Let's Get Physical

Dear Abbot:

How is it self evident that the spiritual world exists? In what way do we experience it directly?

Bright


Dear Bright:

I'm not sure where we're not connecting. But remember Descartes' "cogito ego sum": I think, therefore I am? We experience ourselves, ultimately, as mental or spiritual beings, as a subject of consciousness aware of various thoughts, feelings, and impressions. The thoughts and impressions are also, themselves, mental in nature, objects of consciousness. Whether they bear any meaningful relationship to anything beyond themselves is conjecture; and what that relationship might be is conjecture.

For example, even granted that there is a physical world to which our sense perceptions correspond, what is the necessary relationship between our sense perceptions and their objects? When we see a post box, it is not as if that post box itself, or any part of it, enters our mind; such a thing is impossible. No, we deal with and know only our mental perceptions, our thoughts, feelings, impressions. We do not know anything about the post box as it is, if it is.

But because the thought is the same as the experience of it, the instant we have a thought, we are certain that that thought exists, as a thought. We cannot think a thought that does not exist.

Abbot