Does the World Exist ? Probably not, and that's a good thing.

          

Art by SheepDen

First I write about the practical psychological consequences of such a belief, and then the mystical , scientific, and philosophical aspects of the world not existing. 

The Psychological

Often I hear people say they’re worried about “the world”. Where is the world, I ask. They usually point to a wall. “I’m worried about my neighbor,” they say. “Where is she?” They point to the wall again.

This interests me both psychologically and philosophically.

Psychologically, with clients, my intention is that their minds only entertain what is valuable; and by valuable I mean good to have done and possible to do.

So, it’s not indifference to the actual neighbor I would suggest, but indifference to the thoughts about the neighbor that are not valuable - that aren’t possible to do, and so don’t help anyone.

If we are preoccupied with thoughts of what is not possible to do, we will miss the real flesh and blood person in front of us that is possible to help.

Of course, when we are fused with our thoughts, we might believe them as an absolute truths, or iron laws we MUST obey, and then it’s difficult to separate our thoughts from reality, and instead of our mind reacting to the reality we are reacting only to our thoughts.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) has much in common with Buddhism; also with Vedanta and its practice of Self-Inquiry where you meditate on “Who am I.”

In ACT they practice cognitive defusion, which has three steps:

Looking at thoughts rather than from thoughts.
Noticing thoughts rather than becoming caught up in thoughts.
Letting thoughts come and go rather than holding on to them.

It also helps to ask yourself: 

Is holding on to this thought/belief helpful?
Is doing so causing me suffering or keeping me from being effective?


The Philosophical.

I’m also interested in this viewpoint philosophically. There’s even a movement now in philosophy called the “new realism” led by Markus Gabriel, you can read a review of his book Why the World Does Not Exist HERE

So, the world doesn’t exist, something poets and mystics have always known, and now scientists.

Below are quotes from all three :

"How little does man know of his Self [the one, immortal, formless substratum of all that exists], how he takes the most absurd statements about himself for holy Truth. He is told that he is the body, was born, will die, has parents, duties; learns to like what others like and fear what others fear.

Totally a creature of heredity & society, he lives by memory & acts by habits. Ignorant of his Self & his true nature, he pursues false aims and is always frustrated. His life & death are meaningless and painful, and there seems to be no way out."

- Nisargadatta Maharaj

From Eckhart’s 87th sermon HERE : 

“For in that essence of God in which God is above being and distinction, there I was myself and knew myself so as to make this man. Therefore I am my own cause according to my essence, which is eternal, and not according to my becoming, which is temporal. 

Therefore I am unborn, and according to my unborn mode I can never die. According to my unborn mode I have eternally been, am now and shall eternally remain. That which I am by virtue of birth must die and perish, for it is mortal, and so must perish with time. In my birth all things were born, and I was the cause of myself and all things….”

“The assumption that space and time exist and are real is not universal to humankind…there is practically no limit to the different ways in which people conceive of space and time.”

-Stanisław Iwaniszewski

“From an anthropological viewpoint, concepts of space and time should be viewed as cultural products (artifacts), products of thought, situated within Karl Popper's (1972) third world (Renfrew and Bahn 1991, pp. 340), but remaining embedded and embodied in physical objects, events, and processes taking place in his first world.

Therefore, there is no reason to suppose that space and time are real things that exist and can be universally and objectively perceived; rather they should be regarded as "imaginary constructs which generate the rationality of the relationship between people and their actions" (Iwaniszewski 2001, p. 3). In a similar way, all peoples create a concept of the universe, or cosmos…”

- Iwaniszewski, S. (2015). Concepts of Space, Time, and the Cosmos. In: Ruggles, C. (eds) Handbook of Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy.

“Just as the spider emits the thread (of the web) out of itself and again withdraws it into itself, likewise the mind projects the world out of itself and again resolves it into itself. When the mind leaves the Self, the world appears.

Therefore, when the world appears, the Self does not appear; and when the Self appears (shines) the world does not appear.”

- Ramana Maharshi

"O, aspirants who hide yourselves away fearing this world, nothing such as a world exists! Fearing this false world which appears to exist, is like fearing the false snake which appears in a rope."

- Ramana Maharshi

“If one wished to escape the world of perspectives one would perish.”

— Nietzsche

"What is perfection? Profound humility, which consists in the abandoning of everything visible and invisible: visible meaning everything involved with the senses; invisible meaning all thinking about them."

—St. Isaac of Nineveh

“If it is perceivable 

or conceivable 

it is not You, 

therefore discard it.”


~Nisargadatta Maharaj

THE UNBELIEVABLE by William Bronk

We are made afraid not to believe the fraud

of this world : believe or be lost.

Lost anyway.

No more to lose. Not that we ever had.

We said we had. The world said. It said,

"There is a world for having, a world to be had

only believe." Who was had ?

World,

I say no. No world.

These are not

spoken speeches. Nobody says, or to say.


But the unbelievable, which nothing believes,

says something. Listen. Says itself.

As if it were my voice. As if it were now.


