Seeing Through and Seeing As

The first lens that forms in God's imagination is time. And after it comes space. And through time and space we have the potential for the distinctions of before-and-after, backward-and-forward. But the source of the light (the spectator, God) is really located back with the projector where the light source is. The source or spectator is not really "in" time or space.

Time and space (lenses in the imagination of God) do not really ever materialize except in appearance. So the light (spectator, i.e. God) never really enters into the world of time and space, for time and space are merely imagined ways of seeing. Likewise the dreamer of a dream never really enters his dream. But from the point of view of the mind of God that is immersed in his illusion (in the form of man) he finds himself convincingly in the world of time and space.

We are ensconced in the dimensions that arise in the percept as a result of these lenses. Thus they condition our minds and experiences. So if we ask, "Is God here or there; is he now or then?" the real answer is that he precedes as imaginer all such imagined distinctions.

Now we can use this analogy of the projector to see how the world forms, and especially to explain what is called

in philosophy the distinction between the objective world (same for everyone, such as the fixed formula of gravity F=Gm1m2/r2) and the subjective world (a little different for each observer).

We account for this difference with the order of the lenses. When we understand the sequence of the lenses, we see why we find this objective/subjective quality distinction. The answer lies in the order of the lenses.

Each lens forms the raw material for the next distinction. For example natural laws are merely variations on pure relations of time and space, and the body of a man (or animal) is merely variations of pure relations of natural laws.

Study the picture above. In it lies the key to why the facts of reality were so hard to discover. Seeing the world through the distinction of time we say that there is time. And we cannot conceive of a world without it. This is because time is part of the fabric of our conception. Thus we cannot possibly discover the cause of our percept by simply examining our percept. It must be revealed by a master or through inspiration. This explains why western philosophy has moved in endless circles, chasing its own tail as it were. Time, space, and natural laws, we thought, must be independent of perception since they are the same for every observer. In fact they are independent of the individual's perception, but not independent of perception itself – for they precede in the perceptual process the rise of the sense of individuality. We have been mistakenly reading the effect (laws of nature) into the cause. This error in thinking is called the historical fallacy as described by philosopher John Dewey.

A set of considerations which hold good only because a completed process is read into the content of the process which conditions this completed result. (The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology, 1896)

Now look at the picture below. It shows where in the sequence of the process of perception the primary and secondary qualities (and the worlds that supervene upon them) emerge in the image.

Note that the real witness of all of the percept (both the objective world and every individual's subjective impression) is all the while at the point of the projector. The real witness (God) never really enters into his percept, but merely evolves the impression that he does. Thus in this view we are all One with God.

I have drawn light lines to show that the same light is passing through every lens, even each human body. And thus the experience of distinction of 'selves' is actually an illusion.

In this view there is only perception, an evolution of perception, in the imagination of God. God (light of consciousness) is the only perceiver and all that God ever perceives is himself (light). The percept that God perceives is his own invented illusion, which he takes himself to be part of as man. When God (as man) realizes his real original nature, he does not see light so much as becomes light and conscious of his true identity as light. In mysticism this greatly anticipated event is called "God-Realization."

The above illustration is meant to show that each person sees the same world conditioned by the primary lenses such as time, space, and natural law, but sees that world slightly different according to their own individual psychology and biology. Realize too that the psychology and biology they are using as a medium for interpreting their perception of the world of laws, is itself an outcome of those primary lenses that precede them in the process that is forming the image world. Thus, a way to think of this is that the world is partially formed behind them, and partially in front of them – behind them by God's lenses, in front of them by their own. The person arises in the middle out of the laws. Thus, like God, man is really looking at the light of God through his lenses.

Thus each person sees a slightly different variation of the same world. The world is filtered to the individual through the eyes and brain. But the one receiving the impressions is God himself actually. The one who searches is God himself. The one who becomes confused is God himself. The one who realizes his true original nature is God himself. This non-difference between the individual and the whole is called nondualism, the view that there is no true separation in time or space because time and space never really existed at all. Thus division (world) is illusion and unity (light) is reality. But both are Divine because both originate in God and remain in God for there is nowhere to go but God.

From the point of view of one who has not gone beyond Maya, it seems that there are as many individuals as there are minds and bodies. In Truth there is one Universal Being behind the minds of seemingly different individuals, who through them has the experiences of duality. (Meher Baba)

It is truer to say that the world is in you than that you are in the world. (Meher Baba)

Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you. (Luke 17:21)

What is unique about this view is that it does not fall into the spiritually paralyzing trap of "mind idealism" where human intellect is the ultimate reality. Rather it is both perceptual idealism and perceptual realism and obliterates the distinction, for the world that people and living creatures experience is the actual world. In this view Plato's forms become ways of seeing and lose their ontological existence – ceasing to be mysterious metaphysical things. The image world is the only world to see, not a faint copy of an ideal primary one. Thus it is the first system to escape what is called representationalism, the idea of perception as a faint copying of something unseen. Even materialism has never successfully escaped this intractable noose, where the so-called qualia of experience are believed to represent an unseen unheard mysterious substratum. The system also is compatible with both biological evolution and an all-creating, all-knowing, all-seeing God, yet does not collapse into anthropomorphism or atheism. It is even compatible with existentialism and one could do away with the idea of God if they had too many bad emotions tied to the word "God". So it is a very elastic and adaptive basic concept. It represents a generalized shift in paradigm, a turning inside out of our old conceptions, but not a new dogma.

