlier shot at it.
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Reality is the unseen chair you trip over when trying to navigate an unfamiliar room in the dark. The chair didn’t care if it wasn’t being observed. You simply suffer the consequences of an insufficient observation of reality when you trip over it. Filters weren’t involved. Basic physics was. You weren’t actively creating the chair, didn’t create it and the bits in the chair would laugh at you if you said you could create them.
Of course, if you really understood the bits in the chair as the geometric weave of basic space units that they are… well, maybe then you’d get the last laugh.
Hubbard was really full of it when he asserted that thetans create reality, imo.
I don’t think I ever agreed with the idea that thetans create reality as a continuous operation but I see no reason to not suspect that thetans, or the like, created reality. Once this reality was created it required no further attention to keep it created. However, if the universe was built, created, engineered as I suspect it was, then there is also reason to assume that consciousness can modify the basic weave of matter and cause the matter to modify either in composition or connection to other bits of matter.
To put this in perspective, a cellular phone seems pretty magical if you stop to try and figure out how it works. To the average person it might as well be magic as they would never be able to modify it. To a trained engineer the same phone is just a nice compilation of physics, math and engineering.
The trained engineer would know how to modify the phone and would know the limits of modifications that could be performed: he would, for instance, know the cell phone could never be turned into a basketball but he may be able to turn it into a TV remote.
To someone becoming very aware of the capabilities of consciousness, the idea of turning hydrogen into gold may seem ludicrous. Lead into gold may be all but impossible, but learn how to flip one little quark and you can convert a mercury thermometer into a rod of gold.
Nice trick and if you can cash it in within 48.4 minutes(*) an easy way to supplement the retirement funds.
* 48.4 minutes – the half life of the gold isotope before it reverts back to mercury
“I don’t think I ever agreed with the idea that thetans create reality as a continuous operation but I see no reason to not suspect that thetans, or the like, created reality.”
I’m not sure how this point of view helps move our understanding forward to a resolution. But if I stop feeling superior and turn my attention to what is really there and admit that I seem to have some control of the way in which I experience a headache, swinging on a swing, some bad news, some good news, etc., then I’ve begun to get somewhere for myself – personally. And I can help others with this as well, to get some control over how they experience. After that, we seem to be able to get some control over the re-arrangement of our environment, a little bit, even though temporary and impermanent.
I’ve kind of gone blank as to if I can think of another way we affect ourselves or our environment. Rearranging mercury into gold is kind of cool though.
“However, if the universe was built, created, engineered as I suspect it was, then there is also reason to assume that consciousness can modify the basic weave of matter and cause the matter to modify either in composition or connection to other bits of matter.”
If the universe is built, created, and engineered, then is it to much to assume that consciousness is also built, created, engineered? And if I do, does it move my understanding forward in an effective way? How?
I have been thinking that starting from the assumption of “I know what consciousness is,” stops my thinking about consciousness.
“To someone becoming very aware of the capabilities of consciousness, . . . ”
My mind is open, show me.
CT:“To someone becoming very aware of the capabilities of consciousness, . …show me”
Chris, I think you interpreted a reflexive modifier there whereas it was intended as an indeterminate modifier.
Anyone proceeding along this path may see it as a thick book. We’ve just begun reading the prologue. A little early to say we can recite chapter or verse or show anything. However, the physics of changing Hg200 to Au200 is alarmingly simple, as is making a transcontinental cell call – once the equipment is in place.
CT:I have been thinking that starting from the assumption of “I know what consciousness is,” stops my thinking about consciousness.”
It could – if you stop thinking. So just keep on thinking and aligning observation and acquired data. To the degree that it aligns consistently for you, you probably are less likely to trip over a chair. No givens on this path, though. Even a child’s wooden blocks can trip you as easy as a chair would.
Who creates the thetan? That is a very old question.
Would that be an “Unthetaned Thetan”?
My answer to that is getting pretty old, too. Given an infinite timeframe, even a remotely probable event will become probable.
In such a framework, even the remotest possibility of the random emergence of a factor with the possibility of becoming self-aware becomes probable.
It doesn’t take a creator to create a creator.
But when a creator goes to create a universe… “(He) doesn’t play dice.”
Where does that infinite timeframe come from?
I just see random speculation.
V:”Where does that infinite timeframe come from?”
The same void from which you would derive Brahman.
