REALITY IS AN ILLUSION
Sometimes I think about the story of a brilliant psychoanalyst in France who happened to have in his practice a number of men who claimed to be Jesus, the classic version still vital at the time and place. He could talk none of them out of this conviction. One day he had the brainstorm of putting them all in the same room to argue out which one was the “true” Jesus, an identity they all claimed.
At the end of the day he went back to see what the result might be but he didn’t expect what he got. They had argued all day and agreed by now that they were ALL Jesus, the true son of God.
By now many people are aware that no human brain could ever come near comprehending any theos that could be premised as “omni” anything. We exclaim about God’s blood and argue about whether he married in order to get him into some kind of comprehensible category we could grasp.
In fact, the human body is presented with so much data from the world outside the skin, that it can’t be processed by the human mind, so the work of the brain is to make a comprehensible selection for an operating plan. It’s even capable of updates in case of change, though lately things have been moving a little too fast even for a truly “plastique” brain system, which is really a system of overlaid systems going back to the birth foundation of first brain-building thought. Some new compelling insights are so centrally deep that they challenge things we thought we always knew “for sure.”
This understanding reduces all “religious” systems, in particular the “theist” versions based on owning and defending an oasis for one’s tribe, to “nice guess — for their original times” but trouble for a painfully integrating planet. This means that the issue of “truth” is moved to “verifiability”, meaning whether there is evidence for proof. It is not a surprise that in this trade-dominated world, one of the main definitions in the dictionaries is about accounting, number records. But verifiability in accounting is close to money-laundering if records are unreliable and the system is faulty, like the one this town uses that just stood my hair on end with a bill for $300 which later evaporated. Surprises based on miscalculation happen like that all over America. But we trust that we can figure and argue it out.
The kind of verifiable science dependent on “warrants”, meaning actual real-world perceptible and repeatable concrete facts, is now in competition with a different system of significance based on numbers alone. They float in mid-air. No one goes out to count the number of camels are really in the corral. We are gingerly approaching the scary “reality” of money, which is simply a number asserted by a nation, lately by the invention of other money systems not based on anything like “bytes”. Laws are passed based on estimates, but no two estimates agree. Where is the concrete verifiability we once had based on precious metals? Some try to tie the value of money to the value of land, but it is value hard to measure and variable according the circumstances.
God is like money, a value variable dependent on “miracles” and the assertions of individuals, hopefully respected and believed. We had it all worked out into a theological system that proved itself, until it didn’t. But it is even harder to invent a “God” than a pretend money system. Value is a human assigned amount. Banks look like churches for a reason. Brains are impressed. The sanity-preserving emotional meanings take over.
We’re not quite at the point where we can admit that we’ve made this whole thing up. All of it is arbitrary, a habit, someone’s big idea for the past that has begun to seem real. The planet itself is real enough and all the creatures on it, including ourselves, are real. But the overwhelming majority of what humans think is their world is just fantasy. The houses are real, but the fact that they are square and spaced just so is all a product of human ideas.
How we drive, what we eat, what we allow to be public, what words we use — all of that is arrived at through an unacknowledged consensus. If there is distance between our groups the consensus may be quite different. In the US drive on the right side, in England drive on the left side.
The biggest illusion with the most actual consequences is simply money.
