The purpose of presenting this series of lists is to provide terms of reference for future discussion and analysis. They have also been offering a slightly progressive journey of sorts in that our initial materialist assumptions, shared by nearly all modern people these days, posit an objective reality out there making all subjective, mind-experienced phenomena somehow less than real even though they comprise the vast majority of both individual and collective human experience. The first list was a quasi objective one, namely the Five Skandhas, starting with form and ending with individuated stream of consciousness, aka ‘me’; we then went through the five Chinese elemental phases, the six realms from Hindu-Buddhist cosmology and finally the five tantric Buddha families. The Five Skandhas are a quasi objectivist 1 list whereas the Five Buddha Families are anything but.
However, I don’t want to entangle the Reader in too many philosophical or analytical weeds by delving deeply (even assuming I were able) into all the many differences and similarities of objective and subjective views of reality; rather have been trying to point out that one major problem with over-reliance on the reductionist materialist, or objectivist, world view is that it blocks out too many vital, not to mention enjoyable, elements in human experience, discounting them as irrelevant and thus banishing them from public discourse and overall culture, a very real, and increasingly world wide, problem. This is not to deny that many of the insights derived from the objectivist point of view are valuable, however they go too far when they insist that only their view works for everything and unfortunately too many of us have consented to such cultural and perceptual parameters being set, to the detriment of all.
This beef animates this entire Layers & Levels presentation which is framed with the intention of demonstrating how so-called ‘reality’ is not only objective and therefore not uni-dimensional, flat, uniform, unchanging, always ‘there’, solid, physical-only and so on. Reality is more like a dream world conjured by a combination of one overall Being or Consciousness field within which unlimited particular living points of view including yourself, myself, the birds, the bees, the flowers and the trees and so on ad infinitum, each of whose perceptions constitute a unique dimension of ‘reality’, something I like to call our ‘Experiential Continuum’.
Within this multi-dimensional context it is possible to develop terms of reference based on observable experience, even if such observation principally comprises direct subjective experience. For example, whether we can prove it or not, when we look up we all see sky; and that sky provides multi-faceted emotional, psychological, physical, cultural and civilizational contexts to our lives. In other words, it is not only hydrogen, carbon dioxide, oxygen and dust particles as measured by scientists. What scientists can tell us about the physical properties of the sky is interesting, even helpful, but it is not the whole story.
In any case, from more non-materialist approaches have developed, especially in Asia, many ways of observing, categorizing and also developing personal, intellectual and spiritual understanding, even mastery, with countless volumes written and schools or disciplines founded dedicated to furthering such knowledge and praxis. What makes this different from the modernist mindset is, again, that they are not based on objectivist assumptions. So in this Series, now that a few examples of non-objectivist ways of viewing reality have been introduced, we can hopefully begin to examine things through the different lens they offer, one which although at first may feel unfamiliar, is in fact much more familiar than the constrained, unnatural straightjacket imposed by the materialist views which of late have come to dominate so much of our modern world.
1: any of various theories asserting the validity of objective phenomena over subjective experience (merriam-webster online)
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