Which is speculation basically. 🙂
Are you saying Brahman isn’t speculation?
Brahma is a speculation too.
All first postulates are speculations by their very nature. Reality has to be consistent with it. If the reality is not consistent with the first postulate then that first postulate is not the right one.
Agreed.
“Reality is the unseen chair you trip over when trying to navigate an unfamiliar room in the dark.”
This is oh so true but it is a different slant on what I am thinking about at the moment. I don’t think that we are responsible for reality, I only think we can become responsibility for our own reality, our own take, our own understanding, our own attitude. I never ever promote adherence to the illusion of control. I think we are so funny running around trying to get control of things over which we influence very little.
CT:” I think we are so funny running around trying to get control of things over which we influence very little.”
But you’d probably think it was exasperating if your dear wife thought it was funny that she had to be in control of the car while driving it.
And i thought it was funny that accidents cause people. Another measure of responsibility to take in our reality.
“Of course, if you really understood the bits in the chair as the geometric weave of basic space units that they are… well, maybe then you’d get the last laugh.”
Alfred Korzybski uses the word abstraction to differentiate between illusion, seeing something falsely or which is not there, and abstraction which is our own personal interpretation of what is really there. By abstraction is meant our filters, something we’re talking quite a bit about. (I don’t care for Korzybski’s hair-splitting about the two words, I care about his noticing that we see what seems to be there and upon closer inspection, there is more to it).
CT:”Korzybski uses the word abstraction to differentiate between illusion, seeing something falsely or which is not there, and abstraction which is our own personal interpretation of what is really there.”
Yes, of course, and our dear friend Mr. Clark also said that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” so I can only add “You just have to look at the color when it comes outa the warsh.” If that’s not sufficiently arcane and elusive then I’ll add “If the weather doesn’t suit you, come back in 10 minutes.”
If you were to go into an Amazonian village that had never seen a big white guy before, they might believe you were a god but they’d never understand a story about how you’d driven down a freeway at 90mph.
Good points.
CT:”(I don’t care for Korzybski’s hair-splitting about the two words, I care about his noticing that we see what seems to be there and upon closer inspection, there is more to it).”
That is pretty much where the last 140 years of physics research has been directing our attention: “there is more to it.” Inspection must never cease.
The funniest thing is, a 140 years of research hasn’t ended our idea that “anything we don’t understand now doesn’t exist.” Sometimes I think a guy would be better off with a rusted tin-can top than Occam’s razor. After all, you’ll always inspect the rusted can top.
“After all, you’ll always inspect the rusted can top.”
Before we drag it firmly across our stubble? Yup. And maybe like a good expectorant, the rusted can top might be more productive?
“The chair didn’t care if it wasn’t being observed. You simply suffer the consequences of an insufficient observation of reality when you trip over it. Filters weren’t involved. Basic physics was.”
A good example of this is your tripping over a chair in the dark. In this example, our abstraction of the room is of darkness without any perception of the chair which is obviously there. I’m not thinking I have anything to do with whether or not the chair is there, I’m wondering why, in a room filled to the brim with EMR, do I not perceive the chair? Of course we have the physiological reasons of our eyes being inadequate, that we have not developed sight of that particular sensitivity nor ears of that sensitivity either. So is that the simple answer? We are not evolved to perceive something which is obviously there and instead abstract darkness? Seriously. How OT is this?
CT:”in a room filled to the brim with EMR, do I not perceive the chair?”
Do you expect an AM radio to pick up FM channels? No, you don’t. Do you expect that you could go into a child’s sandbox and instantly make a 10 ft tall pillar of sand? I doubt it. There be some larnin’ to do. ‘Speshly when yur trying to larn with a head that’s bin used for batting practis.
Here is an earlier essay on this subject.
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God help me but I so love it when 2xmer shows up. No one writes better posts than he does.
God help me but I so love a scab.
There’s nothing we love to scratch more than the itch we hate. 🙂
“God help me but I so love a scab.”
Nope. I just really enjoy your commentary. I’ve learned a great deal from you.
Metaphysically, the only thing that is unseen, and which trips one, is the filter.
Physically, one may trip over a chair when one is not paying enough attention.
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“Reality is the unseen chair you trip over when trying to navigate an unfamiliar room in the dark.”
And the rest is not part of the reality?
