The problem here, again, is that English does not accommodate forms of insight available to some other languages due to its limiting grammar. The “in the mind only” idea of solipsism (the idea that one cannot prove existence of anything outside one’s own mental perceptions) is applicable as well to the idea of “I” as it is misunderstood in English. This problem is pointed to by RA Heinlein who said that “…in English, only the first person singular present tense of the verb ‘to be’ is true to fact.” This is an accurate statement, vital to understanding both religion and philosophy, and almost always dismissed up front by Western religionists. It is also at the root of the wholesale misunderstanding of the Teaching attributed to Jesus.
It would be good and useful for anyone involved in a philosophical discussion to understand these distinctions. They are very well treated in the prefatory material in any book by Canadian Philosopher Kenneth G. Mills, and the idea is treated at length in Franklin Merrell-Wollf’s The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object.
Now it is possible that the solipsist in question is a tyro and is ignorantly though sincerely enamored of the idea he espouses. That is fine, as so many are equally enamored with their particular christianist interpretations of the Jesus Teachings. But nevertheless, we are here at a disadvantage in our language, English, because of its essentially dualistic structure, and the pervasive subject-verb-object sequencing that brings with it certain necessary lenses that distort the actuality of the world, as if we see much of it as it is to begin with.
The Nobel Laureate David Bohm attempted to tackle this difficulty in grammatical filtering in his work Wholeness and the Implicate Order. It has also been the work of such integrational philosophers as Ken Wilbur and the whole line of exponents non-dualist perception from the beginning of Man to attempt to awaken the general population to the actual mode and condition of human perception and participation in Universe. All of them have and do take a dim perspective of this being even slightly successful, as the subtleties of Actuality are too easy to dismiss and overlook, similarly to the solution of some Chinese puzzles and riddles. We also have the overwhelming momentum of addictive, habitual thinking to overcome, and that is a monumental task, few being up to even understanding what is involved in it. That is why many Teachers have actually resorted to using shock as a mode of bypassing the pervasive hypnotic state of nearly the entire population. History is replete with these.
All of that is to preface the idea the mind, as in your mind and my mind, each being dependent on associative awareness derived from Consciousness as a Principle, is different in scope and compass from Mind, which is equatable with Consciousness itself, that Consciousness being synonymous with Principle, Life, God, and a few other such words. One of those words is Self, but we then again encounter the stubborn density of English as being unable to comprehend easily the distinction between egoic personal “self” as a shadow of Self as Principle.
But nevertheless, it is a simple matter of observation to note that all things happen first in the mind. We are even aware of what we mistakenly call external stimuli because our mind makes note of some change in the senses. Thus perception is an act of awareness, not of chemistry or of mechanics. That is why there is no response from a dead person: the associative awareness has disbonded from the body interface with the physical dimensions.
That simply means that when you look at the world, you are in fact looking at the very narrow band of sensory (name removed by moderator)ut afforded by the space suit called your body. The driver, “I,” mistakenly called “me,” is responsive as an act of awareness to sensory stimuli impinging the interface of the body. Even that body, for the “wearer,” exist in the awareness primarily. That is to say, no awareness, no association with the body or the world.
So in this sense, being clear that in the overall picture there is in fact no possible distinction between what is attributed egoically as “me” and the rest of creation, whatever is perceived as a distinction is necessarily and only in the mind and at the level of dimensional engagement of the human body and its perceived, not its actual environment. So we can say in an actual sense, the mind (human) being necessarily tuned to the structures of only a certain spectrum of perceptive possibility, and therefore ignoring the vast context of its existence, is where “it (the world and me as an inhabitant) all is.”
All that is to say that though our senses and awareness cooperate to tell us about a world “out there” and “in here,” there is in the big picture no such actual distinction except as an associative act of mind. And on examination, the very “mind” used to make these distinctions is dissolved into a different kind and quality of understanding if the right effort is made. So, in fact, the world we live in, including our own perception of ourselves, is an ad hoc construct designed to allow us to navigate in these immediate dimensions, while we ignore vast amounts of sensory and other data simply so we can get from here to the place we use our credit card to give someone else the symbolic value of our giving up our imagined time to earn a “living” which is always already completely ours.
