Buddhism: Creating Reality

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Creating Reality Jul 17th 2011, 22:38 If someone says that we create our own reality, what does that mean? There is more than one way to define "creating reality," of course. But I'm reasonably sure we can't grow wings or fill our closets with Jimmy Choo shoes with the power of our brain waves alone. Here's another way we create reality. This is from a book review by Israel Rosenfield in the April 2011 issue of Harper's. The book being reviewed is The Mind's Eye by Oliver Sacks, which is about the neurology of language and perception. "For animals, motion creates a world of visual, tactile, and auditory sensations that are unorganized and unstable; in short, the world is constantly changing. What the brain must do--it's probably the principal reason brains evolved--is create a stable, coherent sensory environment for the individual organism to understand and use. The brain does this by "inventing" a range of perceptions: a series of constructs that we "see," "hear," and "feel" when we look, listen, and touch. ..." "... The creation of a coherent environment out of chaotic stimuli is one of the brain's primary activities. There are no colors in nature, only electromagnetic radiation of varying wavelengths (the visible spectrum is between 390 and 750 nanometers). If we were aware of our "real" visual worlds we would see constantly changing images of dirty gray, making it difficult for us to recognize forms. Our visual stimuli are stabilized when the brain compares the variations in the different wavelengths of light; the consequence of these comparisons is what we perceive as "color." The brain creates a sense of "color constancy":� no matter the lighting conditions--bright sunlight, filtered sunlight, or artificial lighting--colors remain more or less the same. This phenomenon is not fully understood. But colors themselves are not in our surroundings. Brains therefore create something that is not there; and in doing so they help us to make sense of our environments" This reminds me of the Buddhas teaching on the skandhas. What we think of as external reality is continuously created by our senses, thoughts and consciousness. That doesn't mean that those things "out there" don't exist, but that they have no inherent existence. We create their forms, appearance, identities. We label and sort and categorize, and then we say those things we have created are "real." Are they?

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