The example of the unseen chair is a counterpoint to your assertion that reality is a product of our filtering. The filtering concept is true to the degree that what we perceive through our senses is filtered by the mechanics of the sensory perceptors and the brain/self interpreter.
But to say that “when the filter is gone then that which is observed and that which is observing are gone too” is incorrect for all other observers who are not gone i.e. reality continues for the rest of us even when it appears to end by death for one of us.
Reality is the filter according to the OP and what is observed as well as the observer are part of it. The filter is not gone if observers exist.
Is an observer gone with death? What is death really? These are good questions to be explored..
I think that with each death only part of observer is gone, and with each birth part of observer is added.
” “Reality is the unseen chair you trip over when trying to navigate an unfamiliar room in the dark.”
‘And the rest is not part of the reality?’ ”
I like both these comments.
The idea of “responsibility” comes from a self-centric viewpoint.
From a reality-centric viewpoint, the idea of responsibity gets replaced by a motion propagating through a matrix of cross-indexed considerations. Some of these considerations get condensed into complex nodes. Such a node is usually called a “self”.
Things evolve in nature without the concept of responsibility.
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The idea of “control” may also be explained by a motion propagating through a matrix of cross-indexed considerations.
Physics is the outer layer of hardened considerations.
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Motion gets “absorbed” by this complex node called “self” and spit out again in a processed form.
We try to tinker with this “self” node using the idea of ‘responsibility’ to make it processes the motion differently to some desired pattern. This may work somewhat in a fashion but it is temporary. ‘Responsibilty’ acts like putting pressure on this node. This may compress the node somewhat and alter its output. But when the pressure is taken off the node may spring back like the hysterisis loop of some stress-strain relationship.
To make a permanent change in this node’s ‘sense of responsibility’ the node’s internal structure of considerations would have to be modified.
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Let me comment on Chris’s favorite video here:
Here is the transcript of this video:
Alfred Korzybski demonstrates how the nervous system creates ‘reality’ through the process he called “abstracting.”
“I had made a little fan. It has blades. Now I rotate the blades. And you see a disc, where there is no disc… Don’t call that ‘illusion’. It’s abstraction.
“Some philosophers said, just because of this kind of stuff, ‘the world is an illusion.’ Not a bit! The world is not an illusion. It’s whatever it is, except what we abstract from it. We are sort of a mirror, and we mirror only inside us, in our nervous system, what is going on outside of our nervous system. The correct expression is that we are dealing with abstraction of some order, and to show those abstractions I made this myself.
“You see a disc where there is no disc. This is what it means when I say that objects… an ordinary object, is man-made. You see an apple… you made the apple alright. What exists there is only a process going on. Electro-colloidal, electro-magnetic, process going on… and on. Which lasts for awhile, and we abstract out of it the apple we see. And this applies, remember, to all abstractions… The abstractions do not mean that it means nothing. Except it’s the human mirroring of the process which is going on, if we want it or not.
“Now this is a very, very important point to realize that the world is not an illusion. That the world simply happens to be an abstraction. Out of the process please remember we are interested in humanity. It’s more important for us in our work here to know how we know, even than what we know. Because whatever we “know” on the silent levels, whatever we say something is… well, it isn’t. Because what is going on is unknown at verbal levels.”
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(1) What Korzybski calls abstraction, KHTK calls it a “filtered view”
(2) Korzybski is objecting to calling it an “illusion” because that amounts to dismissing this important phenomenon.
(3) Korzbski calls this process “human mirroring.” KHTK calls it “filtering.”
(4) What is beyond the “filter”, according to Korzybski, cannot be expressed verbally.
KHTK deals with this subject in much more detail here:
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A major part of filters are imagined constructs to explain what one is ignorant about.
I would say that “self” is something real in a relative sense. It can be expressed as a compressed sttrucure of considerations acting as a node in a larger matrix of considerations.
However, the idea of ‘thetan’ is an abstraction or a ‘filtered view’ of self. You see a disc where there is no disc.
The idea that the thetans, or the like, created this reality at some point is just a speculation pulled out of thin air. It probably stands on some people’s subjective feelings. But there is nothing much else there.
Brahma is “neti, neti” meaning “not this, not that.” It is consistant vith void. There is no inconsistency in the postulate of Brahma.
But when “infinite timeframe” is postulated as the starting point, it is not consistent with void at all.
Yes, the void is a timeless, magnitude-less construct.
