Are our visualizations in your minds as real as direct experience from our senses?

[Holygrail]

Leo keeps saying that thoughts aren't real, they're imagination, but isn't the present moment also imagination? whats the difference?

[Batman]

I think you might be confusing between the Now and experience (mind). They are not the same, although experience (Mind) is a limited form of the Now.

Your experience is not what is absolutely true. It is Mind, which was designed (or 'imagined') for the purpose of survival. It is only "real" within the reality (or prism) of self-survival and relative existence, not absolute reality.

Mind is a subset, expression, and a realization of possibility within Consciousness, and so is a limited form of it. So, in that sense, you might say that experience (or Mind) is pure imagination, yes. But I sense the the word "imagination" may have negative connotation, so I would stick with a limited form of Consciousness. Unfortunately, even the most precise words are merely representations of Consciousness. The dream analogy might help in reconciling this, given that the substance of the dream is the dreamer's Mind, and so the dream is, in a sense, an imagination of the Mind.

[GreenWoods]

1 hour ago, Holygrail said:

Leo keeps saying that thoughts aren't real, they're imagination, but isn't the present moment also imagination? whats the difference?

No difference. Thoughts and visualisations are just as real like stuff you see or hear like a chair or a bird. Both direct experience. Both imagination. 

A thought or a concept is real, it exists. But the thing that the concept describes / points to, isn't real.

[TheSelf]

1 hour ago, Holygrail said:

Leo keeps saying that thoughts aren't real, they're imagination, but isn't the present moment also imagination? whats the difference?

I don't think he ever said that, thoughts and imaginations are as real as everything else in your consciousness.

An imaginary apple in your mind is literally as real as a physical one.

[BipolarGrowth]

25 minutes ago, GreenWoods said:

No difference. Thoughts and visualisations are just as real like stuff you see or hear like a chair or a bird. Both direct experience. Both imagination. 

A thought or a concept is real, it exists. But the thing that the concept describes / points to, isn't real.

 

14 minutes ago, m0hsen said:

I don't think he ever said that, thoughts and imaginations are as real as everything else in your consciousness.

An imaginary apple in your mind is literally as real as a physical one.

They already took the words out of my mouth.