“There are no facts,” said Nietzsche, “only interpretations.” Or to put it simply: there’s no reality, only perception. Hence perception is reality!
To illustrate the above insight, let’s briefly make use of Einstein’s famed thought experiment method.
Picture, if will, having just survived a car accident and lying in a coma — that extended version of what Shakespeare called “sleep [which] is the cousin of death.” And so, let me ask: while you’re lying in this coma — surrounded by loved-ones and flowers that flank your bedside — does any of this exist to you?”
What’s understood need not be explained. …
But the instant those eyelids for curtains of yours lift . . . abracadabra — the world’s stage adorned with all its actors magically appears.
Poof!
For ages, philosophers have known it’s in fact the mind that shapes things, not things that shape the mind. Or to put it another way: if beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, then, what the beholder knows is not a beautiful sunset, but only a mind that perceives “beauty” in a setting sun.
In short, because of the 5,000,000,000 species to have ever graced the world’s stage — from aardvark to zebra — we’re the only species armed with a mind, it must be the case — change how you look at things = things you look at change.
No wonder John Milton famously concluded:
“The mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell . . . a Hell of Heaven.”
网友评论