On Reality and Being
A brief guide to the design and intent of the book
The title: Reality and being are exactly the same thing.
The cover illustration depicts reality exploring what is possible by imagining life as a little man looking around at his world; he sees the sun above but thinks of the moon instead. Reality is aware of its being, and being is aware of its reality. The universe and everything within it are not what they appear to be.
The text begins with Words [1], an introduction to the main arguments of the book, which are briefly stated above on the title and the cover illustration. It ends with Discussion [22] that summarizes the journey. Six chapters convey the six primary distinctions that the book addresses, while the remaining 14 chapters are subtopics of [4], [7], and [14]:
[2] Reality and Unreality
[3] Being and Existence
[4] Awareness and Experience
[7] Container and Content
[14] True and False
[21] Absolute and Relative
These six distinctions are related to each other in the following ways:
The left-hand terms, reality, being, awareness, container, true, and absolute, are closely related to each other. The words are typically used to refer to and discuss one extremely simple and universal thing. For example, “being is aware of its own reality.”
Similarly, the right-hand terms, unreality, existence, experience, content, false, and relative, are also related to each other. These words are typically used to explain and describe the great complexity of particular things. For example, “the universe is composed of every possible experience.”
There is a close relationship between the left-hand terms and the right-hand terms in the form of a distinction, a polarity, or a sense of structure (e.g., nested containers, independent-dependent, unlimited-delimited). Each distinction can be used to explain and describe the other distinctions. For example, “Absolute reality allows false ideas and illusions,” or “Awareness is not just another thing to be experienced--it is instead the reality of all possible experiences.”
The book was designed to build familiarity with these words, statements, and ideas. However, it is intuition that matters, and intuition is beyond such words and ideas. So, the real work is not to learn some more ideas, it is to set illusions aside in order to see the reality that lies beyond.
1 - Words (an Introduction)
Questions: Do we live in a world of illusion? How would we know? What is this place? What should we do?
How to read this book – warnings and guidance:
Be careful about trusting words; allow for significant misunderstandings. Do your own thinking. Do your own observing. Seek direct, intuitive self-awareness and not just agreeable words and ideas.
Word meanings change with usage, even from chapter to chapter and from moment to moment. Such meanings are always private.
Ideas are more important than words. Some ideas cannot be explained, and the simplest cannot even be named.
Reality, being, and awareness are more important than any words or ideas. (Consider how easy it was to read that sentence.)
Stop to consider each question and suggestion, but do not get stuck on anything.
This is more about focusing your intuition than about finding some new answers.
Story: Where Is Here. What do those words mean to you?
2 - Reality and Unreality
Reality: Not subject to birth and death, nor to beginning and ending, nor to existing or not existing. Whatever is real is what truly is in and of itself without depending upon anything else. Reality contains unreality.
Unreality: Things that are subject to creation and destruction; they exist at one moment and not at the next; their characteristics change; perception of them changes; or their existence depends upon the existence of other things. Unreal things have no reality of their own.
Story: Ancient Chinese Puzzle. Hidden in plain sight: practicing intuition.
3 - Being and Existence
Being: Direct self-knowledge of reality. It is what (or who) experiences, perceives, or knows things; it is both the reality of knowing and the way that reality knows. It is not divided in its nature. Being contains existence.
Existence: The unreal things that being seems to perceive. Divided, having the appearance of many separately existing individual things. Existing things have no being of their own.
Story: Being Dreams Forgetting. What place is this?
4 - Awareness and Experience
Awareness: The certainty of experience and intuition. It knows experiences; and through awareness of intuition being knows itself. Intuition is self-awareness of reality and being. Awareness contains experiences.
Experience: Things that awareness is aware of. Indirect knowledge of appearances. Experiences have no awareness of their own. Intuition is awareness being aware of itself.
Story: Where Is Here. To what do the words refer?
Chapters [5] and [6] are subtopics of chapter [4].
5 - Appearing and Appearance
Appearing: The fact that awareness is aware of things, without reference to what those things might be. The fact that experiences come and go.
Appearance: the characteristics of the things that are appearing, changing, and disappearing.
Story: Seeing a Tree. The appearance of appearing, and the appearing of appearances.
6 - Self and Other
Self: True self vs. False self. True self is direct self-knowledge of being; it is self-awareness without any word or representation. The idea of false self is expressed indirectly in statements, ideas, or inclinations, usually of the form, “I am this” or “I am that.” False self is truly other than self.
Other: Not true self. Other than self. False self.
