Can We Trust Our Senses?
Our perception of reality isn't always accurate. We all have our own different perceptions of reality based on our memories, feelings & lives. An example of this being proved in real life was when a photo of an infamous “colour-changing” dress went viral across social media platforms. The dress was blue & black. Many people saw the dress as blue & black, whilst some people saw the dress as white & gold. The poor quality of the image is what sets off the brain’s internal model. The ambiguous conditions and lack of context are important because your brain doesn’t have enough information to discern it
“So the brain has to turn to the internal model and say, ‘Hey, guru, what do you think is going on out there?’
Each person’s internal model reacts differently. People who saw the dress as white and gold did so because their internal model presumed they were observing the dress under blue light. They discount the color blue. For people who saw blue and black, their internal models primed them to think they were viewing the dress under orange incandescent light. When scientists analyzed the pixels of the stripes, they found that they appeared to be brown, not gold or black. But because people could not tell what material it was made out of, some people’s brains assumed it was shiny and perceived it as gold. This is evidence that we are all flawed in thinking due to our perception of truth is all based on what we have experienced.
What would you do if one of your friends told you little white lies over and over again? After a while, you’d probably stop trusting that friend, and certainly not rely on them for anything important. What we can rely on, if it’s not other people, are our five senses: sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing. Well, that’s not quite true. Our senses feed us a constant stream of tricks and lies too. Not ready to believe that? Just think about what it’s like to dream. Dreams can feel incredibly real, so real that we rarely realize that they are just dreams. At least, until we wake up, and start to notice quite how bizarre and absurd those dreams were. Just as painters can make stunningly realistic images of life, the senses create vivid and convincing images in our minds. Of course, painters often combine ideas from life to create images of things that could never exist in the real world. Think of satyrs, the half-man, half-goat figures that we know from mythology. We know they don’t exist, but still, we can be fooled into thinking they do. It isn’t just in bizarre dreams that our senses can fool us. They can mislead us over the course of our entire lives. How? Senses can be tricked by external forces. Imagine, for instance, that something evil out there is determined to fool your perception. Sounds far-fetched, but let’s go with it for the moment. They could be tricking your senses without you knowing it right this very moment.
So we can’t trust our senses or what we learn from them. We should therefore treat all knowledge with skeptical doubt. Things like our body and the physical world around us might exist, but we can’t be sure of it. So what can we be sure of? We can be sure of our own existence.
Our thinking proves that we exist.
As our senses can so easily deceive us, we should spend our lives as vigilant skeptics. But what’s there to gain from a life full of doubt? Well, it does give us one thing we can be sure of: the fact that we’re thinking. There might be an evil genius messing with our senses, but we can challenge our senses and imagination by thinking about them. Regardless of what our senses tell us about the world and our place within it, the one thing we can depend on is that we think. This leads to one conclusion: we think, therefore we exist.
But how can we know we’re really thinking? Well, imagine a piece of beeswax. Freshly made from the honeycomb, it smells, feels, and looks like beeswax. If we put it close to the fire it melts, yet we still know that it’s a piece of beeswax. How do we recognize it? Through thinking. Our mind makes judgments and definitions of the world outside, so when our senses can’t be trusted, our mind fills in the gaps. But couldn’t the beeswax be just a dream or a production of our tricked sensory impulses? Maybe, but the fact that our brain perceives it and makes the judgment that it’s beeswax means we are thinking. This way our mind proves that we exist. Even if we’re just thinking nothing more than “I don’t exist,” the fact that we are thinking it proves we do exist. But if our mind can prove our own existence, what about the existence of other things in the world? Are they real at all? And how can we know?
Our inherent ideas and ability give us evidence of God’s existence.
So it is really our mind that is the core of our existence. Our thinking proves we exist and the concepts we can understand with our minds alone are really the highest form of reality. So how did we get this human equivalent to an operating system? We wouldn’t be able to have ideas if the ability to think hadn’t been given to us. As we possess this ability from birth, we ourselves can’t be the source. So something outside of us must be the cause of our ability to think.
After all, nothing can cause something else without existing and possessing the same property, or source, to a higher degree. For example, nothing without the property of warmth, like a fire, can make something else warm. The ability to think is with us from creation, and this ability is proof of our existence. Since we exist, and thereby think, from the time we are created, this also proves that this ability is in us from the start. This can only have been put in us by something with a higher level of thinking than our own. Like a supreme thinking being which is God. With this knowledge it is now evident why meditation and mindfulness is powerful & amazing for you as when you practice this you undergo an awakening which brings you closer to understanding your true self, which in turn brings you closer to God which is within us.
So endeavor to delve into tackling your own ego & more challenging feelings, such as pain and hatred, with gentleness and respect. Don’t resist them. Instead, live in peace with them, as you meditate on their interdependence with other objects in your life.
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