Quote:
Originally Posted by Jeff Lilly  Wow, step away from a thread for a day or two and it totally morphs into something else...! :-)
I appreciate all your comments, and I'm particularly interested to learn more about biocentrism. What I find most intriguing -- as a linguist, a scientist, and someone who's been working and struggling with 'subjective reality' most of my life, since it's a central part of the Zen Buddhism I was brought up on -- is the ways in which our minds are organized.
What I'm working on -- with my questions about psychology, mathematics, and the scientific method -- is this:
IF subjective reality is 'true' in some deep sense, then reality is utterly created by our consciousness; BUT are there any structural limitations on that consciousness? Many people assume that if your mind creates your reality, then anything at all is possible, but it seems to me that's false.
Could you, for example, create a reality in which 1 + 1 = 3? Or Euclidean geometery does not work in an infinite flat plane? Or from linguistics: you might create a reality in which everyone spoke English, but could you create a reality in which everyone always spoke in C++? Or in which sentences had nouns, but no verbs? Or from psychology: could you create a reality in which your memory worked like a computer's direct access memory, instead of the human brain's distributed model?
What I'm saying is that the ways to be human appear to be infinite, but bounded. There are some things the human mind just doesn't do. Some of these things might be just inherent human limitation (like the inability to imagine infinity, or to speak always in C++); others (like mathematic truths) seem to be hard-wired into the universe itself.
THESE boundaries are the real rules of subjective reality. Or are they? What are they? And why are they there? |
Great questions! I think these are the questions that are going to get us somewhere in terms of understanding subjective reality.
Something you will hear a lot here is that everything's just your beliefs and you create whatever you believe. This implies that there are no boundaries.
However at the same time there's the idea that we all share one consciousness and its this singular consciousness (dreamer) that creates reality. By this logic, there are certain boundaries because you are only a fragment of a bigger design which is the one consciousness we all share, where mathematics and such things are possibly reflections of higher principles in the one consciousness' mind. So surely no one person would be able to whimsically change everyone's reality, because they are just a fragment and not representing the entirety of consciousness.
*If you completely identify with the shared singular consciousness totally and not your individual self, then you would be able to change the highest order beliefs; letting you change anything without limits. But at that level I would imagine there would be no desire to do anything but just be silent and observe the myriad of forms infront of you, instead of say changing the laws of physics.
Which begs the question, as true as it may be: how
useful is it to say we are all one and everything is our beliefs?
On the flip side, I also think it's possible that, while still retaining the sense of individual self and desire to change something; one person could believe something strong enough that they enter a parallel universe where things have always been that way due to infinite possibilities. This means they would not be contradicting anyone else's beliefs so there won't be a paradox with singular consciousness. In which case maybe the boundaries could be broken in that particular universe. This one possibly has solipsist undertones, but still allows for other people to exist individually in their own universes and while sharing the same consciousness.
My brain hurts now.
