As I read a book the Andrew has sent me entitled Relative Truth, Ultimate Truth one is again forced into reflecting what a difficult experience life would be if our brain didn't filter the discrepancies between the information received by our senses, the eyes, nose and hearing and what we make of it all as we place ourselves in the centre of the world we perceive.
Any road and the cars passing on it is different in many ways from another road but we have the confidence to cross the road because our brain has stored a default picture of a road and the traffic moving on it. Without the default we could be totally confused by the many different things about this road, from other roads, but we are confident that the structure of the road, the traffic, the speed of the traffic, whether it is coming towards us or has passed, allows the brain to comprehend the situation and make us feel secure in our relationship to the road and its traffic. If we are in Amsterdam our default picture is thrown off balance because for one thing the traffic flows in the opposite direction and our confidence is shattered for a while whilst a new default picture is built for the mind to gain some equilibrium.
So the real world is not completely real, rather it is an amalgamation of our past experience. This relative world, or relative truth places us in a difficult position vis a vie our self belief in our actual place within the scheme of things since who are we to judge anything that is not finite.
Our philosophical security is rendered dodgy if the "we" is based on such a flimsy reference system which has to be modified when the "present" introduces a whole set of new unforeseen images.
What is for real, - our instinctive search to find the default setting or, the stimulus that initiates the whole process. If we don't exist in a sense that you can't pin us down because of the nature of how we operate in the world of the senses and therefore we are only an amalgam of events over which we have no control it wrecks the concept of our integrity .
Perhaps we have to reinvent ourselves, which seems to be what the Buddhists want to do by re-examining the
fundamental process of our self recognition, by drawing away from the concept of self and identifying a oneness with all sentient beings by recognising, through the power of contemplation a deeper clearer understanding of our time and journey through this life. In wrenching ones self away from what we in the West would take for granted as "living", it being a struggle to obtain things and promote our self both internally and externally with an eye on the crowd.
The Buddhist finds this is meaningless and false, their ultimate goal is to understand the nature of, life and death, and our part in this journey.
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