FLUID REALITY

FLUID REALITY

Document status: June 8, 2003

Maintained out of interest

Essential ideas are already in and no further action for Journey in Being

Preliminary

In Which the Objective is to Show How the Rock Called Reality is Fluid

1. The history of knowledge shows that what is agreed upon as firm, even scientific, reality by most people for long periods of time can be overturned and replaced by a new view of reality. Examples used were: [i] Two thousand years of geometry of physical space as flat to the curved space-time of Einstein. [ii] Deterministic mechanics of Newton to indeterministic quantum mechanics. Determinism is the view that the future is determined in advance: in religion by God, in common thinking as fatalism, and in science that the future of the universe is predictable precisely, in ideas of human behavior that people cannot make choices and do not have freedom or responsibility. [iii] Fixed species created as they are and a special role for man to evolution of species including man from common origins. [iv] Man as a rational animal -the new view after science and philosophy began to replace the medieval emphasis on authority as the source of truth- to Freud’s idea of man as also governed by unconscious and animal motives and drives. Other examples could be given: the evolution of logic, the evolution of ethics, and the nature of knowledge... These examples show that even though seemingly paradoxical, the new ideas provide the most accurate descriptions of the world currently available

2. There are two important aspects to discovery of new ways of seeing the world. First, it is not just facts that are at issue... it as also the nature of the world, of our ideas about the world. We can see this from the spoken discussion of examples. Second, in any view of reality there are a number of central ideas whose relationships and structure correspond to the reality. One of the difficulties of discovery and transition is that, usually, more than one of the ideas has to be tweaked at the same time. This makes the process difficult, requires imagination and concentration. I did not go into the examples sufficiently to bring out this point

3. Common reality is what grounds us in everyday affairs. So, there is a frequent reaction to the thought that traditional ideas of what is real can be changed... how can the ideas and theories that root us in the world be wrong? That is both somewhat logically inconceivable and psychologically discomforting. But on careful examination, what is really being said is as follows. When traditional reality is overturned it often remains useful and valid in much of its original realm of application. The new reality seems different but, mostly, agrees with the old reality in its own realm; the new version is valid in both the old realm and newer realms of discovery; often the new reality is useful in some cases in where the old version was inadequate even in its own realm

4. Although it often seems that the newer ideas are esoteric, they are usually developed through imagination in response to the inadequacies of the old ideas. When new ideas seem strange and paradoxical it is because they are developed in response to errors and paradoxes in the old systems: what seemed firm, true, consistent and secure was not really so. It follows almost logically that the solutions will appear strange... The old ideas were developed in response to even older ideas. The history of ideas can be traced back and it is found that the seemingly esoteric realms have origins in the realm of human life... and for this reason, even though older systems of ideas continue to have application in more immediate realms the newer ideas that are more universal in application also have application in immediate realms

Human and Ultimate Being and Knowledge

The Objective is to Find a Concept of Knowledge that Enables My Full Theory of Being
The Problem is to Find a Way to Understand Ultimate Being and Knowledge Through Our Proximate Being and Knowledge...and so to Approach and Realize, as Far as Possible, Ultimate Being and Knowledge

What is stable from our immediate perspective is seen as fluid when we take a wider view

5. The examples and general conclusions are building up to the central idea which is about the nature of being... and specifically, about human being. But I am not asking specific questions about human being as it is on an everyday realm. I am asking what the limits to human being are. Specific examples of limits and boundaries are: Are the thoughts of distinct individuals truly distinct? Are seemingly distinct persons absolutely distinct? Is the boundary called my skin, a very practical boundary, an absolute boundary? Are the boundaries called birth and death final... or is there some kind of continuity? Is the individual permanently an individual or is there, can there be a merging with being[s] of progressively more inclusive boundaries? Does that progression lead to All Being? And if it exists at all does that identity with All Being exist, unrecognized, here-now or does it require the working out of destiny?

