Defining Thoughts. What Is Map And What Is Territory?

[Purple Jay]

Lately during meditation I've been contemplating on thoughts, emotions and physical phenomena. Asking questions like "What is real and what is not real?" Here is my (humble) take on thoughts so far. Do not take my word for it, this is just me sharing observations. Keep in mind that this is from a non-enlightened perspective. I am not a spiritual teacher.

Are thoughts real? Yes they are but it seems that they are not the reality they represent. Thoughts can occur, they are arisings just like you, me and everything else is this world. Experientially, they arise out of nothing and then they end. But what are they really? If I think of an apple, does the apple exist? No it doesn't, the thought of the apple is what exists. This applies to every physical phenomenon imagined. The image and/or understanding of something is not the thing itself. It's just a model. Whether that model is accurate or not has nothing to do with whether it is a model or not. Accurate or inaccurate, useful or useless, any thought about what I call "outer world" (any physical arising) is modelling. A new question then came to mind. A question which I encourage you to ask yourself.

Can I come up with one single thought that is not modelling? So far, I haven't been able to. Regardless of whether the thought is about a physical arising or not, it seems that all thought is just more models, concepts, inner imagery, inner sounds, language system, ways of understanding reality etc. It's just content imitating other content. Mental projection. Just like me trying to understand my thoughts is actually me trying to create models of my own modelling. It's the mind drawing a map that explains how its other maps work.

Do not confuse the map for the territory. Thoughts are maps. Sure, the map is real, the map exists. The map can be read and understood, it can be experienced. We can even be trapped inside the map (dogma?). But it's just a map. No matter what, it's just a map. Deriving our ultimate sense of reality from thought is a mistake because thought can never actually be the reality that it is mirroring.

So we shouldn't take thoughts seriously? Generally speaking, no. Thoughts are great for sending people to the moon but... when looking for ultimate truth you'd be better off putting your faith in an acorn. Here is a sentence you can use to determine for yourself whether something is ultimately real: "If it doesn't exist when I'm not thinking about it, it can't be real." Not a lot of things survive this test. Even your world view. Even your own idea of yourself.

I hope this was in some way clarifying. For now I'll leave concepts such as beliefs, opinions and emotions untouched. Have a great day! - Jay

 

P.S. If you find any inaccuracies, please let me know. For the sake of the reader's clarity, I shall take your suggestions into consideration.

Edited March 6, 2016 by Purple Jay

[Costa]

Your thoughts and your senses are not reality. 

True reality cannot be seen because we have very limitted perception of it. To give an example, we only see about 3% of the  electromagnetic spectrum, all other things we cannot see, or sense. 

We interact with reality like we interact with our computer, with an interface. Something to help us make sense of this, but we are essencialy blind to it. To take the computer example, most people dont understand how pressing a key makes something apear on a screen.

This is the nature of our relation with reality. 

[theinevitableandi]

1 hour ago, Costa said:

Your thoughts and your senses are not reality. 

True reality cannot be seen because we have very limitted perception of it. To give an example, we only see about 3% of the  electromagnetic spectrum, all other things we cannot see, or sense. 

We interact with reality like we interact with our computer, with an interface. Something to help us make sense of this, but we are essencialy blind to it. To take the computer example, most people dont understand how pressing a key makes something apear on a screen.

This is the nature of our relation with reality. 

You are REALITY! not in reality or a part of it .. you are it ! 

[Leo Gura]

2 hours ago, Costa said:

Your thoughts and your senses are not reality. 

True reality cannot be seen because we have very limitted perception of it.

No, thoughts and senses ARE the only reality. They literally ARE what reality is composed of. The idea of an external reality outside of immediate perception is just that, an idea.

Thoughts are real, but the stories they tell are not. The existence of an external reality is one such story and should be treated with much skepticism.

Maps are the stories thoughts tell. The territory is raw sensory perceptions, including the sensation of thoughts (but excluding their stories).

