Untitled - Awaken Video

Chapter 1. World Views 4
reading, hearing lectures, seeing movies , etc.-it does not leave the same impact on
the human mind as the “direct” experience of watching a sunrise!
Now, there is a problem with what has just been termed “direct experience,”
however. The human being is a complex animal, and because of this complexity
many things are often chalked up as direct experience when, in fact, they are not.
For example, a young man walks into the grocery, and looks directly in to the eyes of
a young woman of approximately the same age, who then smiles at him. The “direct
experience” is that of a young woman smiling at a young man; the “interpretation” of
the event, on the other hand, is that the young woman likes the man (which may or
may not be the case). The physical event or experience is then stored together with
the interpretation of the event. As could be easily guessed, this kind of information
storage can lead to a whole variety of problems for the individual.
Direct experience as the primary source of information becomes even more confusing
and complex in the case of “hallucinations” or simply “imaginings.” A hallucination
is direct experience without a correlate in physical reality, and also often
without a correlate in consensus reality. However, because hallucinations do involve
direct experience, i.e. are “experienced” by the individual, they must be treated as a
part of that individual’s (or group’s) reality. Even more confusing is that people deal
with hallucinations (at least by this definition) quite often. For example, memories
fit this definition, and so do dreams, fantasies, ideas, visualizations, etc., but most
twentieth century people disregard this type of information to be either illusory or
having come from the mind’s memory banks and give greater credence to only those
things which have a correlate in physical reality. At least, this is how some people
respond. Here is a ficticious example which could be found in almost any daily
newspaper:
A man has killed his wife in what seems to be cold blood. An investigation
reveals that the man felt that his wife was having an affair with a mutual
acquaintance. Further investigation reveals that the wife had to work late at
least two times per week, and the husband who has been known to be quite
jealous, killed her in a fit of rage one evening after she returned from work.
As it turns out, the man was quite mistaken. His wife fearful of the jealous
outbursts had been faithful to her husband all along.
Fantasy, fueled by the powerful emotions of insecurity and jealousy, has created
a very real-feeling hallucination, a direct experience, with no more relationship to
physical reality than the wife’s not being home, and so real did it feel that the
individual felt “forced” or “obliged” to react. Although seeming a pretty extreme
example, on the one hand, most folks will “misinterpret” at least one other person’s
behavior on a daily basis and then will react to their own misinterpretations as
if they were a part of physical or consensus reality. The problems presented by