Inside World, Outside Reality

I think the confusion that you are having with this concept comes from your education and programing as a westerner (basically in Aristotelian logic), whereas the Zen master you were talking to had been brought up in a different culture, especially if it is Chinese or Japanese culture where this kind of thinking is easier to accept.

I had a lot of confusion with this for a long time too, until I started to explore its meaning in terms of Western science (which makes the concept more acceptable to our 'western' minds).

Let me explain:

If I take an example which we have all encountered in High School Biology classes, that of the visual processing system. Basically this says that light enters the lens and is refracted to the back of the retina. Here, there are photoreceptive cells which convert the photons received into electrical impulses. These are sent down the optical nerve to the back of the brain - the visual cortex - where the electrical signals are processed, only at this point does the experience of sight occur. The brain produces a model of the outside world it has received by the senses, it is this model which we experience not the world outside us directly. So, basically the world outside you is actually a model inside your head.

The intuitive or common sense perception of the world outside you is actually false, scientifically speaking. If it were true then it would mean a reverse of the visual processing system, i.e that we would be looking out at the world, the only way to do this is by looking out of our own eyes (kind of like the theories of Euclid and Ptolemy), whereas light comes into the eye not out of it. The eye is not a organ for 'seeing', it is a sense organ for capturing the information of light that it receives then transmitting it to the brain to produce a model.

Another example I would use is that of someone with colour blindness. If someone cannot see, say, the colour red, then if he/she is looking at the outside world, how can that colour dissapear if it is part of the outside world? Also, the light coming into the eye is not red, or green or blue, it is made of wavelengths of light - not of colour. When it hits the retina and an electrical signal is sent to the visual cortex in the brain, this electrical signal doesn't have a colour. The colour only appears after the processing done by the brain, where each wavelength size is given a colour in the corresponding model.

In fact, there is a slight delay between the eye receiving the wavelengths of light and a corresponding change in the model/simulation in the brain. If this were not true we would not be able to watch TV, because this system relies on a slight delay between processing the environment and updating it. This means that we can overlap 33 frames per second of still frames and see it as a moving picture when in actuality it is not moving, just a linear series of still pictures.

Wow! Sorry if I have rattled on too much, this is a complicated subject. I recommend reading about Kant and his theories of Phemonenon and Noumenon, and also the article visual perception on Wikipedia (as it is a much shorter version, but be careful of inaccuracies on there).

Combine this with what the zen master said, especially about the brain not actually making a totally accurate model of the 'outside world' (it actually guesses a lot of the time), and hopefully you may understand this better.

After understanding this, I understood what people saw in magic, that you can make changes in your brain's programming or perception system and you can change the model in your brain (change colours and shapes, etc), which is not changing the outside world but the inside world model. Also, psychedelic drugs do this too, but I do not condone the use of drugs without proper preparation and research (i.e not to be used willy-nilly, these are powerful things that need responsible people using them). Also, yoga and meditation can be very useful in this regard as well, but take many years to practice and perfect.

Buddhism as you quite rightly asserted is a philosophy of the mind, but it is also a religion too. It is actually a very complicated religion (as most are), with many different views and traditions who don't always agree with each other - but which usually boil down to the four noble truths and the noble eightfold path. Buddhism to me is an ongoing dialogue between likeminded people (the Sangha) investigating the nature of the mind, and all the while - like Science - amassing a huge amount of information on reality (reality from a 1st person perspective in Buddhism and from a 3rd person perspective in Science) and then testing it to see if it applies universally.

Hope this helps you or other people reading this.

Namaste :)

Also, a Zen Koan may help here: "If a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound?" Even though Zen Koans are not necessarily meant to be answered but rather pondered, I will be explicit in my answer to this question. If a tree falls in the woods, it itself doesn't make a sound but rather air vibrations from falling to the ground. It takes an organism with a nervous system and sense organs (such as the ears) in order to convert these air vibrations into sound. If you look at how the ear works in a biology textbook or internet article it will explain how it does this, converting the air vibrations into liquid vibrations and so causing electrical pules to be sent from the ear to the auditory processing system in the brain (just like the examples on visual processing in the above comment). It is here where sound is added to the model created in the brain (but quite how, science is yet to explain in detail, however).

I also recommend Robert Anton Wilson and especially the video on youtube "who is the master that makes the grass green?", I also recommend another video - "The Nature of Consciousness" by Peter Russell.

Apologies as I am not a member, but I came across this article in my web-surfing/exploring, I just felt a need to post a reply. Again, hope this helps.

Namaste :-)