18-09-2013, 09:55 AM
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Is Reality an Illusion?
Regarding the misconceptions by many about the "illusion of reality" I would like to share a couple of excerpts from the brilliant book "The Tree of Knowledge" by Alvin Boyd Kuhn.
Quote:
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...They knew that every tree, bush, insect, worm, beast, every tumbling rill upon the hillside, every cloud, snowflake, mist and rainfall, was each in its way a visible delineation of cosmic principle. For these processes and creations were themselves the outward visible manifestation of the Soul of the Universe that was working to give itself concrete expression in myriads of variant forms. They were themselves truth come alive in the actual world. They were Universal Spirit’s ideas that were now crystallized in material form in the outer world. They were God’s archetypal ideas concreted in atomic matter, as an architect’s ideas become substantialized in brick, mortar, wood, stone and iron.
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Quote:
When nature tells a story it can not be false, it can not lead the mind astray. Nature can tell nothing but the truth, because it is truth itself come to view in the actual world. Philosophers have argued for ages whether the actual things such as trees, rocks, streams, are real things, or only the appearance of real things. The whole visible world of things may be an illusion of man’s mind, they contend. The obvious truth is that these things are indeed the appearance of real things, for they have emerged from the invisible world of noumenon or divine thought and made their appearance in this outer world of actuality. They were not, however, mere appearance in the sense of being an unreal semblance or ghost or shadow of reality, as has so generally been the way of describing them. They were the forms of reality itself, arrived at actualization in our world. Philosophy needs to make this vital correction in its thinking. Anything that is must be real. The philosophical dispute over reality or illusion is only a matter of relativity, contingent upon the level of consciousness that is present to evaluate reality.
Anything is real to that level of consciousness that can cognize it, but real for that level and not for other levels. A radio wave at eight hundred is real for the receiving instrument set to catch that frequency. It is not real for a different set of the dial. Man—and the philosophers—had better settle this question of reality on the basis of naïve acceptance, that our experience here is real. This world is real, terribly real, for us. It may not be real for cherubim and seraphim; but that should not mislead us, as it has done some misguided “spiritual” religionists in our own day and all past days, into thinking we can treat this world as unreal. Along that ideological path lie the whitened bones of many a wrecked personality, philosophically and psychologically speaking.
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Any thoughts at all on the matter are welcome.
~Naddread~
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