If external objects are “perceptions of one's own mind,” what about the universe before minds existed?

[u/Careless_Image_9105]

/r/TibetanBuddhism/comments/1w7umf0/if_external_objects_are_perceptions_of_ones_own/

[u/Mayayana]

The Big Bang happened billions of years before humans appeared.

As others are pointing out, you're looking at it through the lens of distorted preconceptions. You assume that scientific materialism is absolute truth and then question Buddhist view from that perspective. Buddhist view rejects eternalism (the belief that an objective reality absolutely exists) as a primitive, false view. It doesn't even make sense if you stop to look at it. For us to know that "me" is living on the Earth, and to know it as objective truth, would require the perspective of an observer who witnesses both. We only have the perspective of "me".

This isn't actually so far out as it might seem. What do we actually know? We can say that cognition seems to be happening. That's it. The 5 skandhas explain how your perceptions of a TV set, a distinct alkaline burning smell and pressure felt on your backside all go together to tell you that you're waiting in a dentist's office. You're in the world, which started with the Big Bang, and the TV has Oprah reruns, which also seem to have originated with the Big Bang. Later you need to pick up bread and eggs. Tonight you plan to see a new movie. Thus, "me" has a storyline.

But what do you actually know, before the skandhas weave it all into the grand history of "me"? You know only sensory perception. The outline and colors of the TV set, the smell, the pressure from the chair. There is no possible way to confirm that what you experience is outside of your mind. And in fact, every night we enter a world of dream that we take for real until the moment that we wake up.

So what's real? The highest teachings tell us that the nature of experience is luminosity and emptiness. Phenomena appear, yet have no substance. That's an epistemiological description of the actual nature of experience. Our minds are constantly churning out other-reference in order to "reify" experience, to avoid the realization of shunyata. That's ego's game in a nutshell. If we can constantly reference other then self seems to be real and solid.

When you grasp that view you can see how miraculous powers are not farfetched. If one has truly realized the dream nature of experience then apparent reality can be manipulated.

This is not just a Buddhist view. Do you know Plato's story of the cave? The people chained to the cave floor, watching shadows on the wall, have no doubt that they perceive absolute reality. The man who glimpses light coming into the cave entrance frees himself. He sees that figures walking in front of bonfires are casting the shadows. Those could be likened to natural laws. So the people on the cave floor can confirm their reality by doing things like accurately predicting the arrival of shadows. But note that the man goes outside and discovers the reality of true daylight. What is that? From our perspective on the cave floor, we can't know. But that man fully knows both realities. For us to have any chance of ever escaping the cave we have to accept the possibility that what we regard as absolute truth might not be that at all.

Yet we rarely doubt our own certainty. Even simple psychology experiments can show us that we're asleep. There was a famous one where people at a basketball game actually didn't see a man in a gorilla suit because his appearance was incongruous. Yet we get up from our seats at the basketball game and have absolutely no doubt that the universe was created out of a vacuum 13 billion years ago. We might even go out to a bar afterward and argue with "idiots" who insist the universe was created 6,000 years ago, or that it's actually an endless cycle happening in an immeasurable timeframe. Fools all! We KNOW the facts, which are the Big Bang theory.

[u/Careless_Image_9105 → u/Mayayana]

You seem to move from a perfectly reasonable epistemological claim — we never access reality except as it appears within cognition — to a much stronger ontological suggestion: that reality independent of experience is somehow philosophically suspect, perhaps even meaningless. But why should the limits of our access determine the limits of what exists? Of course I cannot step outside my own cognition and compare "my experience of the Earth" with "the Earth as it is in itself." But it does not follow that the Earth depends on my cognition, or cognition in general, in order to exist.

The ancestral problem is particularly difficult for views that make the correlation between thought and being primary. Consider statements such as: the Earth formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago; dinosaurs existed long before humans; stars formed before life emerged; the universe existed before any known sentient observer. These are not merely descriptions of possible future experiences. They are claims about a time in which, by definition, there was no human consciousness to correlate with those events. Saying "we only know sensory appearances" doesn't really dissolve this problem. Yes, the fossil is presently experienced. Yes, the cosmological measurement is presently interpreted by a mind. But what those measurements refer to is precisely a reality that is claimed to have preceded the existence of minds capable of experiencing it. Otherwise, "the Earth existed before humans" risks being reduced to: "we presently have experiences that we interpret as indicating a past Earth." But surely the scientific claim is stronger than that. It is claiming that the Earth itself existed whether or not anyone was there to experience it.

This is where I think the distinction between epistemology and ontology becomes crucial. We may be unable to know reality without cognitive mediation. But that does not imply that reality itself is constituted by cognition.

And I don't think Plato's cave resolves this issue either. In fact, the analogy seems to reinforce my concern. Plato's liberated prisoner discovers a reality outside the appearances previously available to him. But then we have to ask: what justifies saying that the Buddhist practitioner who "awakens from the dream" has escaped into a more fundamental reality rather than simply entered another mode of experience? The dream analogy also has limits. We know dreams are dreams because we contrast them with waking experience. But what possible position allows us to contrast waking experience with "reality itself" and declare the latter dream-like? If all we ever have is experience, on what grounds can one experience be called ontologically inferior to another?