6. The key to answering these questions is: What do I know? How do I know what I know? And, more generally, what is knowledge? This last question is the key. Knowledge is commonly thought to be a description of some kind of a state of affairs. That is what it is in the common realm. That is what we are taught in the secular world, in courses in universities. If that is all that knowledge is then, likely we are not going to be able to answer the questions about human being. We are going to think that any attempt by human beings to answer the questions is absurd. We might even think that the questions are absurd. There is a history of all kinds of people from the practical realm to scientists, philosophers in universities, to some poets and some religious leaders who think that questions of this kind are absurd. The absurdity has two parts to it: the questions contemplated are meaningless because they cannot be answered and they are futile because, even if they could be answered, they would have no conceivable practical application to our lives. Actually, the two parts are mutually supporting and stand and fall together. Everybody agrees that thinking ahead is meaningful in areas of life where we think we have reasonable knowledge of the possibilities. So it is important to ask: how can I know about the ultimate nature, limits and boundaries of being? And it becomes immediately apparent that I must also ask what is the nature of knowledge... because [i] the traditional idea of knowledge will not get us anywhere, [ii] we have seen that when going beyond immediate realms, the nature of reality itself - in this case the nature of knowledge - must be questioned, and [iii] knowledge is a characteristic of being, knowledge is part of being [of mind] it is part of what is being questioned. Because we are going into new realms we must be prepared to be uncertain, to experience uncertainty and dark before security and light. If we want traditional and comfortable ideas to work everywhere we are not going to get anywhere

7. Let us step back from our very self-centered view of what is knowledge... a view in which knowledge is something I have about the world, is right or wrong, is a picture of how the world is. How can I do that stepping back? I can imagine myself looking at the earth with its societies and cultures and, within cultures, people. I can imagine how this might have originated. I might not be able to come up with an exact account of origins and history, but I do know that there was an origin and a history. Knowledge must have played a role in the process. I look also at the history and of knowledge itself as in the examples of item [1]. What do I see? Knowledge has an adaptive role! Before we got all cerebral, we did simple things like gesture and grunt. These were not about how the world is but about mutually adapting to the world. Knowledge is not always about being right or wrong, but about adapting, about relationship. Even before communication, there is a certain kind of knowledge in our bodies. A digestive system “knows” something about food, what to do with it; muscles and nerves “know” something about the dynamics of motion; all these things happen without having to understand, to talk, and to put into words. On the intensely language focused view of knowledge as free description, these examples stretch the meaning of knowledge. However these are forms of knowledge as adaptation... not the same as knowledge by description; but the kinds of knowledge possess similarities of function. Taking one more step back in imagination look not only at the earth but at the universe and its origin. What could be knowledge on that scale? There are three things that can be said. First, knowledge is about adaptation. It is more about how a being acts, how it is able to act so that its acts are not merely random but are cued into reality. Second, at the level of existence as a whole, there is a relationship between knowledge as belief that enables action and, through risk, growth and the possibilities of being. Third, knowledge as we experience it has something to do with mind which must therefore have something to do with adaptation coming to some extent under the control of the being rather than just what happens to the being. Combining together the views of knowledge we find, that to discover the nature of being the role of knowledge is to create ideas of being, to live out these ideas, and learn and see what may be the outcome for our being. Clearly, the scientific idea of hypothesis and controlled experiment [not really how things happen even in science] is not going to work... the idea of hypothesis and controlled experiment has its realm of validity but it is a realm and not a universe; and it is somewhat mythical since it does not define even scientific practice

8. But we are getting involved in a tall order. So I am going to imagine that I am the universe and do an experiment with my life? How so? To answer, I need imagination not just for the subject of study but also how to do the study. Guided by vision on a large scale, one begins small, with simple examples such as healing and mind, such as creative relationship and leadership [charisma] through imagination, risk and review. Look at other ideas and cultures. When it is claimed that meditation can lead to knowledge of the identity of individual with all being... what experiments were done? Put all these ideas together, synthesize, and create new experiments... We evolve a hierarchic network of ideas, vision, limits, actions and transcendences; walking through the network in a dynamic way -vision of the path is created as we walk and learn- we approach the one goal. This is a sketch of how it will work