Healing
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Healing
our
Wounded Lives through Fairy Stories, myths and Legends
My
next book...
Gonna
Lay Down my
Sword
and
Shield
A
Complexity Perspective on Human Evolution from our Violent Past to a
Compassionate Future
Articles
by Victor
Fairy
Stories
Complexity
Spirituality
Short
previews
of
all talks
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The
Evolve Holistic Development Trust |
How do I know I’m Real?A talk given to the Dunedin Spiritualist Church in June 2009
How do I know I am real? Philosophers have puzzled over this
question for thousands of years and maybe it is one of those things that in the
end we just cannot prove. We can come up with some interesting possibilities,
however, and it is worth spending time to consider the problem.
Rene Descartes though about it and decided we cannot trust
our senses to prove we are real because sometimes our senses tell lies about
the real world. The only thing we can rely on is our thinking.
Therefore, Descartes concluded, that if he doubted something,
then something or someone must be doing the doubting; therefore the
very fact
that he is able to doubted proves that he must existence in some way or
other. If one is sceptical of existence, then being
sceptical is in itself proof of existence. " This is famously put in
his
saying, "I think, therefore I am".
We usually think of our brain being in our head and that is
where all our thinking comes from. Nerves stretch out to all parts of the body
and reach back into the brain. For convenience, we have divided our nervous
system into three parts: brain, the spinal cord, and the peripheral nervous
system, which reaches out to all the extremities of the body. In actual fact it
is just one continuous nervous system all linked in together.
Our mental
processes occur throughout our body not just in our head. We could almost say
that some of our brain is in our toes. Scientists have found a complex of nerve
cells in our heart, big enough to undertake complex neural processing that have
been called the small brain of the heart. Also, of course, our nervous system
has no meaning without the circulation system, the endocrine system, the
respiratory system etc also working together to enable it to function. It is
not all in our head; our thoughts, instincts and emotions come from our whole
body.
Next, what see, hear, taste and smell is not what is
actually out in the world. We receive information from the world through light
waves, sound waves, smells etc. Our sense organs detect them and turn them into
electrical signals, which are sent to our brain, which decodes them and turns
them, into a representation of the world out there.
And the representation of the world out there is not just a
remapping of the outside world like an image through a looking glass. We take
observing our world for granted, it feels so real.
This is also a little like what happens in a digital camera.
Light comes from the outside world, goes through the lens on the camera and
forms an image in the back of the camera. Light sensitive sensors detect the
light and translate the impression into an electrical pulse. All of the
electrical pulses are then all combined in such a way as to produce an image we
can see on a screen or print out on paper. The picture looks just like the
reality we had been observing. It is very convincing and we often talk of a
photo as if it were the real thing. We say things like, “this one is me on
holiday in Africa” and “the next one is me in Moscow”. Photos seem so real, but they are
never more than a representation of what they depict.
Creating an accurate and useable representation of the world
outside takes a big proportion of the energy needed to keep our body alive.
Therefore anyway our body can decrease the amount of energy needed, the more
efficient it will be.
In order to miminise energy use, the brain does not take
notice of all the information it receives, but rather only chooses what it
thinks is going to be the most important pieces of information and then uses
information from the past about the patterns it has noticed to make guesses
about the rest of the picture. This takes far less energy, so we need to seek,
prepare and eat far less food if the brain takes a few shortcuts, which for
99.9% of the time works just fine.
That is why, especially in low light, we can see something
we seem to quite clearly recognise, maybe as a dog or a cat, but when we get
closer, we find it was only a branch or a piece of paper perhaps. Our brain has
noticed the size, colour, speed etc. of the object and made a “best guess” as
to what it is and actually presented it as that for you to see. But, when we get
closer and gain more information we find it can not be our first guess. The
brain must focus more closely, take in extra details and make a better guess as
to what it might be.
As well as this, processing all this information takes time
and sometimes that time is critical. Imagine a ball coming at you very fast
that you need to catch. When it is say 4 metres away from you, by the time you
have figured out that it is about four metres away, it will be closer, say only
three metres away. You would always see the ball where it was rather than where
it is, so it would be very hard to catch.