What We Are by William Bronk


What we are? We say we want to become

what we are or what we have an intent to be.

We read the possibilities, or try.

We get to some. We think we know how to read.

We recognize a word, here and there,

a syllable: male, it says perhaps,

or female, talent -- look what you could do


or love, it says, love is what we mean.

Being at any cost: in the end, the cost

is terrible but so is the lure to us.

We see it move and shine and swallow it.

We say we are and this is what we are

as to say we should be and this is what to be

and this is how. But, oh, it isn’t so.


THE ELUSIONS OF DESIRE by William Bronk


I know nothing about my life except
that (call it my life) it is all mysterious.
You say, all right, come to your senses. I come.
I come to a sense other than common sense.


But I love that, too, would come there

if I could. Sense is what I love — the half
sense I find. My eyes look
out while I stay in mystery, wanting sense.


Abba Alonius, summarizes it well: “If a man does not say in his heart, in the world there is only myself and God, he will not gain peace”


When I was the stream, when I was the
forest, when I was still the field
when I was every hoof, foot,
fin and wing, when I
was the sky itself,

no one ever asked me did I have a purpose, no one ever
wondered was there anything I might need,
for there was nothing
I could not love.

It was when I left all we once were that
the agony began, the fear and questions came,
and I wept, I wept. And tears
I had never known before.

So I returned to the river, I returned to
the mountains. I asked for their hand in marriage again,
I begged—I begged to wed every object and creature,

and when they accepted,
God was ever present in my arms.
And He did not say,
“Where have you
been?”

For then I knew my soul—every soul—
has always held
Him.

~ Meister Eckhart (13th C Christian mystic)

David Bentley Hart on Leopardi vs Nicholas of Cusa

                     

"Children find everything in nothing, adults find nothing in everything"

-Giacomo Leopardi

In his book You Are Gods David Bentley Hart has a chapter on Nicholas of Cusa, in which he contrasts the great mystic's intuitions with the those of Leopardi, the great poet of pessimism :

"In one of the earlier passages in his Zibaldone, Leopardi reflects at considerable length upon what he takes to be a sentiment common to all of us: a sense he believes we all share of the “nullità di tutte le cose,” “the nullity of everything,” the insufficiency of every pleasure to satisfy the spirit within us, and  “our inclination toward an infinite that we do not comprehend.” It is, taken as a whole, a tour de force of psychological phenomenology. 

It also, however, begins from a logical error; for, according to Leopardi, both this persistent dissatisfaction within us and the infinity of longing that underlie it can probably be ascribed to a cause “more material than spiritual.” Which is to say, he begins by assuming a contradiction: that an infinite intention, exceeding every finite object of rational longing, could arise spontaneously from finite physical causes, without any transcendental end to provoke it as, at least, an intentional object and capacity of the rational will. 

But how, then, could we experience this tendenza at all as an actual intelligible volition beyond what lies immediately before us, and arrive at an aware- ness that it is unfulfilled? An intention without a final intentional horizon can be experienced neither as fulfilled nor as unfulfilled. 

And yet Leopardi recognizes that our desire for pleasure is limitless in duration and extent, and that we would not exist as the beings we are without it; it belongs to our substance, he says, not as a longing for this or that, but as a desire for the pleasing as such. 

And here he is quite correct. One can desire nothing finite as an end wholly in itself, but only, “as abstract and limitless pleasure.”

 “Following on one pleasure, the soul does not cease from desire for pleasure, just as it never ceases thinking, because thought and desire for pleasure are two operations equally continuous with and inseparable from our existence.”

 Indeed. But, then, what Leopardi’s reflections actually reveal is that our ability to desire anything as a purpose conceived by the willing mind is inexplicable unless we presume that the source of that desire is a tran- scendental object (real or supposed) to which our rational wills are—at least, again, intentionally—wholly adequate. 

As a matter of simple fact, all purposive human desire is animated at its most primordial level by an unremitting volition toward (for want of a better term) the divine. Cor nostrum inquietum est donec requiescat in te, to coin a phrase.

One can see, of course, why as unremittingly dour a godless genius as Leopardi would not be inclined to follow his musings to the conclusion they appear to entail. To grant that the human spirit is capable of a genu- inely infinite intentionality is already to grant that the sort of bleak materialism he presumed is at best paradoxical, at worst incoherent. If nothing else, it would mean that even that aspect of human character that seems most irrational—our inability to rest finally content in any proximate and finite end of longing—is in fact the result of a prior and wholly rational relation between human spirit and the proper end of rational freedom as such. 

That irrepressible disquiet is not merely the insatiable perversity of aimless appetite, magically positing an ever more exalted end for itself somewhere out there in the nowhere of the will’s spontaneous energies, but is rather a constant and cogent longing that apprises us of the true ultimate rationale that prompts the mind and will to seek any end at all, and therefore to be capable of recognition, evaluation, judgment, and choice in regard to proximate ends: a rationale that lies elsewhere, beyond the limits of the finite. 

