Bodhi Dharma Zen
Advaitin
- Joined
- Nov 25, 2004
- Messages
- 3,926
Some quite unexpected facts (to the common people):
There is no “external” material world outside your consciousness. There are no objects, there is no light, nothing like and earth or stars or galaxies. Consciousness is your world, the only one you know and will know, the only one that exists and will ever exists.
There is also nothing “internal” to consciousness. Feeling, thoughts, sensations, perceptions, language, etc. are also your world. Still, consciousness is merely the tip of the iceberg (notice that I said that consciousness is YOUR world, not THE world).
Consciousness is made of phenomena, yet it is caused by the noumena. As we have seen, phenomena comprehends both the world and the ego, the external and the internal, the objective and the subjective.
The noumena is, whatever it is, outside the reach of consciousness. For convenience we can say that the noumena is physical, made of quarks, quantum states, strong and weak forces, and so on. But we must never forget that such concepts are oversimplifications that serve a purpose (they are like anchors that let us to make predictions) but are not “real entities in themselves”. Particles and waves are ways of describing the noumena, nothing else, and nothing more.
The ultimate nature of what we call the universe is then the noumena, and every attempt to describe it will begin and finish in language. Different languages, different concepts and you might end with a different description. Valid or invalid only in the sense it can accurately predict phenomena, but not “truer” or “more accurate” or “better” outside its predictive capabilities. It is a map and the map is not and can’t be the territory.
There is no “external” material world outside your consciousness. There are no objects, there is no light, nothing like and earth or stars or galaxies. Consciousness is your world, the only one you know and will know, the only one that exists and will ever exists.
There is also nothing “internal” to consciousness. Feeling, thoughts, sensations, perceptions, language, etc. are also your world. Still, consciousness is merely the tip of the iceberg (notice that I said that consciousness is YOUR world, not THE world).
Consciousness is made of phenomena, yet it is caused by the noumena. As we have seen, phenomena comprehends both the world and the ego, the external and the internal, the objective and the subjective.
The noumena is, whatever it is, outside the reach of consciousness. For convenience we can say that the noumena is physical, made of quarks, quantum states, strong and weak forces, and so on. But we must never forget that such concepts are oversimplifications that serve a purpose (they are like anchors that let us to make predictions) but are not “real entities in themselves”. Particles and waves are ways of describing the noumena, nothing else, and nothing more.
The ultimate nature of what we call the universe is then the noumena, and every attempt to describe it will begin and finish in language. Different languages, different concepts and you might end with a different description. Valid or invalid only in the sense it can accurately predict phenomena, but not “truer” or “more accurate” or “better” outside its predictive capabilities. It is a map and the map is not and can’t be the territory.
Thunk!
