We are all Interconnected even with the Universe

Excerpt from Chapter 8 Transcendental Idealism: A Form of Enlightened Cognition – The God is No-Thing An Apophatic Assertion: An Introduction for Humankind’s Transpersonal Actualization– revised -. Copyright Rodger Ricketts Psy.D.,2023. All rights reserved. Protected by international copyright conventions. No part of this chapter may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever, or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, without the express permission of the Authorpublisher, except in the case of brief quotations with due acknowledgment.

                                       Chapter 8

    Transcendental Idealism: A Form of Enlightened Cognition

That which is called the “external” world, as well as the “internal” world (the world we inhabit), is only a representation or interpretation that we create with our cognitive apparatus. It is not the actual reality itself. In summary, our brain models the world for us. Just as a creative artist creates an art form, we create a picture or representation of reality that has only a resemblance to actuality.

We can never truly know reality because we are limited by (and cannot go beyond), the input of our sense perceptions, and, as well, our cognitive process has evolved to accommodate and service that input egocentrically. The brain brings to bear its prior expectations about what is out there in order to interpret this massive, noisy, and ambiguous sensory information that it continually encounters. In confining an analysis to Earth and its immediate surroundings, some estimate the limitation is about 25% of the total, and if one includes the vastness of the universe beyond the “visible universe” the numbers would be much smaller. So, it is reasonable to say that we only perceive a small fraction of the totality of physical reality.

Physics has informed us that all sensory experience is triggered by photons which power an electrical impulse which is how we become aware of the signal. Our sensory life partakes of physical reality, whereas our thoughts are quite removed from it. Therefore, the one thing we can do if we wish to come in touch with reality is to intentionally redirect our attention from the thought stream and focus on the overall sensation of the mass of the physical body, which is very real. In fact, our entire linguistic framework of conceptual categories is a set of representations or pictures of reality, and the input through our sense organs is only possible because of an integral relationship between aspects of “reality” and our specific sense organs. As cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman explains,

Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be.

(Perception refers to the process of acquiring, interpreting, and representing incoming sensory information.)

Perception is the brain’s search for the best interpretation of the stimuli that are presented to us. What we believe to see and hear from the world is essentially modeled by the brain. This model the brain creates is made accurate by our sight and hearing. For some individuals, the model their brain creates is largely different from what is “normal.” Individuals with synesthesia arguably perceive “too much.” whereas individuals with agnosia and colorblindness perceive very little. Our cognitive apparatus or process must filter out unimportant incoming sensory information and, at the same time, it must intensify what is important. Sensory Integration Theory (1989), developed by Dr. A. Jean, explains that the incoming sensory information from the body and the world is continually processed in the brain. When the information is processed well, organized, and in sync, the resulting behavior is regulated, coordinated, and accurately experienced as sensation and emotion. The neuroscience underlying this phenomenon suggests that we—or rather our brains—construct reality for us. A simplified illustration of this is shown in figure 1.

Figure 1: Simplified view of the representation of a cat in the mind

In other words, as the Buddhist scholar Susan Hamilton wrote in her book Early Buddhism; A New Approach (2000),

[…] the reality of experience is experiential. And the reality of Reality is unknowable in (normal) experiential terms. The aim of the Buddhist is to understand the nature and limits of experience by means of understanding the nature and extent of one’s subjective cognitive apparatus. In Buddhist terms, this subjectively and objectively correlated insight is knowing and seeing how things really are.

Given our ordinary, pre-enlightened way of understanding, we assume and believe that the world is as real as we cognitively construct it. However, as the apophatic mystics and cognitive science contend, reality is not ultimately conceptually graspable or verbally articulable. As Albert Einstein wrote, “Behind anything that can be experienced, there is something that the mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection.”

Tags: buddha's teachings, Buddhism, Knowledge, life, reality, Science