This also, moreover, touches upon a very old issue within the history of Western metaphysics: the gradual discovery that infinity is not merely a name for unintelligible in- determinate extension—as was the prejudice of early Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic thought—nor even merely a positive rational category; rather, infinity is also a proper name for that necessary terminus of all real rational freedom apart from which neither reason nor freedom could exist. Plotinus is perhaps the first Western thinker to have grasped this explicitly. In Christian thought, it was Gregory of Nyssa who first unfolded the principle at length, and with consummate brilliance. 

But no Christian figure after Gregory, with the possible exception of Maurice Blondel, grasped the principle in all its dimensions as fully as did Nicholas of Cusa. As he writes in De visione dei: “Were God not infinite, he could not be the end for desire.” To which, of course, corresponds the reciprocal proposition that nothing desired as a limited quiddity, without any remainder of the “ever greater,” can be in itself the sole final cause prompting that desire.

Actually, the sixteenth chapter of De visione is oddly similar in some ways to that passage from Leopardi cited above, though of course radically different in intonation. You, God, says Nicholas : “are the form of every desirable thing and are that truth that is desired within every desire”;  “to taste of your incomprehensible sweetness, which becomes more delightful to me to the very degree that it seems more infinite,” is to see that, precisely because the divine is ultimately unknown to all creatures, “they might in holiest ignorance possess a greater contentment, as though amid an incalculable and inexhaustible treasure.” 

Hence, the creature’s ignorance of God’s full greatness is a “supremely desirable feasting,” for the intellect. And hence, also, it is God’s will both “to be comprehended in my possession and also to remain incomprehensible and infinite,” because he is a treasure whose end no one can desire. Neither can this rational appetite desire the cessation of its own existence. The will may long either to exist or not to exist, but appetite itself cannot desist from itself, for it “is borne into the infinite.” 

 “Indeed, intellectual desire is borne on not into that which is capable of being greater and more desirable, but into that which is incapable of being greater or more desirable. . . . Therefore, the end of desire is infinite.”

And so, says Nicholas, with exemplary precision: “Therefore you, God, are infinity itself, which alone I desire in every desire.” God shines forth in human longing, and so that longing leads us to God, casting all finite and comprehensible things aside as it does so, for in them it can find no rest; thus it is led ever onward from God who is the beginningless beginning to God who is the endless end.

 One sees God, then, under the form of a certain rapture of the mind, and thus discovers that the intellect cannot find true satisfaction in anything that it wholly understands, any more than it could in something that it understands not at all; rather, it must always seek: “that which it understands through not understanding.”

 And so, then, it is only within God’s own infinite movement of love that any rational desire exists, coming from and going toward the infinite that gives it being.

Infinity itself, which alone I desire in every desire. And yet, for Nicholas, quite unlike Leopardi, this very insatiability—this indomitable longing for the infinite within each stirring of finite longing—is also a kind of ecstasy, an eros that finds its highest possible delight precisely in its own perpetual dissatisfaction. 

Where Leopardi (in his Schopenhauerian way) sees only evidence of the blind, indeterminable striving of idiot will, Nicholas recognizes from the first that nothing could actually prompt an appetite for the infinite that is truly capable of drawing us toward finite ends except a real intelligible horizon of rational longing, against which the intellect can measure and evaluate any finite object of desire. 

Every limited terminus of rational desire, then, is recognizable to the intellect only and precisely as a contraction and mediation of that formally limitless terminus. And so Nicholas sees this exquisite state of elated frustra- tion as nothing less than the original intentionality of spirit toward God’s revelation of himself in all things, an openness of spiritual creatures to all things, through which all things are reciprocally opened up to spiritual creatures.

 God’s “facies absoluta”—his absolute face or aspect—is the “natural face of every nature,” the “art and knowledge of everything knowable,” and so the  “absolute entity of all Being.”  He is the face of all faces, already seen in every face or aspect of any creature, albeit in a veiled and symbolic manner;  he is the infinite treasure of delight glimpsed within every delight, manifesting himself in all that is and by every possible means of attracting the rational will to himself.

Nor is the mind’s ascent beyond every finite end merely a journey into the indeterminate; rather, it is a true engagement with an end at once both infinite and rational, because it is nothing less than God’s own end, his essence, the only possible determinacy for an infinite nature.

We receive the world, therefore, and the world is available to our spiritual overtures, entirely on account of this prior infinite appetite for an infinite end, this desire to know the infinite in a real “infinite mode”: that of incomprehensible immediacy, unknowing knowledge. We are capable of knowing anything at all only because the primordial orientation of our nature is the longing to know God as God, to see him as he is, rather than as some limited essence.

For that vision to be achieved, however, all finite concepts must be surpassed by the intellect as it ascends to a more direct apprehension. That hunger for the infinite as infinite, which can never come to rest in any finite nature, is also the only possible ground of the mind’s capacity for finite realities as objects of rational knowledge or desire. But for our inextinguishable intentionality toward the “face of all faces,” no face would ever appear to us.