Leo Greenwood
2 min readAug 17, 2024

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You said: “Your conclusion in fact contradicts yourself. If you agree that there is no cosmic perspective, then you cannot conclude "we are not perceiving reality as it really is," because this still implies there is a cosmic perspective out there but we are incapable of seeing it.”

Hmm. I'm saying that there isn't a single individualised perspective that could see all things at once, because that would require a finite set of senses that could somehow perceive infinite stimulus. Naturally, finite senses regard finite perceptions and so the illusion of finitude is created from infinity.

Again, I'm not saying we can't perceive reality as it is full stop; I'm saying that reality can never be perceived by limited sense organs and the formulation of objects and categories. Reality as it is is knowable, but not as finite realities. The finite element is the illusion. Like in your dreams section. You touch the tree, and it feels like a tree, it seems real. But when you wake up, you do not assume that you had a waking-state tree inside your skull. No, we can recognise that the perception of a tree was crafted out of pure formlessness. There are no objects in the brain, and yet there is the perception of objects in dreams. These are temporary forms, even looking to basic physics, the energy conservation law: energy only ever changes form. You cannot perceive pure energy because it is formless, you can only ever perceive forms of it based on your modes of perception. And it is your mode of perception that leads you to believe you are separate. You're not. You're existence itself, dreaming about itself. Your dreams aren't the limits of you, they're a form you take because, being infinite, you are formless.

Senses make form out of formlessness. So this is how you can both never perceive reality as it is, and still only ever perceive reality. It is a contradiction and a unification, depending upon which lens you choose to view it through.

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Leo Greenwood

The Universe thinks about itself in interesting ways from here. Philosopher, author, in love with the miracle of existence. leogreenwood.com