Unreal Existence
What is existence?
Are there parts of realty which do not exist?
Or is reality exclusively all that exists?
Existence implies some kind of permanence.
A fairy which appears and disappears never to be seen again will readily be taken for some kind of illusion.
And so we have our first dichotomy: real or illusory.
Outside or Inside me, my head, my self?
But is an illusion, delusion or dream, imagination not also real? That it „is not“ is simply not true. It IS.
That it is „my illusion“ and not yours does not make it less real. It has become a part of my existence, experience and personal reality.
I may even share the experience with you and thus it becomes a part of your experience since you imagine it with me as you listen even if you deny its external reality.
So we now have something moving across different consciousnesses which is part of reality but which we daren‘t call real because it’s not „out there“.
Nevertheless it is. Otherwise how could it move?
We may say: Oh, Illusions are a real phenomena but individual illusions are not. But if the individual imaginings have no existence then of what do Illusions consist?
We may suppose some kind of electrical activity in the brain caused by sound waves. But whence came this activity originally and how is it distinct and different from similar activities caused by real objects? Of course it must be natural and thus part of Reality in some strange way!
The dilemma can only be solved, as Hegel taught us, by going deeper.
Apparently our assumption that reality consists only of objects (things, nouns) is incorrect.
Just as Wittgenstein realised (late in life) that language is much more than naming things (i.e. words are more than just nouns), we come to see that there are Things (objects, building classical or static Reality) and Illusions (ideas, building conceptual or dynamic Reality). We dismiss Illusions as worthless at our peril:
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. - C.G. Jung
There is also, if we look deeper, a third entity: the Self and other Selves (subjects, building personal Reality).
If the Self appears doubtful or numinous or just another object, further reflection will soon cure this. One needs only read Decartes to see that the Self is perhaps the only thing we can be certain of and yet… according to the Upanishads, the most unknowable.
(As an aside, it is a misrepresentation of Eastern philosophy to say the Self is an illusion. It is the permanence of self which is illusory. The self, it turns out, is actually a dynamic process. More on that another time.)
Indeed, some reflection will conclude that whatever Reality (static or dynamic) we think we recognise is always perceived and processed by and through the Self.
The Self encompasses the All.
Or
The Universe we perceive is inside us.
