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AT THE END OF THE ROAD CAN YOU GO BOTH WAYS?

There is nothing WRONG with paradox.

We are very contradictory people living in a very paradoxical world. We are inter-dependents who demand independence, Human Beings who seem incapable of behaving like humane beings.

The experiences of daily life that structure what we are, that create the personal "self", are treated as something that self-same "self" experiences. That is, the created self thinks its creation is independent of itself.
A paradox can be defined as a situation where seemingly contradictory positions hold true simultaneously. Life as we experience it, is paradox.

The sense of self and that which the self senses are one and the same thing, but the apparent demand for seperation, or even isolation, as an individual entity struggling to exist in a big bad threatening world, results in the individual contracting down into the head, becoming an entity-in-a-body, trapped in a surrounding world it insists is "other" than itself.

Accepting the paradox of the situation, realising fully that you have no fundemental existence apart from the world that surrounds you yet having the ability to live as an independent entity within that world is rather like reaching the end of a road, coming to a T-junction, and having no difficulty in going both ways... simultaneously.

Actually doing that is more than a mental/verbal acknowledgement that the argument seems reasonable.
If you think it totally unreasonable then you need to consider just how unreasonable the standard "belief" is, for belief is all it is, that we are all isolated bits of independent life... evolved and evolving to struggle with each other... in a material world that popped out of nothingness to create a colossal amount of somethingstuff in the great who-knows-where that is the here-and-now.

You only believe when you do not know.

What most people believe about life as we know it is as weird and wonderful as anything you may read in these pages, but we do seem to have evolved to accept personal isolation as primary and the "external" world as a physical actuality, and familiarity does tend to lead to contempt for other possibilities, no matter how odd your own beliefs are.

You only believe when you do not know.

There have been many claims from many sources that the material world is in some sense illusory. Arguments from Buddha back to commentary on what the ancient Indian sages are said to have preached, through an assortment of mystics up to and including some alive in the present day.
Search the web, there's plenty to study.
Should you choose to follow a course in philosophy, arguments concerning the nature of reality from some of the worlds most highly regarded philosophers would be required reading, and some have scant regard for materialistic viewpoints.

Current science has also introduced a great deal of uncertainty into exactly what "physical existence" really is. The best science offers is to reduce everything to "energy fields" that manifest at our level of perception as the material reality we currently accept as life-as-we-know-it.

What do we really perceive?

Well, the answer to that is that nobody seems to have the foggiest idea, so the majority take everything at face value and assume that what you see is what you get, but that doesn't hold much water.
You can see "real people" in "live football action" on your TV set... but you know they are not actually there in your television.
You are quite willing to accept the vision on the television is an illusion, that the TV captures information from elsewhere and presents you with an accurate illusion of an apparent reality.
If you switch off the TV and just view the device itself in the corner of the room, your sensory systems (if they are all in working order), present you with a vision of a room and a television set.
The reality of the football match your senses generate are not considered to be actually present in the room, like-wise there is no need for your perception of the room itself to have an underlying actual existence as a physical presence.

The world may behave as a physical material reality, but its source may be nothing of the kind. Accepting the perceived world as behaving as a material reality (as it does) whilst simultaneously accepting it has no underlying physical existence (which it need not have) is going both ways at the T-junction... but accepting that argument is not experiencing the event.

You may be getting there when you look at the world and see nothing but yourself...

Introduction - Three

IS THERE ANYTHING YOU ARE NOT?

We live in sad times, we assume we know.

Or perhaps we live in good times, ruined by assuming that we know.

Not knowing something you think you should is a very frustrating thing and the question "why?" often generates an annoying silence followed by the mind drifting off the subject because it hasn't got an answer, and not knowing makes mind and body feel uncomfortable.
The alternative to not knowing, which eases the discomfort, is believing, which involves pretending you know something you do not.

What is it we assume we know?

We take self-existence as obvious, which it is.
We assume that the voice-in-the-head is our self talking, which is partially true.
We assume that the body is an independent reality in a solid material world, which isn't true at all.

Whenever I have suggested to people that they are more than just the body as they see it they tend to assume I refer to "otherworldly" aspects of themselves, other "mental planes" of existence, existence as "Spirit"... anything and anywhere but the here and now.

There is enormous resistance to any suggestion that the "here and now" is any more than what it appears to be.

Reasons for all this are discussed in the philosophical bit of this site.

The motivation behind these writings is the Nature of Contradiction. Paradox.
A living creatures' desire to survive is only satisfied by the killing of living creatures who desire to survive.
People determine to keep the peace by preparing for war.
Science knows full well that the world we perceive is a product of our senses yet refuses to consider that the senses may be creating the world.
The sense of personal isolated self-existence is extremely strong, yet nothing about "what you are" is isolated or self-existing. Feel free to disagree.

There is a phrase "taking a reality check".
It implies that when claims are getting a little wild and woolly we should look to what actually happens, which is all fine and well until the situation turns paradoxical.
What does a check on the reality of it all say about what "you" are?

Firstly, the world of everyday reality, the room, table, house, landscape,sun, stars, wind... whatever, is a construction of your senses.
No matter how boggle-mindingly convincingly real you think it is, the observable fact is that the whole of everything you experience is (brain) generated imagery, and there are a lot of neuroscientists working very hard to understand how it all comes about.

That I accept as fact.

What is not fact is that there is a physically pre-existing solid material world (or universe as a whole), that the sensory system re-creates for us to love or hate.

THAT IS AN ASSUMPTION, NOT A FACT.

There is PARADOX in this argument.
The body and its brain are as much a part of the sensorily generated world as everything else. If the underlying material reality is not there then the brain is part of the world it is itself generating.
The brain is in the contradictory situation of being both creator and creation.
Ahhh...paradox and self-reference, this is the stuff of philosophy since time before Plato.

Why, before this discussion gets beyond the first page, will the majority tend to think this all stuff and nonsense?
Think about that carefully.
Is it bacause you are so cock-sure certain that appearances do not deceive?
Have you any convictions of your own regarding Gods, life after death, other planes of existence, reincarnation... general mysteries of existence, hells, and more importantly, heavens?
IF SO WHERE IS ALL THAT GOING ON?
Are you so certain of the present that only "somewhere else" can an understanding of death reside?
If behind life you think there must be "more to it than we know" then why the tremendous resistence to the mystery being in the here and now?
If you are a rational, scientifically literate, clear thinking individual who sees most of the population as not really "clued-in" to the current understanding of the material world then you should be well aware that present discriptions of that real world are rather more weird and wonderful than outward appearances suggest.

The primary contention in these pages is that as an integral part of the material world the individual cannot, physically, be anything less than the whole thing (think big!), and the sense of personal existence associated with any sentient life (localised consciousness as an individual) is the thing that really needs explaining.
That explanation can be best approached by accepting the need to embrace paradox, in that the observeable material world is a construct whose appearance does not require an underlying material reality but nevertheless behaves as a very solid structural creation.
That raises the question of the source of it all.

Well, no, of course I haven't got a simple answer to that, but I think we should persue the fact that when you wake up, you are well aware that you have been sleeping. Awareness goes much deeper than the superficialities of waking consciousness.
Embracing paradox allows us to commit the greatest of scientific crimes by putting humanity back at the Centre of the Universe whilst reducing that proposal to a triviality by reducing humanity to a tiny ripple on the surface of a probably infinite creation.

IS THERE ANYTHING THAT YOU ARE NOT?

We live in sad times, we assume we are isolated.

Or is it that we live in good times, ruined because we assume we are isolated.