The Two Realms in Which We Live

 

_*The Two Realms in Which We Live*_

I had read, when young, some of the works of Erich Fromm and been touched by these. 

But rational thought is, at base, a survival tool, as are memory and imagination.  

We are driven by our instincts and emotions. These set our primary goals, with memory, imagination, and reason being tools for reaching these ends.

We, along with other sentient beings, including surely all animals and perhaps most plants, live in at least two connected realms. One is the physical, objective realm. The other is the mental, subjective realm. 

The physical realm is the one on which observations can be made by one person and independently verified by another. We access phenomena in this realm through our sense organs and instruments of observation, including those of measurement, the earliest ones being perhaps our own fingers, hands, feet, strides, etc., later standardized, along with days, lunar months, solar years, etc. 

This is the realm of study of the natural sciences, the physical universe of space and time, of matter and energy, and of information and its processing and transfer. 

This last part--information and communication--may, in fact, be a bridge between the two realms.

The physical, objective realm appears to be one that is shared by all of us and that exists independently of each of us. 

If you or I lose consciousness or die, the physical universe will continue. It was there before we were born. This is an assumption made by the natural sciences and by most of us, appearing to be a reasonable (but still far from uncontested) assumption.

The second realm--the mental, subjective realm--is the realm of experience and of the experiencer, and so also the realm of sentience/consciousness itself. 

I cannot usually access your mental realm, nor can you usually access mine. 

I cannot really "feel your pain", "experience your pleasure", sense your other sensations, including those of your five senses, or experience your emotion (beginning with fear or aversion and desire or attraction) or directly experience your thought, memory or imagined thing. 

The natural sciences cannot be applied to the mental, subjective realm. They are restricted to the physical, objective realm that we all share and in which we can independently make and verify observations of physical phenomena. 

Things such as faith and divinity exist only in the mental, subjective realm. 

Although reason, memory, and imagination are also part of that mental, subjective realm, they are limited in their reach and power, as are symbols and language. 

We usually agree that there is only one, shared, physical realm, although quantum physics and the multiverse theories cast some doubt even on that.

Is there an infinite multiplicity of mental realms, constantly being born with every birth of an individual sentience and also constantly disappearing with every cessation of sentience, including the irreversible death of a living organism?

Or is there also only one, shared mental realm of which our individual mental realms are either portals or portions, shielded from one another for functional or protective purposes, just as our individual, physical bodies are. 

I have had a couple of experiences, not communicable through reason or language, that suggest that this is so. 

I expect that many others have had similar experiences. 

We often tend to disregard these "breaks in the shielding", even if they are  consciously noticed, as misperceptions, coincidences or delusions. 

Delusions do, of course, occur, and some rationalists would group all spiritual experiences, faiths, devotions, divinities, etc. in that broad category, along with bhuuts, shaitaans, et al.

_2024-03-24 Sun._

_Berkeley, California_