Is Reality A Projection? (Delson Armstrong)

I've heard you say, and excuse me if I butcher this, and some traditions believe that reality is essentially a projection of our inner material, of all the concepts, ideas, information that we hold in the unconscious. And I think there's kind of multiple interpretations of that. One being like the way we react to what we're experiencing with our emotions and all of that based on our samskaras like that is that is creating our reality to an extent because it's creating the reaction but then there's a more literal literal interpretation which is no like what you see is actually a a direct projection of everything like you are

effectively putting the creating the screen that you are watching. And I would love for you to talk about, you know, what your experience has been of those two distinctions. Yeah, I think I think the way to look at it is the distinctions are also mind made. That is to say that they're just different perspectives looking at the same thing. You're just looking at it from different angles. So when you mentioned samskaras, and that's really what we talk about when we talk about the subconscious material. You know, in some traditions, they talk about vasanas and samskaras, and in Buddhism, it's the sankaras, which is just the Pali version of that. And so samskaras are essentially these impressions of the mind based on previous experiences, could be even past lives.

And that's really what starts to build up the subjective experience of this world. Now, in terms of an objective reality out there, now that's stretching it out, because now you have to think about what does that mean. But even the experience of a so-called objective reality is dependent upon the samskaras. In other words, the samskaras can be changed, they can be transformed, but can they be escaped? Because the reason I bring up that question is because the samskaras are the building blocks of our so-called karma as well. So when we talk about karma, each of us has different kinds of actions that we produce through our thoughts, through our speech and through our actions. So our projected reality is dependent upon our karma.

What we've done in the past, we will reap in the present or at a later stage. And so in that sense, in the relative world, that's inescapable. Now beyond that, I do go into this understanding of the absolute. For lack of a better word, we can call it the absolute. We have this distinction between the absolute and the relative. And the way I look at karma, which is really what brings all of these different beings that we have in this world, in this existence, interacting with each other and behaving in different ways, are nothing but vibrations throughout this field. And so the interactions of these different vibrations start to create different waveforms, which then concentrate or concretize into different kinds of beings or different kinds of life situations or events.

But in the absolute sense, it is the background from which all of these vibrations come out. Now, does that mean that background is the objective reality? I don't think we could say that either, because it too changes all the time. It too changes dependent upon the different karmas that are there. And so the idea that we project our reality is one reality based on the relative, and that if it's projected onto us and that we are just mere projections of that reality is also the same as saying that we project that reality. But I do want to make a distinction here. I would not say that we should say that we are the same as that projection, or that we are the same as that which projects those projections.

In Buddhism especially, the tradition that I'm teaching from, the way we look at it is all of it is dependent or interdependent upon different kinds of reactions, reactivities, chains, causes, conditions, and so on. To try to find an objective reality that is causeless, I think it's a search in vain, because even if you find it, even if you so-called find it, it's not going to make your life that much easier. It's not going to bring you that much more peace. In fact, I would argue that it would bring a lot more questions. It would bring a lot more intellectual exercises. So what we look at is we live in the relative world. Our bodies are subject to aging.

Our minds are subject to different kinds of activities that are either good, bad, or indifferent. And so all of these can be classified in some way or the other as dukkha, which usually is translated as suffering. And I find that to be a very dramatic translation. It's just that things are inconstant. We don't necessarily get the things that we want, quote unquote, "want." And so this so-called suffering is this reality that we're in. The idea there then is how do we transcend that suffering? And the transcendence of that suffering is to be in a state of existence or non-existence, however you want to put it, where none of that suffering, even if it's there, has any kind of effect on the mind anymore.

And that is what I called freedom of mind. It's the ceto vimutti, as it's known in Pali. The ability to be happy, the ability to be balanced, the ability to have the ultimate peace of mind, even in the most difficult of situations. That really, I think, is a more, in my mind, worthy goal than trying to figure out what's behind all of this, you