Light and Experience

We have been focusing on physics.

But light has another level, something ACTUAL that we have never "seen" at all!

In fact no photons of light have directly been "seen" in the brain. And if they were the brain wouldn't really have seen a thing.

Expose the brain itself directly to light, and the possessor of that brain can not see that light, it can not feel, taste, hear, or smell either...

Light enters the eye and is then turned into electrochemical signals. Electrochemical signals ARE NOT light. You read this screen and can understand my words, because your mind has experienced what it thinks light is presenting to it.

I think we all may have experienced intense dreams and dreams that we don't know are actually dreams. Some of us have actually woken up in our dreams, and learned how to control them (to certain degree anyway).



When we are dreaming, do we not think we are actually seeing things?

But how can we see in a dream if light is only physical?

If the light that enters our eyes isn't what we are actually seeing in our minds, when we are awake, then perhaps the light of a dream is no different from the light of the waking world...Perhaps it is even truer, because it is not being interfered with by the signals coming in from the actual eyes.

I have woken-up inside, and been able to navigate around, my dreams. I once looked up at the sun in a lucid dream and its yellow-white light was even brighter than in waking reality. My REAL eyes actually hurt for a second.



Extend this concept to the way the brain feels all of its bodily senses. Taste is not the chemicals on the tongue, cold is not the temperature of the air, sound is not the vibrations through air hitting the eardrum, and the chemicals perceived when they enter your nostrils are not smell. Every one of these senses enter the thinking part of the brain as electrochemical signals. And they are all very similar.




In a lucid dream I push against walls and stamp my foot on the floor, and these things are TRULY solid. Who is to say they aren't?

Now here's something even more whacked out...

If the body is just the latest version of what evolutionary brain has come to grips with, and is able to project to the mind of its mortal coil, able to handle a sometimes dangerous world of objects, by creating hands and fingers, that it has found useful in the past. This information is curled up in the DNA Molecule, which is simply the ultimate storage medium. And, like a slow-release tablet, DNA lets the mind more fully control the body, through the "brain" (even shape its own perception of itself). But this control is dependent upon EXPERIENCE. It is the same with all animals.

Perhaps someday, as we evolve, we will begin to see ourselves the way Alex Grey does...



What I'm trying - not very effectively I might add - to do is show that we do not have an environment that looks anything like the way we see it. We do not have a body that looks or behaves anything like the way we see it. And we have a brain that thinks it is a several pound chunk of slimy grey fat and never material - WHICH IT IS NOT. :)

I have sometimes differed with people who pay no heed to metaphysics and its influence in reality. I believe the metaphysical is ultimately more real, more testable by experience (even if that experience cannot test the theory until well after death), and the key to understanding the behavior of Spirit - as a "substance".

Let's think about the word beauty. If this perception about the mind interpreting nerve signals, then we can see beauty ([i]experience [/i]it actually, not "see" it). A rose is beautiful, for example. But its beauty is not a physical thing. Someone who thinks metaphysics is not appropriate to talk about in the physics-based world, can not understand why the rose causes an actual, physical, chemical reaction in the brain (mind) that interprets it as beautiful.



The physicist weighs the rose; it is 3 grams. The physicist takes a photo of the rose; it is green and red. The physicist smells the rose; it smells sweet. The physicist may then conclude that something that is about 3 grams in weight, is green and red, and smells sweet must be beautiful.

The Metaphysicist tears up the rose into a million pieces, scrunches them in his hand, plops down the whole messy affair in front of the Physicist. They both agree that what they see now is not as beautiful. Why? Still 3 grams; still green and red; still smells sweet... The beauty of the rose is only in the mind. Beauty is only in the mind.

So if beauty is only in the mind, and nothing from the "outside world" ever impacts inside the mind directly, could we conjecture that there is indeed NOTHING but mind - from highest to lowest. it presents a world to itself in proportion to the level it exists at AND (in an evolutionary way) how much experience it has gained.

Even physics is itselfis a metaphysical aspect of Ultimate Reality.

ALEX WALL