I was listening to a very wise acquaintance last night talking about
the various pathologies of post-modern life. He was talking about the
distinction between "mind" (what I usually refer to as spiritual truth) and material truth, and what he said just made sense. The material world consists of "things" that can be measured, felt, sensed, verified, and that are "true" whether or not we perceive them or not. Science, logic, all the outputs of human society are products of the "mind." They are based on the minds ability to analyze and represent information. They are not the actual reality material reality itself.
This is because we don't really perceive that reality directly. What goes on
inside our heads may or may not be "real" but it is all "designed" to
enable us to deal with that "real reality" and navigate it
successfully. "Successfully" being defined mostly in terms of passing
on progeny and getting through the material world with a minimum of
suffering.
We have all sorts of tools that we use to image that reality, but
none of them are real in the sense of being actual physical things. What we see, hear, smell and conceive are representations filtered by our brains and our eyes for our brain's benefit. All our senses are there so that the system that inhabits our bodies can deal with the outside world, and yet everything in
that system is not real in the same sense as that system.
What is called "spiritual" is that inward reality. That reality seems
more real than the real reality. For a man who is color blind the
real world is perceived different from a person who sees colors
normally. A person who could see infrared or ultraviolet also
perceives the world differently. Our brains abstract various images
and these are the kernels of ideas and thoughts. Our thoughts are
what make our world far richer than the "real world." Where-else but
in the mind can people communicate across time and space by keyboard?
Ideas are important, the will, the saying "what a person can conceive
he can make reality" is true when all causes and conditions are
considered and the idea can be turned into performance objectives and
quantified. But there are limits to ideas. They guide reality but
they don't exist outside reality.
The problem we have as Buddhists and human beings is to distinguish
between the "real world" and the ideas and images we have inside our
heads. What makes an ideologue is a person who makes an assertion and
then argues it in the face of contrary facts. Such people are like
spiritual amoebas who are unable to distinguish between the "sugar"
of their minds vision of a thing and the poison that that sugar is
acting out in their bodies. When we have such people, things
like "trust", "it is written","master/disciple", "the power of 'Will'
and the 'People'" come to trumph other considerations. For the
ideologue anything his heart can will to become true can become true.
Thus Hitler talked about the "Triumph of the Will" and we find
current similar Ideologues believing that if they only believe strong
enough they can "win" a "victory of the will" in Iraq.
When we image something that thing that we create to hold the image
is not the reality itself but a representation of it. The Gohonzon,
concepts like God or Buddha, are images we create to hold the ideas
behind those images and to guide us into making them real. The only
Buddha who really matters is the one we can come to see staring back
at us in the mirror of our lives. Those others are not real, they are
representations of what is real.
Even concepts like Freedom, liberty, equality, don't exist in a
vacume. The ideas themselves are concepts that represent a living
breathing and constantly changing reality. If we want them to breathe
and have life, then we need to follow these ideas and make these
ideas even more perfect and practical by using them to guide our
pragmatic and real life actions.
That is, if a person believes in the power of the Gohonzon, for
instance. That power does not exist outside himself in the physical
object. That is a delusory attitude. He owes that object of respect
his devotion not because that object is objectively alive, but
because subjectively that object is tied to the powers and ideas in
his own mind. Like the symbolism of making offerings to the Buddha,
it doesn't eat the fruit or gaze at the green plants, we do. We
smell the candles. Those who would struggle and fight and have
conflicts over who is right or wrong or which group should stake out
this or that hill have a wrong concept of life and Buddhism. They are
living in their heads and not living in reality.
That is another dimension to the metaphor of the blind men and the
elephant. Even we human beings with wonderful eyes don't really "see"
the elephant as it actually is. What we "see" is a representation of
the elephant in our minds. The act of seeing is an act of processing
information. Because our brains are so wonderful we have an entire
universe of meaning inside our heads. All there so we can navigate
reality without getting squashed under the elephants foot.
Chris, with thanks to a very wise old Doctor :-)