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Yesterday we started with experience: what many people feel as unease, dissolution, or a loss of stability. Today I add one perspective that can help us understand this more deeply – without making the experience any less real.
First, an important clarification:
That the world is representation does not mean that experience is an illusion. Experience is always real as experience. The question here is an ontological one – that is, what the world is at its foundation, not how it is experienced.
A familiar example is dreams.
When you dream, the experience is completely real while it is happening. Feelings, fear, and joy are real. Only when you wake up do you see that what you experienced was not reality as it actually is. The experience was real – the ontology was different from what you thought.
Or the sun in the sky:
It appears to rise in the east and set in the west. The experience is correct. Yet we know it is the Earth that rotates. How something is experienced, and what it is in its foundation, are not always the same.
A third, completely everyday image is a map.
A map or a GPS is very useful – but it is not the terrain. If the map is outdated, you can follow it perfectly and still end up in the wrong place. Then it is not you who are wrong, but the map that no longer matches.
That is also how it is with the world.
Everything we encounter – people, money, institutions, the body, nature – always appears as experience in consciousness. There is no access to “things in themselves” outside of experience. In this technical sense, the entire world is representation: as it is experienced, not necessarily as it is in its ontological foundation.
Here is an important concept: causality. Causality simply means what we believe comes first and what follows after – what is cause, and what is effect.
We are used to thinking that the world works from the outside in: that the physical exists first, and that consciousness, thoughts, and understanding arise as a consequence of that. In our spiritual perspective, the order is the opposite.
Causality is reversed:
It is changes in understanding, meaning, and representations that shape how the world is experienced – and only then what we interpret as “external” changes. Normally this happens slowly and imperceptibly. Now it is happening rapidly and collectively.
When many people at the same time stop carrying the same “maps” of reality, the world loses its former stability. Not because experience is wrong, but because the representations that carried it no longer hold.
That is what many people are feeling now.
Question:
What in your life still feels completely real – but no longer carries the same meaning as before?
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PS. Yesterday someone expressed skepticism toward the word spirituality, because it is used in religion, sects, and manipulation. My answer was this: You can use the word “idealism” instead of spirituality. Idealism is a philosophical tradition in Western culture that goes back thousands of years, which was steamrolled by science – but which is now coming back in “full speed.”
You can also replace the word with “consciousness.” We are all conscious, so it is difficult to claim that consciousness/experience is something strange or special.
I agree that the word spirituality is far too diffuse; it covers any kind of kooky experience and has no stable inner core—everyone uses it however they want. And yet: spirituality is, like idealism, an even older and continuous tradition. And if you go into this material, you find that there are great similarities and that there actually is a core; among other things, that the world is an experience and nothing material (topic tomorrow). What we are trying to do here is to sort out what this is really about.
We will use all three words “spirituality,” “idealism,” and “consciousness” going forward. On one level they mean the same thing: EXPERIENCE, but each of them also has its own precise meaning – and we will return to that.
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