In addition to the above, the territory is also your true existential nature: consciousness, pure empty awareness, Nothingness, and/or Absolute Truth. There are many labels we can use for it. But this awareness is not a sensory perception or a thought or an object at all.

[Purple Jay]

@Leo Gura This is what I've arrived at as well. Reality explores itself through thoughts and senses. That's what life is for! Admittedly, I haven't figured out how emotions play into this quite yet though. Hopefully, clarity will be found on that soon.

[vizual]

51 minutes ago, Purple Jay said:

@Leo Gura This is what I've arrived at as well. Reality explores itself through thoughts and senses. That's what life is for! Admittedly, I haven't figured out how emotions play into this quite yet though. Hopefully, clarity will be found on that soon.

Emotions follow thought. Without thought there can be no emotions

[Mulky]

To say something isn't real is to simply say it is not something other than what it is.  Everything is real, it's just not something other than what it is.  A thought is real, it's just not anything other than a thought.  A thought about a chair is real, just as itself, but it's not anything else, it's not a chair.  When people say a thought isn't real, that simply serves to not give a mistaken idea of it as something else, it's just a thought, and never anything else.  even if i imagine something wierd in my  mind, it's real as whatever an imagined thing is, but that's it, it's not also something else that you can sense percieve without thought.

[Leo Gura]

@Mulky Correct

It helps a lot to practice mindfulness meditation on thoughts themselves, so they can be seen as exactly what they are, and not their story.

[Electron]

@Purple Jay But you gotta appreciate the detail to which the thoughts map the reality. Its astounding. The people, the objects ,,they almost feel real in the mind. Maybe that's what fools people to think of these images of the things in the reality as the the reality itself. 

[Costa]

@theinevitableandi of course, i am reality, i was speaking about our fist person perception.

[Costa]

21 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

No, thoughts and senses ARE the only reality. They literally ARE what reality is composed of. The idea of an external reality outside of immediate perception is just that, an idea.

Thoughts are real, but the stories they tell are not. The existence of an external reality is one such story and should be treated with much skepticism.

Maps are the stories thoughts tell. The territory is raw sensory perceptions, including the sensation of thoughts (but excluding their stories).

In addition to the above, the territory is also your true existential nature: consciousness, pure empty awareness, Nothingness, and/or Absolute Truth. There are many labels we can use for it. But this awareness is not a sensory perception or a thought or an object at all.

I understand and value direct experience but i dont think you understand what i mean. 

Let us leave aside the stories, because they are not reality. 

What i said was that we cannot even start to understand true reality, because it is not accessible to our perception. I don´t mean an ´"external reality outside of immediate perception", the example i gave is very clear: a computer is inside our perception but the processes that make it work are not. 

I believe you say this in one of your videos Leo, that reality is outside our grasp. I am saying the same here. 

[Galyna]

But can we really separate Reality from observer? @Costa

I do not think so....Reality does not exist without observer. 

[FindingPeace]

12 hours ago, Galyna said:

But can we really separate Reality from observer? @Costa

I do not think so....Reality does not exist without observer. 

I agree with this. We can suppose that there is a reality outside of our interpretation of that reality. Afterall, what our conscious-awareness experiences is an interpretation of our sensory information processed through the fog of our neural nets. That suggests that something 'more real' exists outside of our perceptable limits, and that everything we experience is not reality itself but a sensory approximation.

But the other way to look at it is this: experience itself, is reality as we know it. Afterall, our experience - that experience that the concsious-awareness is perceiving, is the only thing that is real to the conscious-awareness. So that equates to reality. Which leads to the very point: if there was no observer then there is no reality.

This is why I find science so funny. It claims to be using objective, impirical observation to 'define' reality and how it works. But since our reallity is only an interpretation of the 'real' reality then all science is doing is observing and defining the interpretation as we experience it. Which is sort of silly yet, at the same time perfectly reasonable since the experiential reality is the only reality there is.

