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RE: Waxing Philosophically For A Moment
What I think about "What is self?" :
The thing is that whatever we perceive is an illusion. There is no way to know for sure if something exists or no. Your perception of something will obviously be different than mine. Now, what do we do about this? I found a middle ground. I think everything is one. What I mean is that there is no duality. When we think about "I" we are saying that there is something other than "I" so all of that is an illusion. I obviously want to explain this in a better way, I will make a post about this thing soon. I'm a huge follower of David Icke. Check him out if you haven't.
Isn’t that perspective, in a way, epistemologically self-defeating, though?
Because if “whatever we perceive is an illusion,” then wouldn’t the perception about whatever we perceive being an illusion, be an illusion itself?
In other words, if all perception is illusory, then that “all perception” necessarily includes perceptions about perception.
I know I’m not saying anything that Pyrrho or Carneades didn’t already say thousands of years ago, but I’m trying to wrap my head around being able to ascribe certainty to all things being an illusion except for the concept the concept “all things are an illusion.”
How can we justify that exception? That idea comes from your brain or your mind (or “a brain” or “a mind” somewhere), doesn’t it?
And if everything is an illusion, then that brain or mind is an illusion too.
Which means the the source of the idea/concept “everything is an illusion” is an illusion too, and throws doubt on any certainty that the concept/idea itself that comes from an illusion isn’t, also, just an illusion.
It’s like if someone in a dream gives you a million dollars while riding a flying pig. If you wake up and can’t remember if you actually received a million dollars or if you dreamed you received a million dollars, you don’t need to have any direct access to your brainwave patterns or a sleep study.
You can recall that you received the million dollars from a man on a flying pig. The flying pig throws doubt on the existence of the man as a real person, and because the source of the million dollars was the man on the flying pig, you now have a good reason to doubt that the million dollars was anything but a dream.
I will say this. Whether we’re all illusions or not, I appreciate your interesting theory that forced me to actually try to use my very limited brain today.
So thanks for that!
When you talk about "the idea comes from a mind" thing. You're again getting duality in between. Imagine everything as just one single thing. It was what is there and will be. Infinite consciousness.
I guess the problem I’m having with imagining everything as one single thing, is that I have no grounds on which to justify that idea.
I can’t justify why “everything is just one single thing” is more true than “everything is billions of separate things.”
I guess I could assert that as a faith if I wanted to, but I don’t know how I can assert that as knowledge or truth.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t assert that, I’m just saying that I can’t think of any grounds as to why we’re all “actually” one single thing, as opposed to, say, “actually” 0 things, or “actually” an infinite multiplicity of things.
Because only then can it make sense. When we talk about perception, if your perception is different than mine, it obviously means perception is based more on yourself rather than the object you are perceiving. So if everything is one, there will be no perception, everything will be just one and there will be no questioning but only knowing. Since there's just one thing.
I understand that it's very hard to wrap up the idea in your head about everything being one because we have never experienced nor seen such a thing and the concept clashes with what we see around us. Around us we can see duality everywhere. We can see males, females etc. You get the point? To simply imagine that everything is one and nothing else is there is a huge ass task even I haven't experienced it yet. This is exactly what "enlightenment" is all about. Feeling one with the universe. The way is to keep questioning till everything is known.
That is an interesting perspective. I know David Icke but only when it comes to reptilians. lol. I see things as a sociologist. I see the self as a reflection of the society we are in. The people around us and the social experience around us define who we are in the moment. Who we are changes as we move around in society. You might be a different person around your family than you are at work. The self is like a mirror and reflects the social influences around you.