Are Visualizations Real When You're Visualizing Them?

[Joseph Maynor]

This is a puzzling thing to contemplate.  Let me show you one of my contemplations here.  I'll capture it below, and just freewrite it here so you can see how I contemplated this issue.

It seems as though one could argue that the visualization is reality when one is engrossed in said visualization.

Ultimately what this conceptual framing is pointing to are the visualization trips that pop up throughout your day.  Those are like little psychedelic trips, at least relative to the main psychedelic trip we're on.  I realize this is just the Mind breaking reality up too.  But it's probably "pragmatically true" that we could say [to the extent that the concept "real" is applicable] that it applies to visualizations where awareness is consumed by said visualizations.

It's so hard for me to even ask a question about Enlightenment anymore -- because now I even see problems with the word/concept/duality "real".

But this question still resonates with me as puzzling enough to warrant asking here to see what responses it gets.

When every Enlightenment question you could ask falls apart in the asking, you're gonna be in a paradoxical predicament.  Do I ask?  Do I not ask?  You see?  Maybe there's nothing to ask anymore.   Ok, well -- what do we have to say now?  It's almost like this deep-paradox is true: There are no issues, yet everything is at issue.  But no paradox is true because it is false; it can be released.

Wow, this turned into a little hornet's nest of the Mind's reasoning and language passageways.

I can even see how awareness solves this problem, but it does so silently.   It's a non-conceptual knowing.  From the perspective of the Watcher, whatever the content of awareness is in the moment is what is "real" (to the extent that we want to coin a label to make the Mind feel like it knows something.)  But "real" has nothing to do with awareness in the moment.  

Edited December 5, 2017 by Joseph Maynor