Our starting point is, and possibly must be, ourselves. It would simply be ignorant to think that the way we understand things doesn’t affect the way we think things are. How we understand ourselves determines how we understand anything and everything else. What we think we are determines how we understand everything else, for it is an issue of compare/contrast, an issue of context.
We comprehend things in/through context. What is the ultimate context? What we might call the self, which is the measure by which, the context against which, we understand anything. We create the way we see things by the contexts in which we see them. What and how things are to us is determined by the illusions by which we think we know things.
We easily forget that how we see things stands in for what we think things are. Form is derived by context, by a mold, so to speak, and our conditioned minds are the mold by which the form of how we see things is created.
It’s like a molded plastic bunny. The form of the bunny is determined entirely by the mold, by the context. Context is the very nature of form. Change the mold and the bunny is changed. This makes sense; the truth of this is almost elementary. But we are conditioned not to see that the way we see things (the form of things) is determined by a mold as well. Our conditioned minds are the mold of the sensory data of nature/the flow of things the way the metal mold is the mold of the plastic which turns into the bunny. Change the mold of our minds—the benchmarks by which we comprehend things the way we comprehend them—and the resulting “reality” changes, just like the molded bunny.
The way things are to us is a result of how we process reality-data. It is our illusions that make up our mold—our beliefs, assumptions, and certainties. These are usually fairly rigid, like the metal mold, and the reality-data goes through this context to become what we look at and think of as “tree,” or “wrong,” or “love.”
When the illusions change, or evaporate, so does the end product—what you see. What you see is therefore utterly dependent upon how you see it, which is the context, which is your illusions through/by which you understand/comprehend what you see. Change the illusions, and the way things “are” changes before your eyes.
It seems foolish to try to understand the plastic bunny without seeing that it gets its very form (which is one of the ways we decide “what it is”) from the mold, from the context. It is just as foolish to think about things in the world without seeing that they get their form (in our minds) from the mold of our conditioned conceptual frameworks, from the context; that the context makes things “what they are” (to us).
So, it is our understanding, or lack of understanding, of ourselves which colors, influences, and dictates our understanding, or lack of understanding, of such concepts as: truth, reality, the world, love, right and wrong, etc. Thus, it is foolhardy to try to understand “the world,” or life, without first trying to understand the medium through which we see and experience that world and life: ourselves. To know yourself is to know everything. Our assumptions, fears, cravings, jealousies, selfishness, arrogance (all of which beget illusions) all get in the way of the process of knowing ourselves, which gets in the way of us being able to see things as they actually are. It is our illusions that preclude true understanding. No wonder the world of humans is the way it is.
When you judge and believe in things, you act on the assumption that your site is clear, when it is actually distorted and can see only what seems to be clear and real, but is actually not. Denial is the enemy of clear vision. Question the authorities on which you base your beliefs and actions. From where does that authority get its authority? Is it valid? Find your own illusions and deconstruct them before you go off judging and believing things on which are based your actions, which very much affect the people around you and the entire world in ways that we do not yet understand.
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From my personal notes, 8/19/99.
