Thoughts

Art sent an e-mail thinking about this quote:

We imagine that our mind is a mirror, that it is more or less accurately reflecting what is happening outside us. On the contrary, our mind itself is the principal element of creation. The world, while I am perceiving it, is being incessantly created for myself in time and space. Rabindranath Tagore

The thought, I think, is valid in thinking about the influence of our minds on the world which we percieve, but the language seems arrogant to me. Rather than saying "our minds create reality", why not "our minds dramatically misinterpret a reality which is 'above' it, seperate"? I have trouble with the concept that the world is merely the construct of individual minds (like dreams), and have a far easier time accepting that our minds are constructs of a larger foundation of reality. We cannot share dreams (not that we cannot dream the same dreams, just that we cannot dream with each other), but we cannot deny that we do share a common world, however different our interpretations of it may be. In the same way that we believe animals cannot "see," or think about ideas, we cannot "see" the base reality--it is beyond us, and we see only one small slice which we project (inaccurately) onto the whole.

Accepting that we create reality, though, there is the famous question, "if a tree falls in a forest, and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?" Here again, the question is too simple--it assumes that we entirely create the base reality! If one person is there, is the sound real? Is it more real if there are more people? What if a person is there to hear it, but not paying attention, and it passes under their conciousness? Is it more real, then, if that one person's life depends on that tree falling and it consumes their entire conciousness? Part of my problem with the world existing solely as perception is that there are such different levels of perception.

So I guess I think that we are all looking at one thing, but from different angles. Your thoughts?