?? The Challenge of Objectivity ??

Hello, my friends!

Here's a piece that follows from yesterday's sharing.

In it, I explore the nature of the objective world, and the 3 levels of certainty.

I hope you enjoy!

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"We were all trained to believe in the universe as something apart from ourselves.

The whole, if a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one to hear it, did it make a sound? We learn to look at that very early and say, “Yes! Of course it would! If it’s happening, it’s happening, even if there’s no one around to hear it."

This is the belief in an objective universe.

Where things stay where you put them unless people move them around.

Where things are the way they are, even if you’re not looking at them.

This is a model for our experience.

And it’s a good one, for so many things.

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It works great, unless you look too closely.

But when you do look more closely, you just might notice that we are constitutionally incapable of experiencing objective reality.

We have my subjective lens, your subjective lens, their subjective lens. A subjective multiverse with everyone at the center of their own perceptual frame.

No subject that experiences the universe does so in any other way than subjectively, their particular relation to the universe, framed through their unique perception.

My subjective perception, theirs, and theirs, over generations and forming an unconscious consensus.

This unconscious consensus as to the nature of reality is called culture, and it continues to shift and evolve over time.

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For physical things in the middle range, it is quite helpful to act as if we were in a common space and share a common timeflow.

That helps with planning and organizing communities and social duties.

But, the further out we go from the physical things in our immediate experience, the more our vision of the world comes from story rather than direct experience.

We have beliefs about times and countries and places we’ve never seen. About people we’ve never met.

We pick up beliefs from others and adopt them as our own.

And every single one of these stories that we invest our belief in will shape our experience of life.

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In order to bring precision into this space, we have to completely pull the rug out from under ourselves.

Stories are not True.

Stories are from a specific vantage point, and they are either helpful or unhelpful.

They are a way of making sense of the world, constructing a mental model to aid our navigation of the moment.

So, to evaluate the worth of a story, the best thing to do is to look at its fruits in our lives.

How does it impact your life to believe that this thing is so? Does it help you to navigate the moment?

Does it serve you, in all your depth and in right relation to the universe?

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Now, with that in mind, we have three levels of experience, which accompany three levels of certainty.

There is one thing only that any of us can be reasonably certain about: I Am.

Each of us has this core of Being, unchanging at the center of our experience.

This is the only True thing we know.

This is the only thing of which we can be reasonably certain, as it is the foundation of our experience.

All of our thoughts, feelings, memories, histories, roles, and relations rest upon the I Am.

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Next, we have the second level of certainty.

This pertains to the physical function of reality in the immediate space that we can interact with right now, in this present moment.

Now is the only time that things ever get physical. Before and later are all probability waves.

It all happens now.

And, in the now, in a physical body, we expect to experience gravity, and motion, and the general course of physical operations in a way that reflects the objective world.

We can act as if this is the case unless presented with evidence to the contrary.

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So, we have a bubble of that which we can see and hear and smell and feel and taste, right here and now.

And we can be second-level certain that what we see and hear will work in a physical way as it has done before.

This is a working hypothesis that allows us to refine our handling of the immediate moment over time.

I can be reasonably certain that if I was struck physically, it would produce impact and pain, or that if I jumped, I would fall to the ground.

This is a good grounding philosophy for those prone to going out on a limb.

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Third level of certainty: the mental model that I have of the world, of myself, of others, everything that I know.

The way that I interpret what I perceive, how I add meaning to it, everything that I know indirectly, all of it comes through story.

Story is meaning.

Ideas, concepts, which crystallize a perception into a specific way of relating to the world.

A way of perceiving it.

Stories of atoms and molecules have helped us to master the physical world.

Even though none of us have ever seen those things directly.

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So, stories can be incredibly valuable, but they are not True.

And this is what we need to remember, every single time a thought enters our minds.

No story is True.

Each is a vantage point, a perspective, something drifting along the way, often imperfectly perceived or constructed.

And everything that we know is story.

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Third-level certainty is no certainty.

The value of our stories is not to be right or true, but to help us work with the world.

And this means that nothing that you know about the world in concrete terms is True in a fundamental sense.

The things that feel True, other than the I Am, are things which you are participating in the Creation and experiencing thereof.

So, if you have a story which does not work for you, you’re not just the character caught in the story.

You’re also the storyteller.

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So, to recap:

Level 1: I Am.

Level 2: I perceive.

Level 3: I understand.

And we have loads of flexibility in our understanding, in the operation of making meaning out of our moment of experience.

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And, knowing that nothing you know is certainly True makes wiggle room for new thoughts and perceptions to enter.

It gives us room to grow.

But it requires vigilance and retraining, as our assumptions have woven throughout all of our understanding of the world.

As we learn to form a conscious relationship with meaning, we begin to see how much of the world we had been shaping without even realizing it.

Truth gives us freedom. The understanding that none of our stories are True gives us the freedom to consider different perspectives and ways of making sense of the world.

Knowing that no story is true gives us the ability to switch perspectives out like lenses and use the perspective that best aligns with our needs and values."

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By reframing our understanding of the world, we can create a new axis of relation with our experience.

And that sounds complicated, but it moves us to the simple pretty quickly.

Just making our home in the I Am, in the one aspect of our experience about which we can be absolutely certain.

If you have any questions or thoughts, I welcome them in the comments.

Thanks and blessings, beautiful Beings!