"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
--Albert Einstein
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"If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, did it make a sound?"
--Anonymous
My client says, “What do you mean, The world is an illusion? Are you saying that tree is not real? I’m looking right at it.”
Yes, everyone knows there are actual things out there, right? Tree, car, house, other people. Real you, sitting at real desk, looking at real screen. DUH.
Reality exists. Everyone knows this.
So let’s take a moment to notice how this is known.
You know there’s a tree because you- you- can see it. You can touch it. You can hear it.
Color and shape is happening in your personal eyeballs, sensation is happening in your personal fingertips, sound is happening in your personal ears.
You can know with certainty that objects exist because your own senses say so.
Although that makes whatever is perceived, personal to you. That’s your sky, your tree, your red or blue or green.
Right there, in your body, literally within your own sensory apparatus.
And there’s no way to know or confirm if your reality, and your tree, is the same as anyone else’s. Even if they say it is.
Since perceiving is an individual experience.
And then, based on those perceptions, you extrapolate that objects are outside your eyeballs or ears, independent of you, and always there, whether you are or not.
Thereby creating a solid world full of things, a world that is not you.
Turns out what is called “reality” is not static, not objective, not outside of, or independent of, the body, and not the same no matter who perceives it.
Rather, it's subjective, biased, filtered, and changing, based on each person's experience and hardware.
Uh oh.
That’s not "reality." That’s just a point of view.
Humans have taken something decentralized, variable, and unique within each of the billions and billions of individual sets of eyeballs and ears, and instead,
Pretended, actually insisted, that objects are outside the apparatus that sees them.
Fixed, unchanging, and always there, always the same, for everyone.
Perhaps you can see how solid and real this mental sleight of hand manages to make the sense of self?
Because when the world cannot be proven to exist except in your own experience,
When there’s no provable physical matter, only some very personal-to-you-alone perceptions,
Then everything, absolutely everything that can be known, thought, or counted on,
Everything that’s real,
depends on you.
There’s no reality without the self.
Which means- there’s no reality.
Because that self-thingy is also dependent on smoke and mirrors.
Ugh. Ok fine, then what’s the point?
The point is you, experiencing.
The point is the ride, riding on you.
The point is consciousness, experiencing through your hardware.
Only you. Only your way.
That actually might make you really important.
And maybe even
as real as it gets.
