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In my previous post, I commented that it is impossible to climb out of your consciousness. You don't know what you don't know, and what you know is in your consciousness. I would qualify this statement that there could be things in your subconsciousness that you cannot directly access but are still within your consciousness. Anything you interact with in the outside world exists only as an interpretation of the information received through your senses; whatever you know and assume is out there in the physical world exists only as information in your mind.
This is a significant shift in thinking and will require you to really break some old paradigms and see the reality of what I am saying. Let me share an example to make this point more palatable. Different creatures have different sense mechanisms, so it is not necessary for them to see the world as we see it. Take, for example, bats in a dark cave. How do they receive inputs to their sensory system and the brain? It happens through sound signals which radiate out and bounce back from obstacles, the walls or thier fellow creatures, etc. Do we know how these signals are interpreted in a bat's brain? How do they experience their reality? It is impossible to understand their experiences. Maybe they see beautiful mountains and ridges in the cave and variations between fellow companions in a very different way than we could ever imagine. If we take a bat outside the cave on a warm sunny morning in an open field, it may see darkness where we experience brightness and such beautiful scenery! The same experience would be reversed if we followed the bat to the cave.
Our experience of the outer world is more linked to our sense structure and, more importantly, our interpretation mechanism. Send two people to the same place, and they could come up with a completely different description depending on their focus, interests, likes, and dislikes. Everything is information, and our interpretation of the same. The question is whether there is any objective reality independent of our sense and interpretation mechanism. Second, if our sense structure design and our subjective interpretation mechanism are such a huge determinant of what we call 'objective reality', then whose interpretation or experience is more valid and 'real' – Our’s or the bat’s? The bat would be equally convinced of its physical reality as we are.
The truth is that we are all dealing with information in our consciousness. The layman's term for that is memory. We talk about being in the moment. Actually, it is impossible to ever be in the moment. We get information from the environment, which takes time to move through our senses and reach our brain for interpretation, and then we experience things. All this takes time, and as a result, we experience information that is a few milliseconds old. All our experiencing things at the moment is actually experience of memory or information with a lag. Further, as discussed before, all this information and its interpretation is extremely subjective. So, in reality, we are all living in a subjective bubble of memory that we can never escape. Of course, we believe our subjective bubble reality is the true reality, and possibly others are getting it wrong...
How myopic can we get?!
You could say all that is fine but is there nothing physical out there at all?? If we are getting some information from outside, then there must be something out there…Some fundamental objective reality which does not depend on the sense structure and the subjective interpretation mechanism. I will take this thought up in my next post...
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