A – We know that experience is.
Q – Sorry, what?
A – Well, we know that something has experiences but we can’t say much more about that something or about the experiences.
Q – Nothing more?
A – Maybe a few things. Like there seems to be just one consciousness to which these experiences happen.
Q – Anything else?
A – Yes, there seems to be a perspective to which these experiences happen. A point of view if you will. It’s called ‘I’ and ‘me’ and ‘Jorma’. It sort of sits at the center of all experience.
Q – Aren’t there other people also?
A – Maybe, there certainly seems to be a ‘not me’ or ‘other’ perspective also. But it does get tricky very fast here because it is difficult to define the boundary between stuff.
Q – How so?
A – Well, beyond the perspective of me we need to start sort of lumping experiences into buckets of ‘me’ and ‘not me’ but there seems to be no reasonable way to do this.
Q – Isn’t that what science is about?
A – Yes, but before we can start doing the lumping together, the categorizing, we need to do something. We need to define ‘things’ and ‘concepts’. And the method that we usually apply is by telling stories around concepts.
Q – Stories? Reality is more than stories.
A – No.
Q – Yes!
A – No. What we do is we define things. We look at the pattern of experiences and we make up stories. We go: ‘That’s grass, that’s a cow, that’s a car, this is the earth, bla, bla, bla.’ We make up stories around the regularities that we perceive in the pattern of experiences. And we could make up any story that we want. We have made up some method to do this, we call it science. But we had a different method before, it was called superstition. We tried religion also. None of these methods are truer than any of the others. And neither are their results. True makes no sense.
Q – So nothing is real?
A- No, consciousness is real and the experiences that are in it are also real. All the stories that we tell about the patterns that we perceive in the experiences that manifest in consciousness are made up.
Q – Couldn’t you make up different stories?
A – I do.
Q – You do?
A – Yeah, I choose my perspective very carefully.
Q – What? How? I don’t understand.
A – I make my own reality by choosing the perspective I like the best.
Q – Sounds like cheating.
A – It totally is. I have taken the game of life, opened the console and typed the cheat code for GOD MODE.
Q – And you just do what you want?
A – Correct.
Q – You can do that?
A – Of course! It’s my consciousness! I’m the only one in it.
Q – But what about me?
A – In my consciousness, the only one I can perceive, I have no knowledge of your consciousness. I can assume you are your own consciousness or not, but the outcome is the same. I will play my video game, in my consciousness, for myself. Now, I’m no idiot. I understand that the ‘I’ perspective is an integrated part of the whole of the consciousness it is in. And that the I perspective has no free will and is just there to perceive. I have no illusion of control over what happens. But I understand the game. Accept whatever you are given. Choose the best story to tell yourself about the experiences that happen. Know that there is no you that is apart from the rest. Know that it is all just a dream. That in so far as reality is real it is only real as an experience to consciousness. The stuff, the things that science likes to study are experiences in consciousness first, they are then transformed into things by made-up stories and are then assumed to be real.
Q – Are there any rules?
A – Yes and no. I have to play by the rules that I believe in.
Q – You what?
A – Well, for there to be a reality I have to believe in something. If I don’t believe that my car is in fact a car, I can’t drive it.
Q – Can you choose what you believe in?
A – No, I don’t have fee will.
Q – Why not?
A – Because I believe in causality.
Q – This is getting circular.
A – How else to close a loop?
Q – Enough already.
A – Yes.