Story: The Flowering of a Wonderful Law. The self cannot be found anywhere in any world. And yet, here it is.
7 - Container and Content
Container: Anything that is used to gather or select other things; criteria or methods for selecting things.
Content: Things that are gathered or selected into any kind of container.
Story: Where Is Here. What contains the concepts, ‘here,’ ‘where,’ and ‘is’? Where do they appear?
Chapters [8] through [13] are subtopics of Container and Content [7].
8 - Universe and World
Universe: Whatever is possible to experience in any way at all, throughout time and place; the universe only includes things that have been, are being, or will be experienced.
World: Abstractly, refers to the way some experiences appear as containers of other experiences, where a containing experience unifies many contained experiences into a single experience. More generally, refers to some part of the universe that contains many experiences and perhaps many other worlds. A world-view is a perspective into a world, a way of understanding it through ideas and beliefs.
Story: The Seer and the Seen. Arising and subsiding of experience.
9 - Allowing and Judging
Allowing: The intentional quality of awareness. The intent is to allow. Awareness allows experience, being allows existence, reality allows illusion, and agreement allows disagreement.
Judging: Habitual attachment to apparent choices. The intent is to directly or indirectly disallow some things.
Story: We Always Do the Best We Can. Allowing is the intentional and motivating character of reality.
10 - Allowing and Choosing
This topic continues and amplifies the previous topic, Allowing and Judging.
Summary: In reality, there is no individual free choice; instead, there exists only the illusion of free choice. Does it even matter whether free choice is real in and of itself or whether it is an illusion? In reality, everything that is possible to experience is experienced within real awareness.
Story: The Magician’s Trick. Who helps whom?
11 - Experiencing and Representing
Experiencing: Awareness of unreal things. All experiences of every kind are unreal things.
Representing: An aspect of experiencing in which experiences refer to other experiences. Representation occurs when one thing re‑presents or refers to other things. Relative meaning; meanings that define each other by referring to each other.
Story: The Five Paths. Searching for the meaning in things.
12 - Anticipating, Selecting, and Recognizing
Anticipating: Awareness of an idea, however vague it may be, that something specific may or may not happen.
Selecting: Awareness of a judgement (or preference) that something represented in an anticipation or idea should or should not happen.
Recognizing: Consciously expressing acknowledgement of a particular selection or some other judgement.
Story: Questions Children Ask. Just noticing what is here.
13 - Knowing and Intuiting
Knowing: The inherent certainty of awareness, being, and reality. Characteristic of being. Being directly (immediately) knows awareness and reality in the same way that it knows itself.
Intuiting: The expanding of awareness from the narrowly focused content of an experience to the limitless character of awareness itself, and to the limitless character of being and reality.
Story: Ontological Monadology. Simpler than you can ever imagine.
14 - True and False
True: Agreement; has two common uses: casual and formal. Casual truth is agreement with commonly understood language and evidence; formal (strict) truth refers to the rules of formally defined languages, such as Logic or Arithmetic.
False: refers to disagreement in the same way that True refers to agreement.
Story: Where Is Here. The paradox of true explanation.
Chapters [15] through [20] are subtopics of True and False [14].
15 - Knowing-What and Knowing-That
Knowing-what: Direct awareness (intuition) of reality. May also refer to direct awareness of particular experiences or intuitions. Knowing-what encompasses (contains) knowing-that.
Knowing-that: The experience of indirectly referring to or representing something by using ideas, words, symbols, representations, judgements, and so forth. Knowing‑that appears as statements, questions, meaningful exclamations, recollections, memories, and so forth. Cannot encompass (contain, express, represent) knowing-what.
Story: The Robin. Recognizing two kinds of knowledge.
16 - Value and Judgement
Value: The importance of something as directly known from some point of view. Direct awareness of a certain experience or circumstance. Intrinsic value.
Judgement: Indirect assessment of the relative worth of something, or at least assessment of an idea of that worth, whether overt, subtle, or virtually unconscious. Valuation. Extrinsic value.
Story: Ocean of Light. The intrinsic value of being.
17 - Casual Truth and Casual Context
Casual Truth: Informal, conditional, and temporary; it has different meanings depending upon the different contexts in which it is defined, asserted, or evaluated. Different contexts may disagree on what truth means.
Casual Context: Both the informal contexts in which something is experienced or asserted and all other contexts in which that thing can be understood, referenced, or examined. A container not only of the thing being considered, but also of the criteria and rules that define the containing context.