Another note of interest is that this model obliterates the need for a model of an atom – if one wanted to take it to an extreme. The natural laws (including quantum ones) are reassigned as perceptual schemata, or regular ways of organizing experience, rather than properties of tiny entities, a manner of thinking that seems to have no conclusion as we subdivide and subdivide and never seem to find the working core of reality.

If we were to sum this view up we would say that consciousness, which is real, creates matter, which is appearance. This isn't very original. What is original is the order of lenses and the notion of replacing metaphysical entities with a single repeating process.

In the evolution of perception, represented as progressing from left to right in the above chart, each perceptual schema (represented as pink ovals or lenses) gives rise to the raw material for the next perceptual schema. As they emerge in God's imagination, the impression they produce supervenes with the previous impression to form the world of appearances. The world of appearance is what we refer to as the phenomenal world. The world is illusion in every sense of the word, a complete chimera, a delusion. Yet what arises out of this process is God's own awareness of his existence. God himself is cause and world (appearance) is effect. Only the cause (God) ever truly exists. God (who is invisible) exists. The world (that appears) is illusion.

Post-modernism

One of the problems that faces our time is the view of relativism. For instance, people seem to have misinterpreted the implications of quantum mechanics to be that the percept is entirely in the individual's mind. This misunderstanding is expressed in new age literature such as Seth Speaks and Jitterbug Perfume, and popular movies like What the #$*! Do We Know? The newly popular but confused view is that everyone has their own reality (ENTIRELY!). This has led to the false idea that the whole world is an expression of your own ego or thoughts. An individual's thoughts, it is falsely assumed, is causing the image world. How absurd!

What needs to be understood is that some of the world that you perceive is the same for everyone and some is an outcome of your personal biology and beliefs, i.e. an interpretation of that objective reality.

Currently the world is divided into two false views. One is that the world is independent of all perception – objectivism. The other is that it is dependent on an individual's beliefs – subjectivism. Both are wrong in that they are incomplete. The whole world is perception, but not the perception of the individual.

The above model accounts for both the objective and the subjective. It does away with the old false dichotomy that it is one or the other.

Another outcome of this confusion is the sense that there is no truth and that all beliefs are mere opinion – or worse – mere "language games" (Wittgenstein). This frightening view has led to two equally frightening responses. On the one hand you have a loss of respect for truth and a view that everyone has their own truth... and of course a totally self-absorbed way of living. The other is in reaction to this nightmare – fundamentalism. Fundamentalism (the reaction to relativism) is now leading us backward to a time of dogmatism and superstition.

In the new view it is possible to have a clear sense of reality, without succumbing to dogmatism. For one has a sense of what is true for all and what is not. And one need not choose between "all is individual" or "nothing is individual." So I think this view heals a terrible divide between relativism and fundamentalism.

Quantum Mechanics

Quantum mechanics has come to be associated with a lot of hocus pocus. People use the apparently amazing nature of quantum events to justify almost anything. This is a terrible state of affairs, as it leads to the argument from ignorance that can be abused to justify almost any claim. In the new view, quantum events are rather boring and trivial. In The Evolution of Perception & the Cosmology of Substance I explain what quantum events are and why they seem so bizarre. They only seem bizarre through the lens of the old way of looking at reality. In the new way they have no magic and they have no important implications. Quantum events, in recent times, have also been used to further justify that everything is in your head. This is a socially and scientifically dangerous misunderstanding. Quantum laws arise prior to the rise of individual mind. Thus individual observers are not creating quantum events as certain philosophers have thought. Nor are they very mysterious when understood in the context of an ordered process that gives rise first to individuality and then to the image world.

George Berkeley

George Berkeley was the philosopher with a view closest to this one. What Berkeley calls 'ideas in the mind of God' simply are lenses in this view, ways of seeing. But Berkeley failed to account for the influence of the principle of time and thus imagines God as truly distinct from our minds. Yet Berkeley comes amazingly close.

Myth

Anyone who has studied the work of Joseph Campbell has realized that the subject of myth is embedded in a deep mystery. I believe that myth arises in man's own mind and is a layer of man's individual lenses, born of thought and education. But what has mystified me is that all cultures have certain common myths (See The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell). This has made me wonder if I have it wrong. Does myth arise earlier in the process, before the rise of individual awareness? Or could it be that the universal mind (collective unconscious) realizes its own journey in the state of man as individual and then expresses this dimension as myth. If one studies what Campbell calls "the hero myth" he sees that it oddly reflects the whole process above as an inner journey. I think these are questions for future generations. Myth is key. In the hero myth man seems to have guessed his own real purpose, to journey into illusion to discover by trials his own real original identity.

