Where does the light come from?

At the moment this is the core issue. And have been through this a lot but just running through again.

The simplest level is we look at a light bulb and we see light coming from it. Great in Humphrey Davy style we have light!

But what this question is looking at is how does the "vision" of light occur. We close our eyes and the light stops. The light bulb is still shining but something else has changed. The "vision" has stopped.

We can dream of a light bulb. There is light, but there is no light bulb. Where is this light? 

In the West we conclude roughly "the brain" is where the vision is, or the brain is like a light bulb and it switches on and creates the vision with in itself. We have a schematic like below and roughly assign the "vision" to this object:

But this is a rabbit hole. It hasn't got us any closer to what we actual experience. We have just slapped a big label over our experience saying that bit over there is the physical light bulb from shops and when we switch it on it produces light which we then see and that switches on the "vision" from my brain that I was born with.

It makes sense that you cannot see the brain when you look, because the brain is how we look. That would be like a camera taking a photo of its own film plate. That is nonsense. This is why we see a light bulb and not a brain when we see. This is SRH you can't see your brain and what you see at the same time because brain is how we see. So you could argue the "identity theory" that what we see is the same as the brain. You can't have Hesperus (Evening Star) and Phosphorus (Morning Star) in the sky at the same time, because they are the same thing (Venus). Phosphorus can never see Hesperus. The Brain can never See itself.

So we are saying that the brain is the source of the vision. But we would say that the brain is part of the objective world. It is a thing that after we die a surgeon can remove and put in a jar. If we are saying that the "vision" of light that we have via our eyes is made by the brain then we are saying that the vision comes from the same objective world that the light bulb belongs! The vision of light does not come from us. In fact where is there anything that is "from me" and is "mine"?

This is the core issue. When we separate the light into the light coming from the bulb and light coming from our brain or consciousness we are trying to separate things into "mine" and "not mine." And that is the issue.

Really nothing that we see comes from "me"!!!!!! Yet we persist in believing that this is "my" experience and "I" am somehow intimately involved in experience. Worse we persist in believing that I somehow contribute something to the world.

This spills out into thinking this is "my" brain. But if you actually are the brain then whose brain is it? It can't belong to itself! Suppose we break a couple of cups and their handles fall off. When we reassemble them we decide which handle belongs to which cup. We say this handle belongs to that cup. But we don't say the handle belongs to itself. Why then do we say that my brain is mine?

And that raises the whole issue of subjectivity and personhood.

So a lot comes from this core issue of trying to separate things into "world" and "me."

In Upanishad Hinduism "Tat Tvam Asis" concludes that seen correctly the Self and the World are the same. But this is also to say that there is no self separate from the world. What is world is self, and what is self is world.

Buddha says that "all things are non-self." We have a clear statement from someone who got as far as seeing this correctly that nothing we experience has any links to a "me". There is no clue of our self in the world. The vision of light that appears when we see a light belongs to the world not to us. It belongs to the same world as the lamp itself.

But wait a second isn't this Naïve Realism? This is the opening belief we probably had as a child that what we experience is exactly what is there. We have no split into objective and subjective. It happens pretty fast that we realise that people see different things, or at least different sides of the world. But to get there we have developed this problem idea of "separate people." We have installed in the world of experience these "people" who are centres of experience. It is this move that distorts the world into a billion separate bubbles.

Yet we cannot maintain that there is just one uniform world of experience. There are parts. The light bulb is one layer. The arising of consciousness is another layer. Light "exists" physically and also mentally if we wish to examine it and start to split it up. And there is the layer of "self" as well.

What is difficult is to unpeel the layer of self and get beyond it. The problem, as said in previous-but-one post, is "who" is getting beyond this layer? Well by definition we can take no one with us. To experience more fully we need be able have nothing in any part of it. We are not the light-bulb is pretty simple. We are not the consciousness is a bit harder. We are not the belief that experience is happening to someone is very hard. Yet it is easy to see this is true, but very hard to actually step beyond, because we habitually want to take our self with whatever move we make. The issue here is to take no one with us when we step beyond having a receiver of experience!

The light comes from no one, and it goes to no one!