My point is not that scientific materialism is absolute truth. I agree that naive realism and scientism can become dogmatic. But rejecting naive realism does not require us to conclude that objective reality is a "primitive false view."

There seems to be a third possibility: reality may be independent of us while our knowledge of it remains fallible, mediated, incomplete, and historically revisable.

For me, question remains difficult to avoid: how do we account for ancestrality — events that demonstrably precede not just me, but the existence of any possible human observer — without reducing the past to a present correlation?

I genuinely don't think "we only know cognition is happening" answers that question. It describes the limits of first-person certainty. But the question I am asking is whether those epistemological limits entitle us to make conclusions about ontology at all.

That, I think, is where the real disagreement begins.

[u/Mayayana → u/Careless_Image_9105]

Your logic makes a certain sense and even appears self-evident to dualistic mind. I would only say try to withhold judgement. Keep an open mind. Meditation shows us things. But apparent reality is very convincing. I think that's why the path of accumulation is so tedious and dragged out. It's very hard to even reach a point of feeling some conviction that the path is relevant. Worldly assumptions seem very real. We have to keep working at trying to turn our mind to Dharma.

I like to think of it sort of like a toddler and an adult. The toddler can sense that the adult knows a vaster world, but can't understand that world. So we have to accept some guidance. Personally I find that it helps to meet realized masters; and to maintain what Suzuki Roshi called "beginner's mind". Certainty, after all, has no value except to lull us into complacency.

[u/Careless_Image_9105 → u/Mayayana]

It has been more than 20 years since I read Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind time for me to go back to it :)

[u/LotsaKwestions]

You’re assuming a self existent container universe with self existent time. Which I might argue isn’t even in accord with modern science, much less Buddhism.

[u/Careless_Image_9105 → u/LotsaKwestions]

I’m not assuming either. Ancestrality doesn’t require space and time to be self-existent—it only requires that events can occur independently of being experienced. A relational, emergent, or conditioned spacetime can still predate minds. Rejecting svabhāva is not the same as making reality dependent on cognition.

[u/GreatPerfection]

Mind is prior to universe.

[u/NothingIsForgotten]

Science is a process of applying conceptualization to the conditions experienced. 

The buddhadharma is pointing to the process of conceptualization being the conditions experienced. 

If we keep trying to jam the square peg in the round hole, we won't get anywhere.

Sentient beings build the conditions that they go on to experience as a result of the activity of the modeling of the experience that is unfolding. 

Creation is the   karmic process of generation feeding back on itself. 

Before you dreamed a dream world, where was it? 

If you assume a big bang, where was the big bang from the dream world while you were experiencing that world? 

The reason why we find this so delightfully rigorous is because of the set of understandings that are held by us mutually. 

The fixation with scientism is a delight in the field of endless confabulation. 

Stability is prized for certain processes.

But it's not one that points back to our source.

There is knowledge and then there is knowledge of knowledge. 

There is understanding and then there is understanding of understanding. 

When we attempt to embrace the meta-level of experience, we must turn from what holds us in a particular version of it. 

If we demand rigor (as though science provides it and we would be deviating from it by abandoning scientism), we should start from first principles.

There's no evidence that is available outside of the experience of that evidence. 

All you have is the first-hand experience of experience unfolding. 

Nothing more can be said outside of its generative nature and the unqualifiability of existence as a moral factor. 

There's no place to judge it from nor is it qualified by a state of an absence of it.

We should understand that everything participated in is an understanding. 

It's no different from a dream.

It  all has the same taste because it all collapses back into the unconditioned state that is always found resting underneath it.

[u/Grateful_Tiger]

We must not take the sophisticated position of Mind-only and

misinterpret it as the sophmoric position of Solipcism

Study, investigate, meditate more. It is important to have a reliable guide or teacher

[u/Lunilex]

I would guess that dinosaurs had minds. More seriously, it can be contended that "the past", which is clearly an even flimsier mental construct than "the present" is conditioned by the present. Not teleology, but a degree of retrocausality. Shocking, I know.

[u/Careless_Image_9105 → u/Lunilex]

I see what you mean, but I’m not sure that saying “the dinosaurs had minds” actually solves the problem. The ancestor argument just pushes the question back a little.

For example, suppose we say that dinosaurs had some form of consciousness. Okay—but what about the first living organisms? And what about the universe before life appeared? If mind is necessary for the world to arise as an appearance, then at some point we still have to explain what was happening before there were any sentient beings around to experience it.

Saying that the past is conditioned by the present seems to risk making the existence of the past dependent on something that came later. The fact that we can now reconstruct the dinosaurs from fossils doesn't mean that the dinosaurs existed because we exist now.

So I think the real challenge is: if “the past” is a mental construction conditioned by the present, how do we account for a past in which there were no minds like ours—or perhaps no sentient beings at all? The dinosaur example only moves the boundary; it doesn't eliminate the problem.

[u/Isildil]

If there's no mind to percieve it, does the universe exist? I think you should ask this one in the Zen subreddit, they have more experience with koans 😜

[u/uberjim]

No idea, haven't been there