In today’s episode we continue with Chapter Two of The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth by Douglas Harding. In this chapter, Harding tackles the paradox of experience. We experience the world via sights, sounds and feelings, and in that way the world is “in us”. On the other hand, science explains how the world comes to be experienced through a long complicated chain of events spanning millions of miles and involving an “immense herd of blind and tethered animals” (i.e. the cells of my eye).
As we saw in the last episode, focused on Chapter One, the answer to this paradox is two-fold. For myself, I am the openness, the empty capacity for the world to appear in. For the scientist, I am a complex perception machine, just another thing in the world. I view these as two aspects of the same reality. I don’t feel I have to choose one over the other. Rather I can just marvel in the both/and nature of being me.