Story: Self-Sacrifice. The limitations of Logic.
18 - Universal Truth and Universal Context
Universal Truth: Reality itself. Directly knowing what reality is. Cannot refer to indirectly knowing that reality is such and such. Exactly the same as universal context.
Universal Context: Reality itself, and therefore also being, awareness, and such. Exactly the same as universal truth.
Story: Memory of Being Born. The Universal Background Memory, where truth and context are one.
19 - Thing and Context
Thing: A word used to refer to whatever can be experienced, referred to, considered, or even imagined. Virtually no limit on what the word might seem to refer to.
Context: Interrelations among words, ideas, predispositions, conventions, circumstances, memories, habits, environments, and other things as they relate to something being experienced, referred to, and so forth.
Story: The Rain. Allowing the universe of all possible experience to unfold as it naturally will.
20 - Relative Truth and Relative Context
Relative Truth: Partial, casual, or conditional agreement. Relativistic, conditional, or qualified in some essential way. Like saying, “mostly true,” “true in the sense of,” or “only true if or when.” Or meaningful only in particular relevant circumstances such as being true in theory but not true in practice.
Relative Context: Many interrelated contexts that appear together as a single context for something, where each component context (sub-context) affects the meaning and truth of that something. For example, in this book the suggested meanings of some words change from chapter to chapter--from context to context.
Story: The Mystery of the Ordinary. Matters of belief.
21 - Absolute and Relative
Absolute: Reality itself. Reality is exactly what it appears to be. At the deepest level of your being, you are what reality is. Absolutely so.
Relative: The character of unreality (illusions); of existence and non-existence; of signs, symbols, colors, statements, shapes, sensations, and other things that all refer to or represent something else (i.e., they refer to and represent each other). How things are not what they appear to be.
Story: Intuition of Reality. A certain frame of mind.
Discussion
Method: Focusing, grasping, letting go, suddenly knowing.
Result: Focusing, knowing, letting go, always returning.
Conclusion: Where Is Here. Woven of a single thread.
— — —
Read the book here on Substack
Read or download the book for free at Archive.org (PDF, Epub, or DAISY audio)
Read more about the sources and inspirations for the 18 story-puzzles.
Read about awakening and remembering: The most obvious thing of all
Read about the author.
When I read it I can’t help but compare it to Martinus and there are a lot of similarities.
Martinus is not that systematic and careful when it comes to his use of words, though. He does not really define words. He mostly just uses them and we are more or less expected to get the meaning from the reading. Now, I am not being quite fair to him, I am exaggerating in order to emphasize my point. It’s also important to state that he was not writing for an academic purpose. He was also not an academic himself, very far from actually because he was rather unread.
If you like to dig into his background, then he introduces himself and his mission in this article: https://www.martinus.dk/en/online-library/ttt/index.php?mode=artikelopslag&art=1807
You seem to kind of make a system of words, right? And so you are very careful about defining words and using them in the proper way. So, that seems to be a marked difference.
When it comes to the points you are making, I find very little contradiction to what Martinus is saying.
For instance, when you talk about "Reality" not being "subject to birth and death, nor to beginning and ending", and so forth. And "Unreality" being those things that are "subject to creation and destruction". All of that is exactly the same as Martinus says.
There may be parts of it, though, that I don’t quite understand because you are using the words differently from Martinus. Thus, there may be more differences that are not obvious to me at this point.
For instance, Martinus also talks a lot about intuition, and according to him intuition is at it highest in "the divine world" where we are supposed to be as one with God and each other. There is a directness and ultimateness of experience there. According to Martinus we don’t have very much intuition in the animal kingdom, it’s kind of dormant here but on the rise for us humans. However, it still has its place in our lives because it’s "the energy of intuition" that we feel when we have an orgasm. So, that’s actually an overshadowing of God right there in the sexual climax. However, Martinus also says that intuition is an ability to automatically analyse a subject, so that we get conclusions without needing to do any calculations ourselves. Thus, intuition is rather a broad phenomenon in his view. It sounds like what you are writing but I am not sure!?
There is one point that seems to be contrary to Martinus. You write that: "In reality, there is no individual free choice". Contrary to that, Martinus says that we do have free will. I don't quite remember how he argues that but he teaches the idea of karma and so, in his view, our destiny is solely of our own making.
Trivial Realism - we sense the world more or less as it is bc truth is ultimately pragmatic and we couldn't have evolved otherwise.
https://kaiserbasileus.substack.com/p/metaphysics-in-a-nutshell