 

[Purple Jay]

@Sigma ...which is something that can help you be more forgiving. ^^ The human mind is miraculous, yes. There is nothing good or bad about thoughts. They just are exactly what they are (but not what they portray).

[Electron]

On 3/6/2016 at 1:00 AM, Purple Jay said:

Are thoughts real?

I think thoughts and stories both are equally real as the external reality. The only difference is in their quality i.e, a change in the manifested world inside the mind doesn't changes the external reality. Maybe that's why this internal reality is labeled as an illusion. As no matter what you do in this fairy land you are not going to produce any change in the external world ,,which I think most teens today are stuck with, and that's why they are very poor results maker.

[Costa]

17 hours ago, Galyna said:

But can we really separate Reality from observer? @Costa

I do not think so....Reality does not exist without observer. 

I do not know.  But at this moment,  we cannot understand reality in the way some people think we can. 

1º because we are part of this reality and so we are reality classifying itself has reality, using words. 

2º because we know that the world extends beyond our perception, and is probably infinite, so how can we understand this concept on infinity with our brain that is just one small part of it? 

[Costa]

@FindingPeace I like what you said but i think we can be certain that the is an infinite reality outside our perception, this is very easy to know.  

There are many electromagnetic waves that we use that we cannot see , radio,  microwave, ultraviolet, infrared .. We use this in our everyday life, and we dont see them. 

What about our perception of time and space? what is time and space? General relativity states that this is not what we perceive. And this is also demonstrated and we use this everyday with GPS for example. 

Science does not claim to explain nothing deep, but some of it must be right, because we type words on the computer and other people can read them. we comunicate at light speed.

WITHIN THE LIMITS OF OUR PERCEPTION SCIENCE WORKS.

All this "first person experience" is fine to understand ourselves to some degree, but " reality" outside ourselves? do not think so. 

In the face of infinity (all of reality), we are not much better than little monkeys playing with our words. 

[Galyna]

13 hours ago, FindingPeace said:

I agree with this. We can suppose that there is a reality outside of our interpretation of that reality. Afterall, what our conscious-awareness experiences is an interpretation of our sensory information processed through the fog of our neural nets. That suggests that something 'more real' exists outside of our perceptable limits, and that everything we experience is not reality itself but a sensory approximation.

But the other way to look at it is this: experience itself, is reality as we know it. Afterall, our experience - that experience that the concsious-awareness is perceiving, is the only thing that is real to the conscious-awareness. So that equates to reality. Which leads to the very point: if there was no observer then there is no reality.

This is why I find science so funny. It claims to be using objective, impirical observation to 'define' reality and how it works. But since our reallity is only an interpretation of the 'real' reality then all science is doing is observing and defining the interpretation as we experience it. Which is sort of silly yet, at the same time perfectly reasonable since the experiential reality is the only reality there is.

 

Dear FindingPeace, thank you for your feedback, what do you think about Quantum Mechanics though? I watched and read about some breakthroughs made in this area, and I was stunned how much they go in sync with Buddhism. Only now scientific world is discovering something that was well known by people long time ago. I will need to upload some videos here.

 

Let me quote something here that I am contemplating right now:

C=hf

“As De Broglie’s equations apply to all matter, we can fundamentally establish that C equals HF, where C stand for consciousness, H for the constant of Planck, and F for frequency. C is responsible for what we experience as the now, a quantized or minimum unit of an interaction. The sum of all moments C up to the current moment is what shapes our concept of life”.

As far as I understand this, there is no, so called past at all, just an illusion. Reality is always a new born of Now. What is memory? Illusion? What is hard for me to understand is how come that we have a linear perception of time? If this reality just popped up right now, just right now, with the illusion of the past and future, of course, then there is nothing left at all, just this current moment. But how does the shift happen? That is what I wonder. The shift from existence to non-existence? Because if there is always Now.....well I can not grasp this,  now is WHAT IT IS, my mind wants to create something beyond now. Also is there such thing as non-existence? Lots of sources say that non-existence does not exist. Talking about it makes me trapped. I want to move, but there is certain feeling that I am enclosed in the moment of Now, like sitting in the jar without any ability to come outside. You can not really break the glass. That is making "me" small. 

