- April 14th, 2023, 3:35 pm
#440030
This is a discussion forum topic for the November 2022 Philosophy Book of the Month, In It Together: The Beautiful Struggle Uniting Us All.
Consider when the human you see in the mirror sleeps, and you find yourself in a dream world, walking around a small part of a vast universe that's all a dream. It's a whole universe created by a little brain, if even that brain exists. Perhaps, you look in a mirror, and see a unicorn. Perhaps, in that world, humans don't exist at all. Perhaps, in that world, unicorns are real. Perhaps, you have to see it to believe it, so you look in the mirror, and see it.
I say your life as an awake human is much more like that than you tend to realize.
In other words, when you look in a mirror and see a human, it is much more like that dream of a unicorn than you tend to realize.
To take it out of the second person, I say our life as literally awake humans is much more like that dream of a unicorn than we tend to realize.
To realize it is, in large part, what we mean we talk about so-called 'spiritual awakening'. Many awaken from being a unicorn into being a human but do not really awaken. Not spiritually, meaning not in terms of what the books calls the real you. The unreal you may be a unicorn, a human, a red-shirt-wearing person, a blue-shirt-wearing a person, or a shirtless person, or any number of things. The real you is never merely one of those things, and it's never truly trapped by the confines of thinghood.
The real you doesn't merely live inside the dream. The fictional avatar you see in the mirror may be part of you, but, in that way, you are not merely it. Instead, it's a figment of your imagination. It's a a part of you. As is the dreamy fictions of space and time. It's all a sort of dream.
The more we have honest faith in science, the more we see it.
Scientifically, the whole world you see right now while reading this is an obvious fake impossible world created by an imaginative brain inside of a dark quiet skull.
At best, your little human brain is acting like an Xbox or a PlayStation. You put one little DVD in a little machine, and suddenly a whole explorable universe appears on a little screen. The screen doesn't move; the Xbox or Playstation doesn't move; all that moves if anything is little pieces and electric signals inside the little box, containing that whole dreamy universe.
When you look up in the vast night sky at the twinkling stars, how far do you think you are really seeing? Do you think you see past your own skull? Or are you a little brain projecting a little video-game-like movie onto the inside of your own skull?
It's a trick question, of course. Physics proves there is no space and there is no time. There is no far, there is no big, and there is no small. Newtonian mechanics itself is just a figment of your imagination. In reality, the physics is all relative and timeless.
A universe with space and time is as accurate as a 2D map of Earth. On some, Greenland seems so very big; doesn't it? And, on others, it's so small. But they are all so wrong. Such utterly wrong models have magical imaginary things called forces, like gravity. Indeed, two flat earthers walking in straight parallel lines might have to invent a second special horizontal force of gravity to explain why they get closer and closer together before ultimately colliding.
Forces are illusions. Time is an illusion. Even space is an illusion. Change itself, too, is in most senses also an illusion. Playing the DVD video game doesn't really change the DVD; does it?
I asked once already, but consider the question again: When you look up in the vast night sky at the twinkling stars, how far really do you think you are seeing?
There is no right answer. All answers to that question are wrong. Really, there is no such thing as far, or farness, or time, or timeness, or even space.
The twinkling stars are no farther from you than an arm's length away baby picture in your hand of a tiny person you call you, or call your past self. Nor is it really any further from you than the baby whose picture was taken to make that picture.
You're looking at yourself. You're always and only ever looking at yourself.
Sometimes it seems so hard to find oneself--one's true self--because one looks for something different than everything else they see. But that's all there is; there is nothing different. If you look for something different, you'll never find it, but you can find yourself in what you've always seen.
It was in front of you the whole time, revealed to you in the nature of frontness itself, forwardness itself, and timeness itself.
The speed C is one second per second. Do you think it's a coincidence that your watch always seems to tick at that time? Do you think it's a coincidence that you look in a mirror and see someone or something moving through time at the speed of one second per second. It is no more so than that your nose always seems to point forward, and that the person in the mirror always seems to look directly back at you, with a nose pointing backwards. That guy or gal in the mirror always seems to have their nose on backwards; don't they? It's almost as if it's true by definition, and it kind of is; isn't it?
