We’re conscious, I feel like I’m alive. It feels like I have an awareness in a body, it feels like I exist. There’s some kind of consciousness that locates, vaguely, around my eyes. My body exists in a world and has senses that look into this world and report to me what I can see, taste, touch etc. This reality is recreated in my mind with the illusion that it is being directly perceived (actually the mind constructs it from the senses, if you think that’s false, do an LSD trip). Inside of my mind, the feeling of my existing, my consciousness, also has thoughts and ideas about what it (I) am perceiving, and also I can see mental pictures, subjective pictures in my mind, that are both spontaneous, and also consciously created, and the same is true for thoughts and understandings and inner-talking. These things relate to what I am perceiving, they are often spontaneous and I can also control and create them. I can see a red rose for example, choose to imagine it later, I can have a thought about it, that I don’t like the colour, and I can imagine it being a different colour, and it will instantly change. This is how I am experiencing mind, and I am assuming you are the same.
The things I am perceiving via the senses could be false. I might be hallucinating. Neither of us can be sure that we see the same world. If I see a red rose, and you tell me that you can see it, then we don’t know for sure that we are seeing the same thing. Not only that, but the whole thing could be a dream and I am not even here. You could be a brain in a jar somewhere, like in the film The Matrix, and all your perceptions are just a dream that is made up.
If this is the case, then it doesn’t make any difference to what we are going to do now. Ultimately, we can never know for sure if reality is true or not. It’s definitely true for me that I have perceptions, and that I can feel happiness and pain and that I have control over these things. I can’t stop being conscious without killing myself, and then I can’t be sure what will happen to consciousness afterwards. It also makes no difference to how true the world that I am perceiving is. What is true is that I can’t practically stop being conscious and I can create happiness rather than unhappiness — and so (if you are out there at all!) we might as well continue with what we are doing here with this work of becoming sane.
So the starting point is that our experience seems to be we are an embodied consciousness perceiving a world. That may be real or it may be some kind of a simulation, but either way, we cannot know nor change it (unless someone gives you a red pill), so we can go with this and if it turns out it isn’t real, it doesn’t make any difference to our experience anyway.
Consciousness lives in a world of ideas. We don’t directly experience the world, it’s reported via the nervous system, i.e. the senses: we see, hear, touch, taste and smell — meaning the senses send impulses to the brain, and the brain reconstructs a reality that is “out there”. It may or may not actually be out there, but as I said, it doesn’t really make any difference.
The point here is that we live in a world of ideas, not things. We ‘see’ some-thing in the world, and we have an idea about it, how it looks, smells, feels etc. We don’t experience the thing (we can’t really be certain beyond doubt that the thing is even there) but we experience the idea about it, a recreation of it, and then we might have thoughts and feelings about this recreation, we like it or we don’t like it, or whatever.
So the idea and the thing (if it exists) are related. This is the subjective and the objective. The subjective is our ideas (and recreations) of the world. Good ideas are closely related to the world, and bad ideas are far removed from it. A ‘good’ idea is “fire burns, be careful around it”. This is closely related to the world. You can perceive many variations of this, of people who have been burnt, seeing things burnt, memories of having been burnt. The idea is ‘pure’, i.e. close to what you perceived without too much thinking.
Now consider a bad idea. ‘Immigrants steal; immigrants are bad’. The idea, as a recreated mental picture, is close to reality (unless when you think about immigrants you think about them with two heads walking on their hands), but the thinking and ideas are far removed from observations or evidence. There would be a number of fallacies (such as generalization) around these ideas. If these ideas were deep-seated, then how would they affect someone? Firstly, it would affect perception, someone would dwell on evidence to support the fallacy (noticing stories of crime involving immigrants, thinking about it when seen, discussing it with people holding similar fallacies) and of course it also affects behaviour. This person would consciously and unconsciously, avoid a large part of the population (and miss out on an awful lot of opportunity). Also, people will unconsciously pick up on these negative ideas (beliefs) and react accordingly. The world of a bigot isn’t only small, but also dark and unlucky.
Now imagine if this person wanted to examine these beliefs. They do a mindfulness/journaling practice and notice that much of their thinking is based around these ideas, guiding their perception, inner and outer focus, thinking, conversations and various other limiting experiences of life. So if they wanted to externalize these repeating ideas, to write them down to examine them and work out what is the argument they are making, then there needs to be a bit of groundwork, also known as fundamental truths.