What our brain actually does is to notice that the ball is
four metres away and coming in fast. It guesses that by the time it has
processed the image the ball will be three metres away, so that is where it
places it in the picture we see of the world. It makes a guess as to where the ball
will be, based on past patterns and puts it there for us to see. That way we
can catch the ball.
From all of this we can clearly see that what we take to be
the real world out there is in fact a representation in our mind of what might
be out there.
We don’t even know that what you perceive is the same as
what I perceive. What you see as the colour red may be quite different to what
I perceive, even when we look at the same object. It may seem logical that we
all see the same thing, but we can never know that what your mind represents to
you as red is the same as what my mind presents as red.
So, we now know that all the trees, houses, rocks, birds,
clouds, rivers and people that fill our world as we perceive them are just
representations of whatever might be out there in the real world. But, more
than that, what we perceive as our own hand is still only a representation of
that part of our body that our mind has created.
All the sensations we feel are again representations. When
we feel heat, cold, pain or the pleasure of a spa pool, we are only
experiencing representations. Feeling our heart beat is a representation.
Here’s where it gets really strange. Our own brain as we
experience it is only a representation of itself. Isn’t that a bit strange? The
brain observes itself and then creates a representation of itself, which we
experience. If my brain is only a representation, how can it create
consciousness?
Maybe there is another explanation to this. Perhaps
consciousness is not tied to our brain. Maybe there is a consciousness that
exists “out there” somewhere that the brain “plugs” into. Emmanuel Kant suggested that our mind creates
time and space as a way of representing that consciousness. That would mean the
consciousness itself is not restricted by time and space but time and space are
created as a way of experiencing consciousness. We therefore live in time and
space, but in reality we are not restricted by it. That would provide a way to
explain clairvoyance. If consciousness exists beyond time and space, then we
can link with those who have passed on from other times and places. We can
access the wisdom of the consciousness. It would also explain how minds can be
linked and such things as telepathy and ESP could happen.
If everything is a representation, then we have no way of
knowing that anything in our life is real. Our inside world and the outside
world are equally real or equally unreal. If we create our outside world, then
we can just as easily create our inside world. It could be that everything in
us is just an expression of the underlying consciousness. Our whole personal
being could be an expression of consciousness projected into time and space.
Perhaps that is why the Buddhists tell us that this life is
an illusion that we create and sustain, but beyond that is a greater reality.
They say the illusion must kept being recreated every second and every minute
and if we could stop, even just for a short while, we would see out true being
behind the illusion. They tell us we become attached to this world and
everything in it, but through meditation and other techniques, we can come to
experience consciousness directly.
Returning to Rene Descartes and his saying, “I think
therefore I am”, we must ask just who “I” is. If everything in my life is only
a representation, then who am I. How real is the I that I think I am. So much
of who we think we, much of our identity, is a representation created by our
mind. We have a name, a personality, and a sense of identity, but that
identity, like all the rest of us can only be a representation of who I really
am.
Then we must look at what might be behind this mass of
representations we have set up to make sense of this life we have found
ourselves in. Mainstream science would
tell us there is nothing behind it. What you see is what you get. They would
say that somehow, as yet unexplained, life has sprung forth within this
material world without anything else other than the process of evolution.
Spiritual traditions
consistently talk of an existence beyond this world, beyond time and space. It
might be called heaven or nirvana, emptiness, paradise or what ever, but it is
seen as the foundation of everything. Our existence in time and space then comes
from what is beyond time and space.
For some, the way out of the pain and suffering of our world
is to escape into heaven or nirvana and leave these illusory representations
behind, while for others, like me, the path way is actually back into the
illusory representations. As we engage fully with the illusion in which we live,
and learn the lessons they bring us, we come to touch the infinite, the divine,
to become that which we really are.
So, we have seen that there is more to the question, “How do
I know I am real?” It might have seemed like an obvious question, and yet just
a little thought shows it is not as straight forward. Everything we are aware
of is a representation, but we do have the ability to reach beyond that
representation to touch the consciousness that we really are and when we reach that
consciousness we have truly arrived home.
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