Appearances can be deceiving. But, nonetheless, this is true in terms of empirical appearance: It does tend to seem like your nose always points forward and like your motion is always 100% in the direction of time and 0% in the direction of space, as if you were the stationary center of a universe with real time; And it indeed seems thus like there is real time, real space, and real fowardness. As surely and illusory as your nose always points forward, your velocity in space and time from your own mystical conscious perspective is always at speed zero through space and speed C (the Constant, the so-called speed of light) through time: one second per second. In Einstein's phyics, insofar as anything can be said to move through spacetime it all moves at exactly the same speed (speed C), which is precisely why something that seems to move through space thus moves proportionally slower in time because everything goes at the same one full speed and something can't go in two directions at full speed at once. To go northwest at speed C requires North at less than speed C. You don't move through time at speed C, but rather you define this imaginary made-up thing of time as that direction you happen to see yourself as moving.
But really there is no forward and there is no time. Your nose doesn't point forward, and you don't move forward in time.
Not really, not in terms of the real you.
All that moves is a fictional avatar in a fictional world. The ending of the movie doesn't change because there is no time in which for it to change and there really is no ending, just a timeless movie that can be equally played in any direction. You are the world. You are the whole movie. At best, you are effectively looking at the inside of your own skull. More surely, the very concept of a solid skull and of there being a literal physical inside of anything at all ever, or space or time at all, is all an illusion.
It's all only as real as the unicorn you see in the mirror with unicorn eyes.
But what is undeniably and absolutely real and true is this: When you consciously look in the mirror and see those eyes--be they unicorn eyes, human eyes, or something else--you are looking at your own eyes. You are looking at yourself. You are looking at your true eternal real self, and it's the one and only self, a self with no real other. No matter where you look and what you see, you are always looking at yourself.
Accept it. Love it.
Then you will find an empowering heavenly free-spirited inner peace and true happiness so incredible and invincible and graceful that it even seems to transcend words, meaning it is practically literally indescribable.
With love,
Scott
(a.k.a. Eckhart Aurelius Hughes)
---
In It Together: The Beautiful Struggle Uniting Us All is available for purchase from all major book retailers in both ebook and hardcover format.
View on Barnes and Noble | View on Amazon | View on Books-A-Million | View on Bookshelves
Consider when the human you see in the mirror sleeps, and you find yourself in a dream world, walking around a small part of a vast universe that's all a dream. It's a whole universe created by a little brain, if even that brain exists. Perhaps, you look in a mirror, and see a unicorn. Perhaps, in that world, humans don't exist at all. Perhaps, in that world, unicorns are real. Perhaps, you have to see it to believe it, so you look in the mirror, and see it.
I say your life as an awake human is much more like that than you tend to realize.
In other words, when you look in a mirror and see a human, it is much more like that dream of a unicorn than you tend to realize.
To take it out of the second person, I say our life as literally awake humans is much more like that dream of a unicorn than we tend to realize.
To realize it is, in large part, what we mean we talk about so-called 'spiritual awakening'. Many awaken from being a unicorn into being a human but do not really awaken. Not spiritually, meaning not in terms of what the books calls the real you. The unreal you may be a unicorn, a human, a red-shirt-wearing person, a blue-shirt-wearing a person, or a shirtless person, or any number of things. The real you is never merely one of those things, and it's never truly trapped by the confines of thinghood.
The real you doesn't merely live inside the dream. The fictional avatar you see in the mirror may be part of you, but, in that way, you are not merely it. Instead, it's a figment of your imagination. It's a a part of you. As is the dreamy fictions of space and time. It's all a sort of dream.
The more we have honest faith in science, the more we see it.
Scientifically, the whole world you see right now while reading this is an obvious fake impossible world created by an imaginative brain inside of a dark quiet skull.
At best, your little human brain is acting like an Xbox or a PlayStation. You put one little DVD in a little machine, and suddenly a whole explorable universe appears on a little screen. The screen doesn't move; the Xbox or Playstation doesn't move; all that moves if anything is little pieces and electric signals inside the little box, containing that whole dreamy universe.
When you look up in the vast night sky at the twinkling stars, how far do you think you are really seeing? Do you think you see past your own skull? Or are you a little brain projecting a little video-game-like movie onto the inside of your own skull?
It's a trick question, of course. Physics proves there is no space and there is no time. There is no far, there is no big, and there is no small. Newtonian mechanics itself is just a figment of your imagination. In reality, the physics is all relative and timeless.
