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I was explicitly taught that everyone thought that the world was flat until Columbus, etc.
Then again, I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian school, so scientific/historical accuracy wasn't exactly a high priority.
I was taught that as well. Public elementary school that was very progressive despite being in a very politically conservative area. Lots of science. Which included Pluto being a planet since it was considered a planet back then. We learned about dinosaurs and archaeology. Took field trips to science and history museums. Anything Bible-based had to be taught during Religious Release (off school property) time.
Last edited by DewDropInn; 09-10-2015 at 05:05 PM..
Most often said by the well-fed and comfortable. Life is real.
I've never seen the practical application. If one begins by accepting the premise that all is illusion, then what? If you attempted to live life as though all were an illusion, it would not be long before some lethal reality corrected that viewpoint.
I've never seen the practical application. If one begins by accepting the premise that all is illusion, then what? If you attempted to live life as though all were an illusion, it would not be long before some lethal reality corrected that viewpoint.
We may ask, what are the pros and cons of accepting the premise 'all is real'.
1. The pro is accepting 'all (including the self) is real' is a default and that will facilitate the survival and well-being of the individual and therefrom the collective, i.e. human species.
2. The cons of accepting 'all (including the self) is real' arise from the inherent default of the majority [not all] to be possessive of that which is 'real' and permanent. This possessiveness, clinging_ness and attachment to 'real' things give rise to all sort of human sufferings. What result are the battles and wars between individuals and nations.
What is worse is the acceptance of the self as real and permanent to the extent the majority do not want to let go and accept the reality of inevitable mortality. To retain that real self to exist forever, humans invent religions [theistic and non-theistic] and the results are religious related evils and religion-inspired evils and violence [especially from Islam].
This con is also a threat to the well being of humanity.
Then ask, what are the pros and cons of accepting the premise 'all is an illusion'.
3. The pro of accepting 'all is illusion' will facilitate a solution to the problems arising in 2 above. If all is allusion there should be nothing to fight for, i.e. they are all illusions.
In any case 'all is illusion' can be logically proven starting from empirical grounds.
4. The cons of accepting 'all is illusion' will lead to an indifference to life and thus a threat to the well being of the individual and humanity.
From the above one will note there are pros and cons to either 'all (including the self) is real' or 'all is an illusion'
To optimize the dilemma, it would be effective to accept reality as dualistic, e.g. recognizing the existence of both contradicting perspectives at the 'same' [almost] time. See the dualistic image below.
It has to be almost at the same time because the 'Law of contradiction' allow for contradictory terms to exist at the same time.
The way out of this is to toggle the contradictory perspective at the speed of thought.
Therefore the optimal action in life is to accept the 'pro' of each perspective in accordance to the circumstances on hand at the speed of thought.
Whenever one feels the anxieties and hopelessness of inevitable mortality, then invoke and shift one's focus to the perspective that life is merely an illusion.
Where in normal circumstance one is optimizing life, then focus on the perspective that all is real.
Therefore the optimal action in life is to accept the 'pro' of each perspective in accordance to the circumstances on hand at the speed of thought.
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Rather than argue, I propose a field test. We shall stand on the side of the freeway at rush hour. I, believing the passing traffic to be real, will cautiously remain on the side of the road. You, recognizing that the seeming onrush of vehicles is but an illusion, step out into the traffic to prove that it is but a product of our imagination.
Rather than argue, I propose a field test. We shall stand on the side of the freeway at rush hour. I, believing the passing traffic to be real, will cautiously remain on the side of the road. You, recognizing that the seeming onrush of vehicles is but an illusion, step out into the traffic to prove that it is but a product of our imagination.
Well ... I'm not particularly tracking his argument either but he DID say that you switch as appropriate between the two conflicting views (reality is real, reality is illusory) according to circumstances. I don't think he's arguing that you pretend reality is illusory in that situation.
The real question is whether you should EVER pretend that it's illusory, and closely related to that: are we any good at choosing the best way to regard reality, anyway?
In any case I don't think literally regarding your reality as illusory is really what the ancients had in mind. What is illusory is not reality itself, it is our framing / interpretation / attachment to reality, and our seeking / groping / clinging to that interpretation in preference to how reality actually works.
In any case I don't think literally regarding your reality as illusory is really what the ancients had in mind. What is illusory is not reality itself, it is our framing / interpretation / attachment to reality, and our seeking / groping / clinging to that interpretation in preference to how reality actually works.
That isn't life as an illusion, that is just getting reality wrong by replacing it with an illusion.
Or is the whole lesson supposed to be.....sometimes we mis-perceive things.?
My suspicion is that there is a tendency to give ancient wisdom more weight than it merits simply because it comes packaged as ancient wisdom. Buddha was just as full of the brown juice as the rest of us, one more dude making guesses.
For example, how old is the universe and how big is it?
If you were an astronomer in the early 1920's, you would believed that the universe was static. You would have thought that the universe was infinitely old and that it was approximately 300,000 light years across. You would have thought that the Milky Way comprised everything in the universe.
In 1929, Edwin Hubble, by discovering that there were other galaxies beyond the Milky Way and by measuring their distances away from us, discovered that the universe is actually expanding and also determined that the universe had an age, which he estimated to be about 2 billion years old.
By the 1950's astronomers Walter Baade, and Allan Sandage, found that Hubble’s distances to galaxies had been very much underestimated and gave estimates of the age of the universe as between 10 - 15 billion years.
Up until just 2013 you'd have been forgiven for arguing on here that the agreed age of the universe is now 13.7 billion years old and 94 billion light years across. That's until The Plank Space Observatory released it's updated cosmic background radiation map and gave us a new and improved age of the observable universe as 13.8 billion years (give or take about 37 million years).
In fact, this only gives us the size of the observable universe. The actual universe may well be infinitely big.
Albert Einstein himself did plenty of observing, measuring and analysing, but up until 1931 he thought that the universe was static, as was the accepted view in the 1920's. He'd already published his theories on relativity by then.
The point is that what you think you know to be true today, may not be true tomorrow.
Yes. That's something that needs to be kept in mind and it is perhaps something that is most misunderstood in the religion -debate (which is the only reason to be discussing it here instead of the philosophy section). Einstein's findings of relativity were right, have been verified and form an important part of physics. But he wasn't right about everything. And the main problems he caused for himself were assumptions that he preferred to believe on a kind of Faith. Order in the Universe. "God does not play dice." Of course he didn't know that - he preferred to believe it and spent the rest of his life trying to find a way around quantum. His science was right; his personal preferences were wrong.
That alone is good reason - while he is admired today, rightly - to see that the method is what counts. Pronouncements by authority figures do not, necessarily, carry weight (1) simply on that basis. That is why attempts by theist apologists to use authority, real, misused or faked, to suit their book and,when it doesn't, to dismiss it as fallible human knowledge, if not guesswork, fantasy and lies invented by the atheist -controlled scientific closed shop...I swear this is what they think...to turn people away from Jesus, are totally misconceived.
(1) how often do we have to say that we don't have to agree with everything that Dawkins says? I doubt that he would want us to.
Last edited by TRANSPONDER; 09-11-2015 at 12:21 PM..
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The Magic of Reality: How do we know what's really true?
