It’s time for a Sunday Spiritual, where we throw some stuff into the mix that the mind can’t really handle, and see what happens.
✨
In yesterday's Daily Reminder—the nattily-titled “It’s not what happens, it’s how you feel about it”—I floated the notion that “Your experience of The thing” is an entirely separate prospect from “The thing” itself.
Giles P Croft
The truly crazy thing is (and I promise, I will stop using the word “thing” very shortly 🤪), we don’t actually know for sure what “The thing” even is!!
Because we’ll never get to experience it directly, even though it looks like we do.
I mean, I’m sat here, typing on this keyboard and looking at this computer screen and it really looks like I’ve got a total handle on what they are – like I’m experiencing them directly.
And yet at the same time, I’m not. I can’t be.
All I get is this internally-generated, Thought-created facsimile of “reality” that’s being pieced together, moment by moment, as the psycho-spiritual entity that is Giles continually answers the question,
🧠🤖: “What must be “true” for me to be receiving this particular set of data?”
Take something as straightforward as the keyboard, for instance.
I’ve got such a relationship with the texture and shape of its edge; the layout of the arrow keys, where my fingers so often rest; the tiny signs of grubbiness appearing at the edges of the return key and the space bar; the resistance of the rubber feet underneath, as I move it hither and thither (I only just noticed how much I do this! 😆); the weight of it; the almost imperceptible notch on its edge, where it must have been bashed – these things cannot feel the same to anyone else.
There is not one single being in the Universe that will experience this “keyboard” as I do. And yet, experience is all we get.
So my experience of it is real… but it’s not true.
(Literally) “God-only knows” what this keyboard actually is, in “reality.”
I’m not having a felt experience of the keyboard, I’m feeling that little movie of it all that’s being created by the 3 Principles: powered by Mind, there’s an experience of Thought, in Consciousness.
😳
It’s enough to make you want to lie down.
Me and a client were slip-sliding down this particular rabbit-hole one day, because it’s not just keyboards that shift and metamorphose in the minds of all who encounter them… it’s everything! These bodies. Our opinions. Other people. The future.
And we got to talking about what’s shared. What we can agree on. The stuff that, on the surface of things, looks the same to us.
(It’s what Anil Seth, Professor of Cognitive & Computational Neuroscience calls, “a controlled hallucination.”)
Anil Seth
"We're all hallucinating all the time, even right now. It's just that when we agree about our hallucinations, we call that reality." 😳
We conceded that some things are pretty easy to predict. Colours, for instance. (So long as you’re not colour-blind. Or a dog. Or a bee, eh?)
Or patterns in the physical world, like the sun rising in the east.
But then we slowed down more still, to question even that.
What is “sun”? What is “east”?
🤔
Labels. Metaphors, for what exactly, I don’t know.
“It,” perhaps. “This”?
And what do we experience of this so-called sunrise?
Well, most often, nothing. (Certainly this time of year.) It’s not happening in Consciousness therefore we get nothing. Nada.
Equally, it could be happening right there, in front of us, and yet our focus is so honed in on something else, we just don’t notice it.
(You can check in with Mrs Croft to see if this kind of consciousness-blindness on my part is a real thing 😂🤣)
And even if we do “notice” it (Etymology: Proto-Indo-European “to know”) we’re still not having a direct experience of “sunrise,” we’re stuck again with our little perception-limited TV picture of it, being projected outwards into our consciousness.
The notion of which had me chuckling away to myself and “reassuring” my client that tomorrow morning there’d be:
“No sunrise for you!”
Nope. No sunrise.
Just “this.”
💝
Giles
p.s. The mind will always want to try and figure out, conceptualise and make-useful these ideas, but I don’t want that for you. Not today. I want you to be left in a feeling of not-knowingness-possibility. That’s what the Sunday Spiritual is all about.
So I’m going to finish by sharing a little post I saw on Twitter. It’s one that slows me down and puts me into this state, every time I read it. So much so that I saved it to a folder. It was from a fellow writer, who said:
“Years ago, when I was in my 20s, a bold and artistically daring older friend who has since passed on gave me what I often think was the best advice I have ever gotten. I was worrying what ‘people would think’ of a decision I had made, and she said, ‘Amanda, there is no audience.’”
😶