Thorby-ism: Know Thyself

My name is Thorby, and although I may just be a dog, I have a deep yearning to understand myself and what makes me tick. After all, what could be more important? If I don’t understand why I do the things I do, say the things I say, think the things I think, and feel the things I feel, am I anything more than a machine responding to stimuli? Well, I don’t like the thought of that! If you’re a fellow seeker, then I invite you to ponder with me the following thought experiments.

What Stereograms Can Teach Us?

When you view the 3D image in a stereogram, it’s important to understand that what you’re experiencing is an illusion. The 3D image is purely a product of the mind and doesn’t exist in reality. What’s happening is that you’re exposing the process by which the brain creates a sense of depth. Now look at the world around you. The feeling of depth is a creation of the brain utilizing the information coming from your eyesight. Now you should be thinking, “OK, I’m on to you…”.

Everything Experienced is an Illusion.

That may seem like a bold statement, but rest assured it is not speculation and can be reasoned out logically. Here is the thought experiment to convince yourself. Imagine you’re looking at a beautiful sunset. How is it that you can see it, experience it? The typical response would be:

“Light from the sun, both directly and from bouncing off various objects, passes through the lenses of the eyes. The light strikes the retinas and stimulates nerve cells. The nerves then send signals down the optic nerve where they are received by the vision center of the brain.”

That explanation is fine except it glosses over an important fact. What exactly is being sent through the optic nerve? Surely, the sunset, reality itself can’t pass through the optic nerve. Of course not. The signal being sent through the optic nerve is comprised of electrons and neurotransmitters. It’s not reality, it’s data. So data is being fed to your brain. The brain then uses the data in order to create the display, the sunset, that you experience.

The conclusion to be drawn from this is that, at best, everything you experience is an interpretation of incoming data from the nervous system. Since all we experience comes from the nervous system, it would imply that everything we experience is ourselves, our own interpretation of reality. There is no way you can actually experience directly anything outside of yourself.

The only alternative explanation for what we experience is that there is no sunset, no incoming data, no brain, and not even a body. But rather, everything is context within an illusion. This life is purely a simulation, a virtual reality, a dream, whatever words you’d like to use. You, the real You, are the awareness, the consciousness, the witness behind everything witnessed in the illusion. You are the observer of everything that is observed, the experiencer of everything that is experienced. And what is observed and experienced includes the world around you, your body, and even your thoughts and emotions. This is ultimately the simplest and most succinct explanation, and the one that this brainiac dog endorses.

Why Should Anyone Bother Thinking About These Lofty Topics?

Simply put: because the ramifications are enormous and potentially life-changing. Imagine you’re asleep and dreaming. Suddenly, you become lucid - within the dream you now know that it’s only a dream. At that point, how invested are you in what now happens in the dream? Not very, right? After all, it’s only a dream. Nothing truly matters. You are now free to explore and play within the dream to your heart’s content without a care in the world. Just joy. And if you were having a nightmare, it’s suddenly not so scary.

If this life, this reality, that we’re experiencing is truly just an illusion, is it possible to become lucid? Sages throughout history have told us that it is indeed possible. They tell us that everything is an illusion, and that the main obstacle to us realizing this fact is the illusion of our feeling of individuality, our very sense of self. They tell us that everything is actually one in unity, but that our sense of self creates the illusion of being a separate entity. And it’s this sense of separateness (and the resulting feeling of being time-bound) that is responsible for all human suffering. This brainiac dog believes that the Buddha and Christ taught the same goal but by different paths. And that goal is to wake up, to be born anew. To see through the illusion and delusions and understand beyond the intellect, through direct experience, our true primordial nature.

Stereograms can help you see through the illusion of your sense of depth. Maybe they will inspire you to seek seeing through the illusion of your sense of self? Thorby-ism is to know thyself, to know thy (true) Self. And you thought stereograms were just silly fun!