The Universe Within
Gregory Lewis
The world is a funny place that lives inside out and outside in. Your eyes see the outside of yourself, internally, for instance. Or your skin feels the outside world, internally. All of the senses, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling, and the sense of touch, sense the outside world, internally. We sense what is “out there” within the context of our internal sense of I.
We sense what is primarily in near proximity to us through the surface of our bodily boundaries within the near void of our minds. There is no space in our minds. There is nothing that can be said of our minds that is not really metaphor, metaphor that can describe the space of our minds. Even though the word space is used to describe the experience of our mind, it is not actually so. There is no space. There really is no existant. There is only the consciousness of an ever changing “now” and it is related to an ever changing “me”.
Take for instance the concept of “now”. When is the now? Every second is a new now. Every division of a second is a now. What is the now? The past has disappeared. The future does not yet exist. The now cannot be named. Now cannot be fixed and labeled. Now is a concept, rather than a true existence.
As well, who am I? What is me? I am here in this room. That much seems to be true. It also seems that I am this body and internal awareness. We are not only the body. A dead corpse may be said to be “so and so” but we no longer consider “so and so” to be existant. We consider them to be deceased and to be no more. The corpse will be taken apart by whatever forces of nature act upon it and too will cease to be. We no longer consider a corpse a personage. We no longer consider a corpse to be a human being. The corpse of myself is not me. Moreover I am the only one who can even somewhat identify my mind. What I call “myself”, is a composite of the complex of my mind and body in a functioning form. We do not know really by external observation how these parts, the body and the awareness of the body, are related. We can observe ionic connection between nervous tissue that seems indicative of the nature of the function of the impulse. It should seem obvious that the awareness of the body and mind is a function of these reactions. Awareness it seems, is the product of electro-chemical impulses.
If you look more deeply there may be a quibble that one could make with the theory of chemical reactions producing awareness. I do agree that electrochemical impulses are what transmit information about our current world state to our awareness. What I cannot explain in this is how electrochemical reactions become the elaborate multidimensional display of sensation that we call existence. There needs to be something intervening between the nerve impulses and a representational awareness. There needs to be an awareness that maintains the integrity of the physical system in awareness. This therefore demands that there is a level of actuation that is aware of the body and the body as a cognizing instrument on a higher level, where the body is conceived as such and so. Moreover this relative integrity of body and personal awareness is maintained even in times of sleep, unconscious and coma. The inner awareness is cognizant of the physical body and maintains it in relatively similar shape, in accordance with the circumstances of the body.
What happens when we are interlocked with the world? Our eyes see, our ears hear, our nose smells, our mouths taste, and our skin feels. These senses all transmit their sensations to the central nervous system where it is processed by the complete body/brain. complex Some sensations do indeed cause reactions that are much too fast to have been processed and responded to by transmission and response by the brain. They have to have been processed and responded to more locally, perhaps as distant as the spinal cord. Note however that external stimulus must be converted to nerve impulses. To do this the original information that caused a nervous transmission must be limited to the information of only the type of information of the sense channel(s) it is using. There must be filtering of information to what is appropriate to each channel. At the interface of the channel with the external world, the sensory stimulus is converted to a basic nerve impulse type appropriate to the sense channel type. For instance, the rods and cones of the eye retina convert photon input into impulses representing forms and colors. But the eyes do not perceive directly. They do indeed convert light to representational nerve impulses to form a frame image. Then each eyes’ nerve bundle splits and the optic nerves transmit each eye “image” to both hemispheres of the brain. Is it possible that we could be missing something with a nervous system filtering and picking up only a small part of radioactive wavelengths available to our eyes. A similar process takes place in all the perceivable vibratory wavelengths that our body can sense. The sensation at the interfacing sense organ causes nervous impulses to be generated, and an abstract of the sensation is constructed from these sensations in our brain/body complex and is recognized as the reality we experience. But, it is not the reality. At best it is a simulation of a limited subset of stimulus that is the “reality” of what we are experiencing. It is a simulation within our awareness. The fact that it is a simulation should have us asking questions. The implication is that the entire world that we experience is a simulation, and it is.
As a personage in this world I, like you have a body and I am aware of “myself” as myself. I am aware of myself and of the world around me. But my perceptions are not your perceptions. Even though we may be viewing the same, for instance, coffee mug, my perception of the mug is my own and your perception is your own. We do not even have the same view of the mug. Lets say the “coffee mug” is sitting on a table in front of us both, you the reader and I the writer. Immediately we must notice that we do not occupy the same physical space. Therefore, “you” and “I” are looking at a completely different view of the coffee mug. I might, for instance see more of the handle of the mug than is afforded at the angle at which you are viewing. And if we were to trade places and actually be able to look at the mug from exactly the same angle and declination, the time at which we view this mug must be different and not simultaneous. We probably do not coincide on a subjective level on the view of the coffee mug. I may be thinking how I might have slept more last night while you may be thinking you have drunk too much coffee today already, or whatever it is that we feel while viewing the “coffee mug”, or whatever we are viewing, with someone. So you see, we would differ on three aspects at least, the physical perspective, the temporal perspective and our own emotional valence toward the coffee mug, and the contents of each of our minds is to each of us an individual experience.
