Here is an interesting dialogue: What is that thing? It is a piano (or other object). How do you know? Because it looks (or sounds or feels, etc.) like a piano. Thus, the two questions, What is it? and How do you know?, inevitably lead to an acknowledgment that the identity of things, rather than being somehow inherent in the things themselves, is actually a result of our having observed qualities which are like our idea of the thing. We know a piano is a piano because it looks like a piano. The piano it “looks like” is not a specific musical instrument, but instead is the subjective mental image we have of a piano.
A moment’s reflection shows this statement about a piano to be no less true than about any-thing else in the objective world, and we may therefore ponder that the only way we can recognize something in the physical universe is by comparing it to our preexisting ideas – to our subjective images. If we do not have such an image in a particular case, all we can recognize is that there is a conglomerate of sense data. To give the data meaning, we have to go through the same learning process as does a child: we indicate some of the data and ask, “What is that?” When we have received a sufficient number of consistently similar answers so that a coherent pattern has been impressed on our minds, we become confident in asserting, “That is a piano.” And so it is that we learn to synthesize and to identify our perceptions in accordance with the prevailing cultural model. (We tend to think that unanimous agreement about the beingness of various things somehow constitutes “proof” of their existence, whereas it is much more likely that this unanimity confirms nothing more than the fact that our beliefs are all the same.)
It is of additional interest to inquire into a circumstance in which we have no mental image of certain data in itself. In this case, rather than finding a conglomerate of information, we would detect no data at all and therefore conclude nothing was there! This has eloquent implications regarding the meaning of “nothingness,” and it leads us to realize that if the universe is indeed a place of infinite potential, discovering “nothing” has little significance in terms of what actually is available to us.
In that infinite potential, everything exists, and whether we perceive certain things or not, depends entirely upon whether we have a mental image which enables us to discover them. This carries us then to the extraordinary realization that because mental images can be deliberately learned, the world of experience may consciously be shaped by us, in accordance with what-ever we take the time and energy to teach ourselves to believe!
