Cloud cuckoo land
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George Clark June 2002
It would be easy to drift through life on a cloud of sex, drugs and rock and roll with all gaps in distraction plugged from a quality collection of up to date consumer products.

If you are lucky enough to be hidden from the worst excesses of
disease, pollution, poverty, violence, old-age and death
then why not eat lotuses in your cloud cuckoo land?

A ‘cloud cuckoo’ is not a bird. It is a cloud formation that looks like a bird. It’s ‘existence’ is in your mind rather than in the cloud formation. How can this be?

Light from the sky enters your eye. Your mind interprets the signal as fluffy white things on a blue background and, if English speaking, labels them as ‘clouds’. Then a pattern recognition centre associates the shape of the cloud with a bird. The cloud cuckoo is thus created and is immediately linked with other thoughts and feelings from your subconscious (desire, aversion or neutrality) and a dynamic chain of illusion is set in motion.
There are options of remembering a cloud cuckoo that you once saw and of imagining one that has never existed – and the remembered and imagined ones have as much ‘real reality’ as the ‘seen’ one.
So it is with all other ‘things/illusions’ which the mind decides to isolate from the Flux. People, palaces and planets perish. There is only the Flux. Impermanence. No ‘thing’ exists or lasts.

People, palaces and planets perish

An experienced meditator sees the world of things (including her individuated ‘self’) as no more substantial than passing clouds. All things (which are not ‘things’ as ordinarily understood) are intimately connected with all other ‘not-things’. It becomes apparent that there is only one thing which is everything. And there is no self conscious subject to whom this is apparent – the Oneness does not ‘know’ it’s Self. No knower, no knowing and no known.

Language evolved to deal with the world of phenomena and cannot easily deal with the end point of mind training - the numinous experience of the filled emptiness.

Mundane people are condemned by rationality, language and cultural conditioning to grasp at a meagre world of common sense phenomena and the latest round of fashions and gadgets.

Poets and mystics pull back the mind blinkers and know their non-selves to be one with the oceanic Mind which is everywhere and always in a state of fearless and blissful tranquillity.

"As the senses … never and in no single instance enable us to know things in themselves, but only their appearances, and as these are mere representations … all bodies, together with the space in which they are, must be held to be nothing but mere representations in us,
and exist nowhere else than merely in our thought."
Emmanuel Kant is his "Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics":

  

The reality which can be described is not the real reality.

Whose reality counts?

 

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