A universe with space and time is as accurate as a 2D map of Earth. On some, Greenland seems so very big; doesn't it? And, on others, it's so small. But they are all so wrong. Such utterly wrong models have magical imaginary things called forces, like gravity. Indeed, two flat earthers walking in straight parallel lines might have to invent a second special horizontal force of gravity to explain why they get closer and closer together before ultimately colliding.
Forces are illusions. Time is an illusion. Even space is an illusion. Change itself, too, is in most senses also an illusion. Playing the DVD video game doesn't really change the DVD; does it?
I asked once already, but consider the question again: When you look up in the vast night sky at the twinkling stars, how far really do you think you are seeing?
There is no right answer. All answers to that question are wrong. Really, there is no such thing as far, or farness, or time, or timeness, or even space.
The twinkling stars are no farther from you than an arm's length away baby picture in your hand of a tiny person you call you, or call your past self. Nor is it really any further from you than the baby whose picture was taken to make that picture.
You're looking at yourself. You're always and only ever looking at yourself.
Sometimes it seems so hard to find oneself--one's true self--because one looks for something different than everything else they see. But that's all there is; there is nothing different. If you look for something different, you'll never find it, but you can find yourself in what you've always seen.
It was in front of you the whole time, revealed to you in the nature of frontness itself, forwardness itself, and timeness itself.
The speed C is one second per second. Do you think it's a coincidence that your watch always seems to tick at that time? Do you think it's a coincidence that you look in a mirror and see someone or something moving through time at the speed of one second per second. It is no more so than that your nose always seems to point forward, and that the person in the mirror always seems to look directly back at you, with a nose pointing backwards. That guy or gal in the mirror always seems to have their nose on backwards; don't they? It's almost as if it's true by definition, and it kind of is; isn't it?
Appearances can be deceiving. But, nonetheless, this is true in terms of empirical appearance: It does tend to seem like your nose always points forward and like your motion is always 100% in the direction of time and 0% in the direction of space, as if you were the stationary center of a universe with real time; And it indeed seems thus like there is real time, real space, and real fowardness. As surely and illusory as your nose always points forward, your velocity in space and time from your own mystical conscious perspective is always at speed zero through space and speed C (the Constant, the so-called speed of light) through time: one second per second. In Einstein's phyics, insofar as anything can be said to move through spacetime it all moves at exactly the same speed (speed C), which is precisely why something that seems to move through space thus moves proportionally slower in time because everything goes at the same one full speed and something can't go in two directions at full speed at once. To go northwest at speed C requires North at less than speed C. You don't move through time at speed C, but rather you define this imaginary made-up thing of time as that direction you happen to see yourself as moving.
But really there is no forward and there is no time. Your nose doesn't point forward, and you don't move forward in time.
Not really, not in terms of the real you.
All that moves is a fictional avatar in a fictional world. The ending of the movie doesn't change because there is no time in which for it to change and there really is no ending, just a timeless movie that can be equally played in any direction. You are the world. You are the whole movie. At best, you are effectively looking at the inside of your own skull. More surely, the very concept of a solid skull and of there being a literal physical inside of anything at all ever, or space or time at all, is all an illusion.
It's all only as real as the unicorn you see in the mirror with unicorn eyes.
But what is undeniably and absolutely real and true is this: When you consciously look in the mirror and see those eyes--be they unicorn eyes, human eyes, or something else--you are looking at your own eyes. You are looking at yourself. You are looking at your true eternal real self, and it's the one and only self, a self with no real other. No matter where you look and what you see, you are always looking at yourself.
Accept it. Love it.
Then you will find an empowering heavenly free-spirited inner peace and true happiness so incredible and invincible and graceful that it even seems to transcend words, meaning it is practically literally indescribable.
With love,
Scott
(a.k.a. Eckhart Aurelius Hughes)
---
In It Together: The Beautiful Struggle Uniting Us All is available for purchase from all major book retailers in both ebook and hardcover format.
View on Barnes and Noble | View on Amazon | View on Books-A-Million | View on Bookshelves
My entire political philosophy summed up in one tweet.
"The mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master."
I believe spiritual freedom (a.k.a. self-discipline) manifests as bravery, confidence, grace, honesty, love, and inner peace.
"The mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master."
I believe spiritual freedom (a.k.a. self-discipline) manifests as bravery, confidence, grace, honesty, love, and inner peace.
Favorite Philosopher: Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
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