Thank you  .

Edited March 9, 2016 by Galyna

[Galyna]

@Costa

 "because we know that the world extends beyond our perception" - we do not know this, that is the point. 

[FindingPeace]

14 hours ago, Costa said:

Science does not claim to explain nothing deep, but some of it must be right

I think science is a useful tool, to a point. And yes, it works, and serves a purpose. The problem is that science now is trying to get in to the nitty-gritty of what reality is and how it works. I find it funny that as a species we are arogant enough to believe that we have the capacity to even understand reality. But it's even more funny when you consider that we can only analyse our own interpretation of it and not reality itself. So it's a futile pursuit. I used to be really into science but have begun to see the limitations of it and the fact that so much of it is only theory and models and not direct experience or truth.

7 hours ago, Galyna said:

what do you think about Quantum Mechanics though?

We can't see atoms and sub-atomic 'particles'. Or energy fields, or photons, or em radiation. Or strings or quarks. We can only theorise about and model these things. We don't even know what they are or even that they really exist. Afterall, they are only a part of the illusion of our interpretation of reality.

I watched a few tv documentaries recently about quantum science. It makes me laugh. Scientists arguing over the theories and models that may or may not prove that something may or may not exist and how it might work. The thing that got me was this idea that light photons can be either a particle or a wave depending on the application and that light behaves differently when being observed than when it isn't. I can't help but see the nonsense to it. Perhaps light isn't a particle or a wave. Those are just human concepts. Models we created for our convenience. But those models no longer work in this context. Maybe light is something else that we can't even comprehend as yet. Maybe we don't even have the ability to comprehend it. Maybe what we are seeing is the limit of our own perception and interpretation of reality. But scientists don't seem to acknowledge this fact, they just press on in ignorance as those they can and will find the answers to everything.

The fact that we perceive a three-dimensional reality may even be an illusion. There is talk that reality is more akin to a holographic projection from a flat surface. Maybe. Maybe not. It's probably stranger than we can even conceptualise with our limited neural net brains and our limited sensory inputs.

I think there will come a point (if it hasn't come already) where we can't get the answers we seem so desperate to find. We are just a biological entity, a part of reality itself, trying to analyse reality itself from the confines of our biological being. There are limits to that. Limits we seem to be ignorant of.

7 hours ago, Galyna said:

As far as I understand this, there is no, so called past at all, just an illusion. Reality is always a new born of Now. What is memory? Illusion? What is hard for me to understand is how come that we have a linear perception of time? If this reality just popped up right now, just right now, with the illusion of the past and future, of course, then there is nothing left at all, just this current moment. But how does the shift happen?

We only have a linear perception of reality because we have memory. If we had no memory then we could only exist in the present moment. Memory is illusion. It's a collection of experiences. A collation of present moments. Time itself is just an illusion really. It is the perception of change. If everything was static then would there be any time? You only perceive the passage of time because you have a point of reference to observe changes. Usually thoughts. The constant flow of thoughts produces the perception of time. Have you ever found when meditating that when you quieten your mind you lose awareness of the passage of time? If you had not thoughts at all then how would you perceive time?

For us there are always changes occuring to give us a sense of time. Biological events within us - breathing, heart-beat, sensations, hunger, tiredness, aches and pains. Then there are external changes - sunlights, movement, a ticking clock, weather etc. All of these things give us a sense of the passage of time. They produce change.

I think the other thing is that our brains can't process raw present-moment data. They have to collate all the layers of sensory input and create a context out of them. Create a story, a description. It occurs to me that it is only our conscious awareness that can perceive this description though and produce the sense of time.

Edited March 9, 2016 by FindingPeace