Subject Object Illusion

When the lines of “reality” blur enough, the divide between your mind and matter^[1] merge, true reality appears.

You begin to see things as they are —and you recognize yourself clinging to static beliefs to preserve your version of reality which is never real, but is felt as real.

Unreality feels more real than reality because we’ve cheated and lied to ourselves for so long. Looking at true reality, it feels insane, it feels wrong, it feels fake because we cannot comprehend real anymore —we cannot see the real before our eyes because we’ve become too reliant on our illusions and mirages to sustain our views of the world with permanency and stability. The world is neither permanent nor stable, therefore all stable views, to some degree, are illusions.

Some illusions are more useful than others, for example the usage of time as an absolute rather than relative or the presence of gravity without the forces of air resistance, etc. The truth (accuracy) is thrown away in favor of functionality. Gravity without air resistance is good enough and treating time as an absolute does no harm. Mathematics and geometry concepts help humans manipulate the Earth to our purposes. We can create, add, subtract, multiply, divide, and destroy with calculations —with order, rather than chaos. Numbers don't exist in reality, but they are useful so we use them, then new technologies are built using these foundations. Computers are built off 1's and 0's —numbers.

Eventually a line of technology will reach diminishing returns. When this happens, it means a mode of thinking is outdated. The Industrial Revolution brought light bulbs, typewriters, assembly lines, cars, radios, TVs, trains, etc into existence. The technological advance was explosive, but this revealed a fundamental shift in attitude of the American people. The nuclear family dissolved, entertaining personal ambitions, being enterprising, these values became more important —the technology followed the attitude.

Our current society is predisposed to thinking rationally. This quest for Truth was started by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle's school of thought all the way back in B.C. times and have stayed with us till today. It's a dualistic way of thinking, where there are objects in the world and subjects, where there is substance (like a book) and non-substance (the ideas of that book). This mode of thinking and Truth-seeking has brought us far, but we're seeing diminishing returns in certain areas. We're trying to apply this dualistic mode of thinking to happiness, and we're failing in large numbers.

Rationality is designed to manipulate objects in the real world by using one's brain —matter versus mind. Happiness is non-substantive however, it is not matter, but we're attempting to apply our own minds... on our own minds. The problem is, we don't know what else to do, no one told us that "substance" and "non-substance" (matter and mind) is just an illusion.

Dualism is an illusion. My mind arises from my cells —therefore my mind and my cells are part of the same logical whole. There is no actual split, but we split mind and matter for convenience and functionality. While useful, it can also have us asking unresolvable questions like free-will versus determinism. The question splits our mind from our cells, but our cells and our mind are a part of the same logical whole. There is no actual split. We are neither determined nor have complete free will.

The individual and society function in the same dualistic manner with the same dualistic problems. Individual's talk about manipulating the system —but they are a part of that system. Who is the system they are manipulating? It's nonsensical in a dualistic world.

More dualistic problems: for example, do the characters on a computer screen really exist? Do they have substance? If they don't exist, what are you seeing? but if they do exist, how come you can't grab them? Why are they "trapped" in the screen?

Dualists believe there's a concrete "you" and "I", but existentialism says that "existence precedes essence," a person is not a person unless they act. They are what they do. In other words, a person is a pattern of behaviors. That is where the conflict arises. A pattern of behaviors has no substance —but surely we exist? Dualistic thinking cannot resolve these contradictions.

When children are first born, they have no concept "I". It isn't until they are between the ages of 2-4 that they begin to understand themselves as an object about other objects. This is also the period of time when language is rapidly being assimilated into the child's brain. In other words, before language —we saw reality as a conceptual whole and afterwards, we learned to separate the world into "you" and "I" —an illusion.

Rationality has no real ways of obtaining happiness because happiness is not a substance. The key is to unlearn the mind versus matter split and learn a new attitude that better explains the world and gives better truths to operate on. This will also advance "soft science" fields like psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, political science, sociology, history, etc. We need new methods of thought to arrive at new technological advances in these weakening fields. What mode of thought? –I leave that to further reading.