8 November 2002: Informed by Reality

Sick.  A shame, because the weather is exhilirating right now, and because there is much bouncy living I wish to do.  But instead I decided to take care of myself, So I came home from school early tonight, to sit around drinking ginger tea and contributing to Moot Zoo discussions.  Maybe later I'll work on some art.

A discussion thread on the Moot Zoo about the nature of Reality gave me the opportunity to attempt to sum up some of my core beliefs about the nature of Reality and our experience of it.  Here's what I wrote:

1. There is an objective Reality - i.e., a Reality which exists independent of our perceptions of it.

2. Each person has his or her own subjective reality, which is an experience of Reality as filtered through that particular person's mind, senses, and tensions.

3. No living person's ordinary subjective reality can ever be a perfect (or even near-perfect) representation of Reality.

4. Reality (or a relatively close approximation of it) can, however, be experienced briefly in certain extraordinary states of consciousness.

5. There are also lesser extraordinary states of consciousness in which one does not experience Reality directly, but in which one's subjective reality shifts so as to offer a perspective dramatically from one's ordinary perspective, thus providing new information about the shape of Reality.

6. The extraordinary states of consciousness in which we can come close to apprehending Reality are fleeting, and even our memories of such experiences cannot be fully accessed in ordinary consciousness. However, once one has begun to have extraordinary experiences of Reality, one can, with much work, gradually adjust one's ordinary consciousness such that those experiences come to inform one's ordinary consciousness to some degree.

7. Such terms as "enlightenment" and "spiritual advancement," as I understand them, refer to the degree to which one's ordinary consciousness is informed by Reality.

8. Such terms as "schizophrenia" and "acid casualty," as I understand them, refer to the degree to which one's ordinary consciousness is overwhelmed by experiences of extraordinary consciousness that it has no way to integrate into a functional whole.