However it is a construct capable of supporting dimension and dimension with magnitude. The void started off as the perfect zero. At some point it became more than zero. Time is not be determinate in thr duration preceding non-zero, so what shall we call that duration?
I find time and space to be aspect of motion and not independent concepts.
Before the Theory of Relativity, in Newtonian Mechanics, time and space were looked upon as independent and absolute. The Theory of Relativity. changed all that.
So, I can’t accept “infinite timeframe” as the starting postulate.
V:”I find time and space to be aspect of motion and not independent concepts.”
I’m fine with the idea of time as a product of motion. What I was asking you is what shall we call the “before motion” duration? The void, by definition, was. Does Hindu have an interpretable term for the “before”?
That sounds like a question that is inherently contradictory if we take time to be an aspect of motion.
Here are my postulates that are a work in progress:
(Possible revision)
KHTK Postulate M-1A: For there to be awareness there must be disturbance.
The rawest of all awareness has to be the awareness of pure disturbance. Prior to that there would be no awareness. Only a theoretical ground state may be postulated in terms of undisturbed primordial field that contains no frequency, wavelength or period.
But this ground state shall forever be unknowable and shall remain only theoretical because there is no awareness to go with it. Awareness arises only when this ground state is disturbed. The awareness then accompanies a disturbance that seem to be traveling through a primordial field.
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KHTK Postulate M-1B: This disturbance has the outward form of primordial light wave.
This is a very raw level of creation. Soul, self, energy, matter, etc., come later.
While awareness is the essential property of this disturbance, the outward form of the disturbance is not different from some primordial harmonic of the electromagnetic wave. The wave-length of this disturbance is nearly infinite, and the frequency nearly zero. The period and velocity are infinite for all practical purposes.
We instinctively associate light with awareness. Both of them seem to have the same basis. Both seem to be merely two different aspects of the same primordial phenomenon.
Light may fall in the category called ‘physical’. Awareness may fall in the category called metaphysical or ‘spiritual’. It is quite possible that the old assumption that ‘physical’ and ‘spiritual’ are two separate phenomena is in error. More likely the ‘universe’ is a single phenomenon and ‘physical’ and ‘spiritual’ are two different ways of looking at it.
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In this model awareness and “light” start out in a very primitive form, These are aspects of a phenomenon that evolves into a sophisticated universe. It is only in this developed universe that we find ‘spiritual’ self and ‘physical’ objects.
Thus, the intelligence develops along with the universe. There is no intelligence prior to the developed universe.
V:”This disturbance has the outward form of primordial light wave….The wave-length of this disturbance is nearly infinite, and the frequency nearly zero.”
This is pretty much the same thing I’ve been proposing for a few years, except I simply have called it an expansion of space. This basic, primordial space would very likely have an E-M type of character. It could be called light if you are willing to call any E-M wave “light”. This would mean you’d have to call broadcast band radio “light”. I can certainly understand the rationalization but it can have the same problem of confusing many readers as I expect my use of the word “space” has in the same sort of context. We really need to do a Hubbard and come up with a word like “static” to define this space / light concept
As to what causes the disturbance in this space / primordial light, I think the most reasonable explanation is an intersection with another space. A collision of spaces. If there was some initial E-M type of polarization in this light / space then it is quite conceivable that there would have been an absorption or reflection of energies between the light / spaces.
For a mechanical model one could consider two slowly rotating eddies of water. When the boundaries of the eddies meet there will be a disturbance of both eddies along the boundary of interaction. Eventually a portion of that disturbance will make its way back to the center of the eddy.
In the case of the collision of the light / space, this would be sort of event that would awaken nascent awareness.
“As to what causes the disturbance in this space / primordial light…”
In my model, what you are calling space / promordial light, is itself a disturbance.
Let me clarify:
(1) Space and time are aspects of motion. They do not exist in the absence of motion.
(2) If there is no matter in space, and we see no objects moving then that does not mean there is no motion.
(3) Just the presence of space means that there is motion.
(4) Space may appear like a container, but this container itself is made of motion. See #1 above.
(5) What we see as space is actually a propagating disturbance.
(6) The universe already expanded to its extreme limits at DL0 (Disturbance level 0). What seems to be expanding now are much higher disturbance levels (probably DL100 and up).
(7) These higher disturbance levels could be nodes of standing waves in lower disturbance levels.
(8) Much is yet to be sorted out in the Disturbance Theory approach.
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