E-mail Doug Bennett
My thoughts about personal-realities
opened up a Pandora's box of possibilities and questions. If we all have
a unique and different personal-reality then where does reality actually
lay? How many possible realities are there? What is truth? The concept
of conjunctive-reality goes a long way in explaining my thoughts on these
questions. Conjunctive means conjoined or sharing attributes. I'm sure
set theory has a better term. By conjunctive-reality I mean two or more
personal-realities sharing a logical construct derived from mutual assumptions
and stipulations. This concept lays the ground work for understanding prejudice,
apriori judgement, religious experiences and acculturation for a few things.
Also, this gives us a hint at the appearance
of the reality we participate in each day.
How do conjunctive-realities
come into existence? I believe it starts at birth or a little before. We
are born into a language, a family, a sex, a religion, a community, and
a society (there are more groups that could be added). Our parents start
to prepare us for life within these groups. They teach us a language (communicating
in mutually agreed upon terms). Most
languages have a subject-verb-object structure; and this is learned at
such an early age that it probably structures our thinking and perceptions
for the rest of our lives.
LANGUAGE
IS JUST A TOOL. Words are symbols for a generalized concept about
a class of objects and actions. There are some serious problems with language;
it is, by definition, unable to capture reality. We become habituated to
seeing the world around us and ourselves as simple, isolated objects. In
truth, NO TWO THINGS ARE THE SAME; ALL THINGS ARE
INTERCONNECTED, AND NOTHING IS SIMPLE.
Our parents overlay our innate-connected
perceptions with our "native" language and the conjunctive-realities they
have subscribed to. As we get older, the sexual, racial, social, religious
and other realities we accept become additional overlays in our personal-realities.
We also have our own experiences that we attempt to incorporate into this
construct. The problems arise when we mistake this structure as reality
and identify with it. Then, when encountering "foreign" realities' or something
in our experiences requires a leap or expansion of our personal-reality,
we tend to have a reaction of some sort : fear, hate, disorientation, denial,
religious experiences and other responses. For centuries, wisemen
of many religions have understood this relationship between worldly knowledge
(complex conjunctive-realities) and the Truth( the Way, the Tao, spiritual
knowledge, Communion and all the other ways to attempt to describe direct-knowledge
of the truth). Most
religions
are based on systems of disciplines designed to reach these transcendental
states.
In conclusion, I feel that through
indoctrination into the conjunctive-realities that surround us we "forget"
the Truth we were connected with. The tool of language is great for a structured
approximation of reality, like science; but limiting, habituating and a
dead-end in the search for the Truth. A better approach to True Knowledge
would be to pursue a religious discipline. "Seek and ye shall find."
E-mail Doug Bennett