We do inhabit only our own space of mind. Although we inhabit a common world with others, our unique place in that world is ours alone. Our experience of ourselves is ours alone. Even our experience of others is ours alone. We may share common perceptions of another with another (of the second or third party) but we never have the exact same experience. For almost the same reasons as why we do not exactly share the perception of “the coffee mug”, we do not share a common experience with respect to each other. We do not share the same experience, no matter how similar.
You will not experience anything outside of your own self. Even if you were to meet God, you would not experience God outside of your own experience. Nor do you experience yourself as outside of your own experience. The entirety of your experience is within your own experience. t is somewhat a convoluted statement. It is tautological.
So our experience being entirely within our own awareness, lets get back to an earlier theme we have the standard 5 senses and the mind, eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin. There is something that allows us to sense weight and something that senses gravity, these are not included in the traditional schema of 5 senses. There may be other abilities of the senses. The mind, for instance, recognizes and distinguishes, emotes, and reasons as well as being the basis on which our self is posited. Getting back to nervous impulses, our nervous impulses simulate the experience which we are aware of. They break down and recreate an experience in our awareness that we call our reality. The key to this is that they recreate an experience. These experiences define our physical world. They are simulations, however. It is not necessary that they are actually “there”, “out there somewhere”, but that they are experienced as “out there”. In a more absolute sense these experiences are experienced in the mind. The only experience that we can possibly have is within our mind. Implicitly, the experience of our body, cells, DNA, atoms, subatomic particles and megaformations such as galaxies and the universe. All of it is only a simulation within our minds.
That experience occurs only in the mind cannot be proven or disproven. We say that we both see a coffee mug, therefore the coffee mug exists. This we say is an objective proof of the reality of the coffee mug. However the contradiction that comes in is that though I experience you and the coffee mug, both are experiences within our minds. Factually, there is no objective referent that exists external to our mind. The so, called, “objective” witness to experience exists in our own mind. There actually is no objective referant.
Things exist as their own entities. Molecules must have a sense of integrity as a molecule, even though the awareness may be a more mechanistic awareness of electromagnetism and valences and the neutrality of complete electron shells or the electric attraction of an incomplete electron shell. There is a molecular formation and an awareness appropriate to its entity, the recognition of positive, negative and neutral electromagnetic charge. That is a paradigm common to the formation of different elemental atoms. They are stable in one configuration and unstable in other formations. Proton counts determine the type of the element and electromagnetic attractive properties, along with the electron count. Proton, neutron and electron counts determine the atomic stability and electromagnetic attractive properties. That each element occupies a distinct place in the periodic classification, and has unique properties suggests that perhaps there is an awareness operating within the formation of each element.
That there are phenomenon that are operating in the same arena as ourselves, which are beyond the normal unaided senses in order to be aware of, suggests that there is a meta level to the mind beyond this level of awareness of objects and beings of our worlds. Something holds our collective awareness such that we perceive similar experiences. The coffee mug that you see is as much in common with the coffee mug that I see, such that we agree in the general idea that there is a coffee mug. This is Jung’s collective unconscious, this is Buddhist, karma held in common.
I want to pursue the idea of a self again. What is the self? Where is the self? We undoubtedly experience a self. That is our ostensible experience. Our self is considered to be our body first of all. But if a surgeon excised a part of one, does one call that myself? The self of the body is composed of parts but these parts cannot be called the self because a self remains after a part of the body is taken from it. Nor can the experiences of the self define the self. A completely blind person cannot perceive form, for instance. Yet the blind individual is a self. So the senses compose a self but are not essential in themselves to a self. And the self that we compute and feel, the psychological self, is not composed of one identity. An emotion such as joy evokes an identity that is different from the identity evoked by anger, as example. Each being, situation, and circumstance in our life evokes identities that we act from, and guide our thought toward oneself. This further ideation is what we identify as oneself in the present tense and becomes further identification of the self. There is no, one, identification that we can call our self. There is no complete set of ideations of identity because we continuously are forming new identities, therefore there can be no group of identities we can call the self. Time and space are interrelated in that they both are measures of change and differential There is no fixed now, but only an approximation of now. Space is defined by its objects, and the hallmark of space is the differential of prominence of objects with shifts in awareness. So, we can find nothing that is an absolute self, or an absolute world. What is labeled “the self” and “the world” are terms we use loosely, as a reference point for sums of approximations.
It is therefore somewhat of a delusion to chase those things of this world, but one acts in this world because one is part of this world, not that it is an absolute reality, but because it is.
