WE, THE CONDITIONED

Philosophers Say That The World Is An Illusion

How the heck could that be true when we know that everything’s real?

The idea that the world is an illusion is a concept that has been explored by various philosophers throughout history.

Eastern philosopher Ramana Maharshi compared the world we perceive to that of a movie being projected onto the screen of Consciousness —

“Scenes of joy and sorrow, drama and chaos seem very real when they appear on the screen, yet what stays truly real and permanent is the screen upon which these impermanent scenes were projected.”

In his Allegory of the Cave, in ‘The Republic’, Plato suggests that our perception of the physical world through our senses is akin to people who are imprisoned in a cave mistaking the shadows on the cave wall for reality due to their limited perception.

Immanuel Kant argued that the noumenal world (the unknowable, underlying reality independent of human perception) is distinct from the phenomenal world (things as they appear to us through our senses), and that we can never know the true nature of the noumenal world as long as our perception of reality is shaped by our mental structures.

Not exactly a philosopher in the traditional sense, but physicist Albert Einstein challenged the conventional notions of space, time, and reality with his Theory of Relativity where he suggested that our perception of the world is deeply intertwined with our frame of reference.

Abstract Concepts Are Impressive From A Distance

It takes a certain intellectual slant to engage in complex philosophical concepts. Even so, understanding existential perspectives intellectually is not the same as ‘knowing’ them experientially.

We read the words of these philosophers with wide-eyed admiration, deem them quote-worthy, and hope to one day call their wisdom our own, but that is how far we can go in terms of relating to someone else’s perspective.

When we hear a sweeping, one-dimensional claim that the world is an illusion, such a statement, even though significant, usually leaves us puzzled as our personal experience of reality is in stark contrast to what’s stated.

Have we understood the nature of our experience of the world accurately enough to judge its legitimacy against the great minds’ claims that the world is only an illusion?

How clear-sighted are we about our ‘experience’ that such a statement should conflict with what we know to be real?

Do We Really ‘Know’ What We Think We Know?

Our experience of sensing, perceiving, thinking, remembering, and feeling, which is our first-hand interaction with reality, is our gauge of what is real.

Right now, we see a tree outside our window and it looks very real.

But by Noam Chomsky’s wisdom, the way we know any experience at all is when we use words and images to reinterpret the experience to ourselves through language — aka, thinking.

“Internal speech is re-internalization of externalized speech. So when you are consciously thinking about something, you are using the external language to re-internalize it.”

— Noam Chomsky

We may think that we’re seeing a tree outside our window, but what we are actually experiencing is a “thought” in our head that says, “There’s a tree outside the window”.

The Reality of What We Know

Any object that we give our attention to, be it a sensation, memory, or words of reason, has a running monolog attached to it inside our head that we conditionally overlook.

We never experience the raw, first-point object or experience as it is, but only the interpretation of it by our mind in the form of thoughts.

When we look at the tree outside and realize the thought ‘t-r-e-e’, the reality of the tree is not happening out there in the world but it is being experienced here in our mind.

We can step outside and hug that tree as tightly as we want to make it feel real. Yet the sensation of the rough, woody bark scratching our inner arms that makes us think the tree is real is only a sensory perception that is being experienced in our mind.

We don’t see the tree outside our window. We only know the ‘experience of seeing’ the tree outside our window.

We are not reading these words, but we are only knowing the experience of reading these words.

See This Clearly — The Illusion Is Real

According to phenomenalism, objects and events in the external world are not independent of the minds that perceive them. Instead, they are collections of sense-data or perceptions that exist solely within the realm of our experiences.

For example, a table exists as a collection of sensory experiences (sight, touch, etc.) that we associate with the concept of a table.

So, when we think we are experiencing an independent object, we are only experiencing the interpreted idea of the object, but not the real thing.

There is very much an objective reality out there. But what we make of it in our mind, is a very limited, compromised perspective of what is truly out there.

“The description of the door is not the door, and when you get emotionally involved in the description you don’t see the door. This description might be a word or a scientific treatise or a strong emotional response; none of these is the door itself. The description is never the described.”

— J. Krishnamurti

We, the conditioned, is an ongoing exploration of the self from the bedrock up. It involves taking a telescopic view of the world — politics, people, et al., along with a microscopic view of the self — mind, thoughts, and perception. It’s about hacking away the fluff around spirituality, seeing reality for what it really is through the lens of philosophy, and learning what we really are beneath all that we think we are.