Contents List:A MetaphorThe Real World Knowing Action Taps at the Conscious Mind Review |
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You are at a dance party, among strangers. The music is not a simple two-step. Nothing familiar is happening; you have heard about this place, but you have never seen this progression of movements. Not by any stretch is it destined for your repertoire.
Yet after one lesson you have begun; and you are willing to get on the floor with everyone else. You can't do much, of course, but your eagerness is helping you get the hang of it.
Now you may enjoy a place on the catwalk, for your perch. Here you can watch and, after a moment, copy a another step. Please wear good glasses. You will see others overcoming bad dance habits. And you might pick up a couple of routines for yourself.
New footwork is going to be introduced, which I know the advanced dancers will have no trouble with. But you can do a little at a time, picking and choosing, a little for now, a little for later. Once in a while, when no one's around, repeat a step. Use the directions, but don't think about them too much; stay free and easy, and take chances.
Outside, a few academic types are peeking through the windows. Others, with leaps of insight, are itching to jig; they want to come in. And a few are just hanging around to watch the insanity. They are good sports.
Your car is in the garage. The North Star is light years away. A frying pan crackles. A fire engine charges up the street screaming. A woodpecker pecks. The sun's bath warms you.
You could laugh and say this is nonsense: "If all the above are only in my mind, how come they are outside, inside, and over there?"
They are outside and over there because we know things that way.
We receive multiple taps on the screen of consciousness, and memories go to work with computer speed, identifying a chair, a shoe, a shirt, and a TV voice. Memories give each a frame of reference: under this, above that, in front of my body, etc. Everything is swiftly identified and given a relationship. No tap on the screen of consciousness is ignored.
Your kitchen, for instance.
With your eyes you receive (see) the refrigerator and the kitchen clock. But you know they are separate; one is here, one is there. With your ears you hear humming and ticking, which you know come from two places.
All of them — the clock and fridge, the ticking and humming — are taps on the consciousness. Memory keeps the taps tidy.
Without knowing (fridge is here, clock is there), you'd be mixed up and probably hollering. It would be like sorting out a closet after everything had been thrown into it at one time.
Knowing keeps everything ticketed and in order.
They are in my mind. They are not an illusion. They are real, and they must be reckoned with.
I know apple, tree, thunder, and wall. I know rain on my nose.
I recognize most of the taps that hit my conscious mind, and this helps me live calmly. I am not amid a babble of light and noise and foreign things.
We've known about the taps since we were children. They enable us to eat and play and keep out of harm's way.
Knowing, then, gives birth to a world we understand. This is the second side of reality: a real world we can bite, hug, hear, and pound.
What we have now are two participants in the three-mix of reality.
With ease, we use those two sides of reality now. We will soon use them in new ways — to make a difference.
My consciousness receives what is seen. A meaning joins it.
I know the table is out there.
The table can be inventoried in two sides of reality.
But that leaves a question hanging. If it is true, if the apple tree and the table are events that happen only in my conscious mind —
What is the source of the tapping?
