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The Inter-Galactic Journal of Confabulology*
Edited by Adam Blatner, Imagination-ologist
(Part of Series on Textures of Reality)
Adam Blatner
December 31, 2008 |
"Reality??? Ha! What a concept!" -- "Mork" as played by Robin Williams in a 1970s science fiction sit-com. Mork was a visitor from the planet Mongo or something like that. He obviously didn't take our concepts of reality too seriously. I can get with that.
What we experience as reality is a compound, a composite, an aggregate of billions of components. Mind can entertain such complexities, though it isn't smart enough to figure it out. It can learn to see through the illusory nature of what we take to be reality, and innumerable books by South Asian philosophers and commentators also in the West in the last half century and more have noted this dynamic. It is the essence of Buddhism. Most people America and Europe still believe that reality is out there and mostly made of stuff, whereas it is often more useful to recognize that most of reality is mind-stuff, stories we make up about what stuff is and what it's about.
Self as Illusion
Take the experience of being a separate individual, a self. In our own lifetime it may become apparent that it's more useful to think of the "self" not as a single "thing" but rather, another kind of illusion. What we experience and/or tend to think of as self involves not only the innumerable qualities, roles, thoughs, sensations, interpretations, and other mind functions with which we identify---and identification is the activity of in effect saying, "Yes, that is part of me, or like me, or I'm part of it!"
On the right is a very diagrammatic example of how there's a kind of thread that ties together many different dimensions or planes of existence. Self-ing is an active process of constructing a sense of continuity and cohesion among a variety of roles---even though this sense is in great part influenced by the narrative or story we tell ourselves about who we are and where we fit in this whole shebang.
As illustrated on the right, these roles actually involve different dimensions---some played out more in the realms of economics, or family life, play or religion, and so forth. In those roles, the individual is actually somewhat different in the subtle feelins of how one is, although at the same time the differences of this state of mind and its associated behaviors differ from other roles is blurred. One feels oneself to be the same person.
I amplify this concept of constructing of a self as a process (rather than believing that there "is" such a "thing" as a "self") in an essay on another website.
The metaphysical elaboration of this picture hints at the intuition of the virtual existence of many sub-"planes" of existence operating within the larger dimensions accessible to and co-created by mind. This co-creation is occasionally idiosyncratic, mainly created by an individual, but most often to a greater or lesser extent co-created by others and the family, community, and culture in general. That is to say that we tend to think in lines that are consistent with world-views and experiences that have been articulated as being at least somewhat valid in this culture. There is yet room for innumerable variations but there are also limits.Byeon those limits ideas are near- or literally in-conceivable, impossible to conceptualize, imagine.
Many ideas and themes today were inconceivable to people living two centuries away, and at the edge of conceivability---but still more science fiction---one century ago.
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