Understanding how the model works

I want to try to explain the logic behind process theories. This will help to understand the evolution of the perceptual schemata shown above and how they give rise to the aspects of what we see. My daughter once saw a steam shovel and asked what it was. Perhaps they call them back hoes now, but I said, "It's a steam shovel." Then she asked me how it was made and I said, "It was made out of metal." Then she asked me where all that metal came from and I said, "It was dug out of the ground." To this she asked how we got the metal out of the ground and I said, "We used steam shovels." Of course she laughed cause she had caught me in a circle of reasoning. So I made up the following story.

"Long ago a man picked up a stick and dug up some soft metal near the surface of the soil. From this soft metal he made a little trowel. With his little trowel he could dig much deeper and dug up heavier metal. With this heavier metal he fashioned a strong hand shovel. With this strong hand shovel he dug up even more metals, mixed them to make even stronger alloys, and from these new alloys he fashioned a steam shovel and many other machines like cranes. And with these cranes he built this city."

As you see, the only way out of circularity is to postulate a process. Otherwise we fall into an infinite regress. The same story can be told about the image-world and how it was formed. "Long ago there was perception, but it had a whim to know itself and so it went seeking. Since there was only perception, perception had to invent a first way of perceiving so it could build something out of itself. This first way of perceiving was distinction or duality, i.e. splitting in two. But this wasn't enough for perception could not pull its distinctions apart from one another so it used distinction to make a particular kind of distinction which served as a medium in which to manifest its idea of distinction. And this way of perceiving was time. Time made it possible to perceive relations. Out of relations perception created natural laws. And out of these natural laws perception formed a body. And now looking through this body perception saw other bodies. And now using its old idea of distinctions perception divided the bodies it saw into up and down, good and bad, rich and poor. Then perception (seeing and moving about through the vehicle of its invented bodies) built buildings out of decomposed bodies (trees and stones) and shaped houses and roads and labeled some good and some bad, some sacred and some profane, etc. And then perception had created a world out of distinctions in a world that we call the world of duality, which is really only in the imagination of the one and only reality which itself never went anywhere since there was nowhere in reality to go. But by this time perception was quite caught up in this fantastic illusion it had formed and took itself to be this one and that one. Slowly perception (in the form of a man or a woman) began to question the distinctions it saw all around itself and wonder about its true identity. And one day it dawned on perception that perception had always been, always was, and always would remain the one indivisible source of all that it had come to perceive. Then perception no longer took itself to be the things it saw, but rather their source. And it saw that that impression was simply its own indivisible reflection in the world of forms. The world was of him, yet he was not of the world. In that moment perception realized that the world of duality was really nothing and that perception, its source, was really the everything.

In short, out of perception is formed the schemata of time and space. Out of the schemata of time and space are formed the laws of nature. Out of the laws of nature are formed individual bodies. Through bodies color, sound etc. are perceived. Through the schema of reference objects are seen as signs. Through signs language is formed. Through language intellect is born. Through intellect cultural schemata are perceived, creating the cultural world around us.

Mysticism

What does this model allow us to see that is of spiritual value? It helps us understand what is and is not real?What is important to see through this model is that that which is truly real (on the left of the above diagram), precedes or transcends the percept, i.e. does not fall into the scope of its imagined schemata (seen in the gray region of the diagram). In other words, God (or Self) cannot be understood in terms of the dimensions that we think in. Even to say "God is One" is merely a concept understood in contrast to duality. And no such contrast can apply. Thus the mystics say of the transcendental, "not one, not two." What they mean to communicate is that about the "I am" we can only speak in negative terms, for we have no schemata to understand it with.

To understand what we 'cannot' know and why is the end of philosophy (and the final frontier of human intellect) and the beginning of mysticism. If this model allows one to see this single idea then it is of value. Of course the 'eye picture' on the left is simply a symbol that maps to nothing that we can conceive. It is more a 'place-marker' for what we cannot know with the mind.

Comparing the Old Model and the New

The old model was called 'representationalism.' That idea is that you are looking at something primary (noumenal or mathematical) and interpreting it with your brain. The new model is different. It is a seeing through invented evolved schemata (ways of organizing experience) and the result is seeing as. Each perceptual schema brings complexity to the percept, which itself is nothing but a seeing as. In this sense there is no subject or object, but rather an evolved process of simply seeing. What I see is a result entirely of how seeing is occurring. The sensation of subject and object materialize out of this process. In a sense there is no seer or seen, but rather simply seeing. But this is nothing new to the mystics. In reality this is the truly old model.

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul. (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First Series, The Over-Soul)