The inconceivable difference and nondifference of reality (the authenticity myth, Pt 4.)

Achintya bheda abhedat tattva (?????????????????????)?

We can experience the sun, but not the sun. We can experience a summer flower, but not the flower. Yet, our experience of them is still the experience of them and is them, for us; different and nondifferent, simultaneously. So it goes for our sense of reality, we sense ourselves in-the-world and we sense the things in it, with us. To suggest at the level of our existence that the only thing, which is real, is our sense of things and that we do not experience the things, seems rather silly. Yet, this is the case, and it is not.

The sun’s warmth and light are not the sun; however, we are experiencing the sun. We can see and smell the flower, which are not the flower, yet we are experiencing the flower.

In terms of reality, ‘we’ are conditioned to think in terms of Newtonian mechanics, and Cartesian dualism. There are causes and effects. There are binary, dual systems like mind and body. Even in some religious-philosophical teachings, there is dualistic balance such as the Tao (Dao) yin/ yang. The idea of difference and nondifference being the same thing is then, quite inconceivable, but this teaching from Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (1486–1534) unites the seemingly ununitable.

The effect of something be the something, and the something be its effect, yet neither of these things.

We are told with certainty that we are ourselves, bodily, somewhere. Our minds, we are told, are evidence that our brains are doing something which supports the idea that we are alive. Our consciousness is evidence that we are living. We are sometimes told that we are a soul or spirit inhabiting a biological body. In all of this, we are told that these attributes are ‘US”, and they belong to us.

Our minds/ souls/ spirits are “us”, or our minds/ brains/ bodies are “us”. The “us”, spiritual or otherwise. Belongs to us and is either eternal or temporary. What we can know is that bodily animation begins and ceases. It lives as a functioning entity, and at some point, no longer has this functionality. Atheists propose that this is all we are and that this bodily functioning is our temporary experience of life. In terms of what we can be sure about, they are correct. However, they are only considering the physical facticity of life and not the meaning of it.

The experience that others have of us, is not us, except that it is. The experience of us that others have belongs to the Beings which experience us, and these do not have to be Humans. It is not ours to control, or own. There is no singular, fixed, authentic “us”, we are constantly created by the phenomenon of the experience the things and Beings in-the-world with us, have of us, and each of those experiences is different, and in constant flux.

We do not experience ourselves, except, we do. Our own experience of ourselves is also not us. Our bodies constantly swap chemicals and in fact, there are billions of individual life forms which make up “us” at any given moment. We constantly ingest new material and make new “us” with it, excreting that which becomes not us. Our chemical existence is entirely temporary and constantly changing. We are our experience of being-in-the-world, which is in constant flux, however slowly and imperceptible the change. There is no fixed authentic “us”.

We are, however, authentically “us” all the time, but we do not own this, and we cannot know this state, because we do not know ourselves nor the experience of us and meaning given to us, by all other Beings. We are authentic, all the time, but constantly changing, all the time.

We are in a state of inconceivable difference and nondifference.

Our “usness” is revealed constantly and is a function of many variables attributable to the Beings involved. These will include bodily health and age, geographical and societal history and historicity, Zeitgeist, cares concerns, and moods.

The meaning of “US” is connected to our bodily “us” but is not bound by it, irrespective of whether or not we consider things like mind, soul, and spirit to be ‘real’. Could the variable flux of our multiply owned and experienced facticity be a way of explaining the concept of a collective unconscious? Certainly, we are not a fixed object, with fixed attributes, no matter how much psychologists would like to think of themselves as scientists, measuring and predicting the Being of humans. Are we perhaps better explained as both existential and existentialle metaphysical mycelium or rhizome, popping up into the presence of the world like new shoots that come and go, of mushroom fruiting bodies?

“WE” do not need to be present for any of this. We do not even need to be biologically alive. ?Think of your mother. That is your mother, and it is not your mother.

Why might this thinking be important?

Once again, we are dissolving into base tribal, if not animalistic identities. We are giving fixed group being to individuals largely divided up into biological and social birth attributes. We are diminished into a cascade of fixed “A”, as in, you are ‘a’, and I am a fixed ‘a’. This is nonsense. Great nonsense. Have we transcended our animalistic roots only as far as being able to identify what is and is not us, and seek to dominate the ‘others’?

It seems so.