Western and Eastern reality meetsThe eastern culture have a long tradition for not being duped by reality, to use Luhmanns terminology. They are brought up with the idea that reality are covered with a veil (maya).
In the western culture we are brought up with the view that reality is something “out there” that can be explored. The western mind might use a doll’s house as an analogy to the world, where he himself are one of the dolls and the reality is all the stuff around him. The world around him is perceived with greater and greater granularity as he grows up and gets more intelligent, but in essence he sees himself as alienated from the world. His approach towards knowing the world is extroverted.
The eastern mind are brought up to see itself as intimately connected to the universe, on the highest level as being one with the divine. The approach towards knowing the world is introverted: You can not know the world without knowing your self. C.G.Jungs words that “All knowledge aims at self-knowledge. All discovery aims at self-discovery” shows that, although brought up in the western culture, he had ideas very much similar to ancient eastern thinking, and I think that is one of the reason his thoughts are so widely discussed in the western world today.
Consciousness as the final ”element”The western approach towards consciousness has for a long time been that consciouss processes could be reduced to interplay between atoms, whereas the eastern approach has been the opposite: that interplay between atoms could be reduced to consciousness.
Ironically it was western scientists with Heisenberg and Bohr leading that discovered that the elementary particles, which everything physical supposedly consisted of, had no exact location in space when they where not observed. They only existed with a certain probability at different locations. It was not that the physicist did not know where the particles were located, they had no exact location - they only had a "tendency" to exist at various locations. Only when an observation were made the particle "collapsed" at a single point, as if it decided to play along with the observer.
The physicist Fritjof Capra wrote in his book ’The Tao of Physics’:
"These connections [between building bricks] always involves the observer in a decisive way. The human observer is the last link in the chain of observation processes, and the characteristics of an atomic object can only be understood as the interaction of this object with the observer. This means that the classical ideal of an objective nature is no longer valid." [Capra, 1975, p. 71, my transl.]
and also:
"For most of us, it is very difficult to keep in mind the limitations and relativity of the conceptual knowledge. Because our image of reality is so much more easy to understand than reality itself, we easily gets to confuse our concepts and symbols with reality." [Capra, 1975, p. 29, my transl.]
The classical ideal of an objective nature is no longer valid, but since the idea has influenced western culture for such a long time, we are mixing up our conception of reality with the “true reality” (if such a termed can be used at all). Instead of treating the map as a map, we are taking it for the real thing.
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