Epictetus, Discourses 1.5.3

Do you comprehend that you are awake?

 

“No,” he says, “no more than I comprehend it, when I seem to be awake in my dreams.”

 

Is there no difference then between the one sort of impression and the other?

 

“None.”

 

I know how easily I can allow myself to confuse fantasy and reality, having once spent a number of years convinced that the dreams I faced while asleep were more harmful to me than the exhaustion I faced while awake. 

 

The danger is in taking a mere impression for its own sake, and not looking to what it represents, to what stands behind it. 

 

No feeling exists in isolation, just as something cannot come from nothing, and wherever there are effects there must always be causes. Instead of doubting away the world, I am far better served by finding the order in what initially confuses me. 

 

Though Descartes would have it that impressions can deceive the mind, I would rather suggest that the mind deceives itself about impressions. Yes, it looks a certain way, and now I am called to understand how and why it looks that way, and what that can tell me about the meaning and purpose of the world in which I am quite clearly immersed.

 

In other words, our errors lie in our judgments about things, and they are not resolved by rejecting the immediate presence of things. 

 

Perception is always a relationship between the knower and the known, such that one can never be artificially divorced from the other. Is it that the world is unintelligible, or rather that I have refused to be open to its intelligibility? The problem is usually that I want or expect things to be a certain way, and so I assume they must be broken if they are not working as I wish. 

 

How often, for example, I have foolishly thrown away the tool, when I simply wasn’t using it correctly. 

 

The very fact that I can already distinguish between waking and sleeping, or between what is and what seems, tells me that I have a context and a frame of reference to work from. The point is not in how vivid or forceful an impression is, but rather in reflecting on the reasons it would come across in the way that it does. 

 

Doubt can be liberating, and does not need to be crippling, whenever we work to lift the veil instead of getting all tangled up in it. The prisoners in Plato’s Cave, and the characters in The Matrix, and all the people on the face of this Earth are presented with that challenge. 

Written in 12/2016