Meaning, Past, and Consciousness

It all starts with, “Nothing I see means anything. [1]” Wait, what? What does that even mean? What do you mean by “nothing I see means anything?”

Well, first, we generally do not see — at least not the way we think we do. Yes, that’s correct. Seeing is something we do every day, all the time; it's something we cannot not do, which we take for granted and think we understand, but we neither understand it nor is it what we think it is.

Here’s a glimpse of what we mean. Light reflects off objects and then bounces into our eye, where we have optic nerves that then process information and send signals to the brain.

Notice that we did not say, “light reflects off of information and then bounces into our eye.” Instead, we said, light reflects off of “objects,” then our optic nerves process the “information.” The key question here is, where does this information come from? From the outside? The object? Or, from the inside? From our past and pre-conditioned internal representations we already have for and about the object?

Yes, this is the key question. And like it is said in science, “The best scientist is not the one with the best answer, rather, the one with the best question.” Without the optimal question, we are more likely to take things for granted, assume they are exactly as we think they are, or have been taught they are; hence, we will never really know.

Like the MIT cognitive neuroscientist Donald Hoffman said, “We don’t experience reality as it is; rather, as we need it to be. [2]”

Of course, he’s alluding to “reality” with a lower case “r,” which means he is referring to the constant fact that we operate in the world from Illusion-Based Thinking. Galileo Galilei, the father of modern science, of the scientific method, and of modern physics, was the first to suggest that humanity was operating from Illusion-Based Thinking when he challenged the belief that the sun orbited the earth. Here is what he also had to say: “I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on ... reside in consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated. [3]”

To put it plainly, the certainty that we are misinterpreting our experiences is as high as the certainty that we are alive. Yes, we are misinterpreting all the time. In fact, given our usual way of thinking, that’s all we can do. Hence the skepticism we feel in response to the Reality that “Nothing we see means anything.”

Going back to how we see, when our eye is directed toward an object, the information we gather does not derive from the object. Instead, we have billions of neurons and trillions of synapses or neuronal connections that make up the information for us. Yes, this is an inside-out world, not the other way around, regardless of how much we may believe otherwise. We construct what we see, and we try to justify it through our outside world.

Now, the question is, how do we decide what to construct? How do we determine what information to come up with? How do we decide what to see? The simplest way to answer these questions is that we do so based on our past, which means our brain, our mind, is preoccupied with the past, which we use to navigate the world. This is the case even when we think we are thinking about the future. We are doing so using the information of the past.

So, what is the past then? The past is based on misinterpretations we have each time we are referring to the past in our present time. In other words, the past is a construct used to distinguish between what we think belongs to our present time and what we think may have taken place just before that.

Einstein left us clear proof, through the use of mathematics and physics, to help us understand that past, present, and future are collapsed. Past, present, and future are not really separate, and we are always moving between the three; "the three" does not infer "three separate things." To use his words, “The only distinction between past, present, and future is a stubbornly persistent illusion.” To put it simply, Einstein was confirming what many great geniuses, like Galileo and others before him, had proven: that we misinterpret and we construct. We construct what we want to see. [4]

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In other words, it is all about consciousness, which exists all the time, and determines what we experience and the level of awareness about that which we experience.

This also means if we are exposed to an event that we interpret as hurtful, when we reconstruct the information related to that event, we may still find it to be hurtful. This does not take place because we went back to our “past” but rather because of the consciousness we are in, at that moment. In other words, we don’t go back to our "past;" which does not exist. What is constant here, therefore, is not our “past,” which again is only a construct we have created. The constant is our consciousness and the level thereof.

To summarize this: “Nothing we see means anything.” This is because, as we explained above, we have given everything all the meaning that it has for us. It is not what’s outside that determines the meaning we give; instead, our internal world is constructed for us, and the nature of the construction depends on our level of consciousness, and on nothing else.

The next key question then becomes: How is our level of consciousness determined? And the simplest way to answer this question is: It is based on the type of thinking we are operating from. It is based on whether we are operating from Illusion-Based thinking or from Reality-Based Thinking. Illusion-based thinking means low consciousness and suffering; while Reality-Based Thinking means high consciousness, ease, harmony, and comfort.

Which type of thinking are you operating from at any given moment? At which level of consciousness are you at any given moment?