Hall of Mirrors

"Last night I had a dream I was a butterfly. Now I'm not sure, am I a butterfly who is dreaming being human or am I human dreaming to be a butterfly?" Unknown

I remember the first time I realized that I had absolutely no contact with the world outside my own mind. It felt like breaking free of a prison I didn't even know I was in. I was in a college philosophy class and we were talking about reality. and how do we know what reality is?

I know what my senses tell me but my senses can't be trusted to tell the truth. My senses tell me the world is flat and stationary and I know that's not so. The demonstration in class that day was that we were to write what we saw in front of us, very simply. I saw a green chalk board.

Photos of light come from the sun and bounce of this object and into the rods and cones of my eyeballs which send information through my optic nerve to my brain. the brain processes this and comes out with green chalk board. So the whole lesson was illustrating basically how the green chalkboard exists in my brain and what is actually "out there" in the world we really don't know. We only have the very limited information that our senses tell us which we each have our own different filters this info goes through as well. We only ever see our mind in what ever we are looking at. I don't even know what's actually there and I am sure as hell not qualified to comment on it. What I see is MY truth not necessarily THE truth.

What I see in the world is always a reflection of my mind.

And on a slightly different train of thought, the idea that our body and the world are the same thing. If I understand correctly, other cultures have words that describe this idea but the English language does not have a word that describes us this way. We tend to think of our body as separate from it's world even though we have absolutely no evidence that supports that. Have you ever experienced your body without it's environment? Have you ever experienced the world without your body? So why do we think they are 2 separate things? In fact, the Ishaya's do call it our 'body-world.' I have heard Wayne Dyer use the term 'environ-organisms' to express the same idea.

I have no idea why I wrote about this today. It was just on my mind. I was inspired by Douglas's comment and just went off on a tangent... :)