Perhaps the most controversial assertion in The Basic Structure of Everything is this:
But from our perspective, the whirlpool of imagination and manifestation gives rise to experience.
This is counterintuitive. We usually tell ourselves I am having an experience, or more specifically, I am having an experience of that thing over there in the world. What actually happens is that, when a whirlpool of experience forms, the prehuman consciousness-current we’re calling imagination and the pre-manifest consciousness-current we label physical reality (things) give rise to experience (think of chemical bonds, i.e. Hydrogen + Oxygen = water), forming you, things, the world, and the experience of you perceiving things in the world as a single doing.
Just because you identify your body as a separate, tangible entity “in the world,” and the world of things as a self-existing reality outside of your body, doesn’t make it so. It’s all one thing. You, the world, and all the things you perceive in the world are a single behavior that consciousness is doing, just as consciousness is a behavior that awareness is doing. There is no separate you that is having an experience, no separate thing that is being experienced, and no such thing as “the world.” There is only experience. You, the world, and things in the world are not disconnected, or even intimately interconnected, parts. There are no parts. Experience is the seamless whole of YouWorldThingness.
As a consequence of The Human Predicament, we experience ourselves to be a physical body moving through an independently-existing “outside world,” with an invisible (to the “outside world”) intellectual, emotional, and spiritual “inner life” going on behind our eyes. When we reclaim attention, we discover that we were never located in an “outside world” or had an “inner life.” We were all along one essence, the seamless whole of YouWorldThingness.
Am I saying that what we currently experience as “the outside world” is actually ourselves? That the sky and earth, nations, buildings, cars, trees and grass and animals, even other people, ARE US, our individual essence?
Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.
But isn’t that solipsism? Doesn’t that make you the only real existing entity, and everyone and everything else tantamount to dream characters in your personal dream?
No, but it’s complicated…
Here’s how I tried to get at it in FREE YOUR MIND:
Consider my office chair from the point of view of a newborn infant, then a toddler just learning to walk, then a three year old child. To the infant, the “chair” you and I see is not yet even the stick-structure of wood and cloth referenced above, for “stick,” “wood” and “cloth” are as yet unknown quantities to its mind. To the toddler, “chair” is an obstacle to crawling, a prop for pulling himself up to a standing position, a place of “Mamma,” “lap,” “story time,” etc. The three year old knows “chair” much as you and I do, perhaps without the subtle nuances of invitation and welcome. A chair is for sitting. He sits.
All the elements that make up the adult understanding of “chair” must be learned by a growing child, one at a time, through studied imitation of the words and behaviors of older humans in the child’s environment. These elemental learned concepts are memes. As he acquires more memes, the child’s concept of “chair” will expand, and in some ways contract, as well, as when “chair” ceases to be an obstacle to crawling because the child now walks. Like a jigsaw puzzle, he will add, subtract and rearrange the memetic pieces many times, with a remarkable mental dexterity most readily available to us in our formative years, until his conception of “chair” aligns closely enough with that of older children and adults around him that no one notices any glaring discrepancies.
At which point, his perception locks into place. “Chair,” as he has come to understand it, becomes, simply, chair, free of quotation marks. It becomes a steady component of his personal reality, a rock-solid, totally convincing illusory mix of external signals and internal memes he will seldom, if ever, be called upon to question again. By the age of five, he will have forgotten all the work involved in acquiring his present conception of “chair,” and there will simply be chairs in the world.
My office chair is an example of an individual meme, with its own separate life and influence, but it is simultaneously a memeplex – an element of our physical/psychic reality mix which, under closer examination, can be subdivided into a variety of smaller memes, much the way compounds are composed of linked molecules, which are, themselves, made up of combinations of atoms, which can be further subdivided into protons, neutrons, electrons, quarks, gluons, all the way down to the spookiest phantom particles of quantum physics. The “chair” meme allows us to identify furniture intended for seating in almost any environment. But the “chair” memeplex is, itself, composed of “sticks” plus “wood” plus “cloth” plus “sit” plus “comfort” plus “welcome” and on and on and on, each of these elements memes in their own right.
Dozens more individual memes are involved in the making of this single object, some of them wholly unique to me or to the person entering my office for a chat. The “chair” I offer a visitor may include, in my personal “chair” memeplex, great feelings of pride and love because, as a small child, I often stood on chairs to help my mother chop vegetables and roll cookie dough on the kitchen counter. The “chair” my visitor accepts may, in his personal “chair” memeplex, include large helpings of fear and frustration, reflecting his mother’s long struggle to control her child’s natural exuberance with frequent banishings to the dreaded “time out chair.” While our adult conceptions of “chair” will likely be sufficiently compatible that we will both, without hesitation, agree that I am offering him a seat and he is accepting, his “chair” and my “chair” are really not the same chair at all.
In exactly the same way, the “me” he has come to speak with is not the “me” I know myself to be, sitting across from him. The “him” I see before me bears little resemblance to how my visitor experiences himself in his own reality simulation. I have entered into his dream, and he has entered into mine.
Remember, FREE YOUR MIND is a deep dive into the making of the attention-generated self, which results in The Human Predicament. To understand memes, please read that book. I refer to it a lot here, but I won’t be restating its basic premises.
Back to the question of solipsism.
I suppose it’s possible that only one entity is real, and all the rest of us are dream characters. I’ve heard the concept of God pitched that way.
That doesn’t feel right to me, though, and this is a document born of visionary experience and my intuitive speculations in its wake. So let’s follow intuition.
What feels right to me is not particularly “love and light” the way most people want spiritual concepts to be. Sorry.
The hard truth in my opinion is that, while each physimaginal YourWorldThingness whirlpool is an individual experiencing essence (every galaxy, every sun, every planet, every person, every raccoon, every blade of grass, every quark), we each star in our own “experience show” and interact with other physimaginal YourWorldThingness whirlpools as supporting characters in our “show.” Even the people we feel closest to and love the most are Non-Player Characters (to use a gaming term) in our experience. That’s not a moral failing. It’s just how The Human Predicament works.
We are each the star of our own experience. We are all NPCs in each other’s experience.
As a consequence of The Human Predicament, we experience ourselves to be a physical body moving through an independently-existing “outside world,” with an invisible (to the “outside world”) intellectual, emotional, and spiritual “inner life” going on behind our eyes.
But, in reality, we are our total experience – and the whole world we experience is us.
Am I saying each one of us is the whole world?
YES!
How is that possible?
Let’s revisit FREE YOUR MIND’s “chair” meme above:
While our adult conceptions of “chair” will likely be sufficiently compatible that we will both, without hesitation, agree that I am offering him a seat and he is accepting, his “chair” and my “chair” are really not the same chair at all.
In exactly the same way, the “me” he has come to speak with is not the “me” I know myself to be, sitting across from him. The “him” I see before me bears little resemblance to how my visitor experiences himself in his own reality simulation. I have entered into his dream, and he has entered into mine.
While trapped in The Human Predicament, we are all simultaneously dreamers and characters in the dreams of others.
We do not live in the same world. We each are an individual experiential world.
Yet, thanks to the training of our attention we received starting the day we were born, and the attention-generated self which that training created, each of our dreams is sufficiently compatible that we all, without hesitation, agree (mistakenly) that there is one “real” self-existing “outside world” that we are share.
The common Human “outside world” is a shared dream in which we each experience ourselves to be reality’s one and only point-of-view character, and everyone else to be NPCs playing more or less significant roles in our experience.
Exactly as we would expect from the attention-generated self.
But again, that’s not a moral failing. It’s just how The Human Predicament works. Guilt and recriminations serve no purpose.
Instead, wake up.
By reclaiming attention we awaken to essence in its totality. We awaken to our unique, whole physimaginal YouWorldThingness.
We discover that We Are the World(s).
My Cosmic Download 