“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
Well, there is neither sound nor tree, no forest nor fall.
The world is made out of sensing. The colors of the world, the touching of the world, the hearing, smelling and tasting of the world is all there is to the existence of the world. There are no atoms, no cells, no muscle tissue, blood vessels or biological compounds. There are no metals, no materials, no chemicals whatsoever and there is certainly no space nor time in which they could exist. No, the world is made out of colors and sounds, of sensations of touch, and of smelling and tasting – throw in thinking and we’ve got the illusion going.
Objects are created in the mind
Most objects are encountered visually. We only touch a fraction of the objects of our daily experience, much less smell or taste them. And when perceiving objects, we tend to believe that there is some more to our experience of them other than their colors. For example, we think that we experience a car and the colors of the car – we think that there is some objecthood to the car that is somehow being conveyed to us. But we never experience the actual car – just the particular patterns of color that we then come to think of as the “car”. We conceptualize and thus create the car in our minds, ascribing objecthood to those particular patterns of color.
And color is really nothing but seeing – which has no independent existence from consciousness, since seeing is what consciousness is.
Objects are made out of consciousness
We usually think objects are made of materials, such as metal or plastic or wood – but that assumptions rests on the false belief that there is an external world beyond perceptions in which such materials (and the subatomic particles that comprises them) could exist. What objects and their materials are really made out of are colors, body sensations (such as the feel of an object), sounds, smell and taste – which are nothing but seeing, feeling, hearing, smelling and tasting.
There is nothing to an apple other than the colors that make up our experience of it – the seeing of the apple is the apple. And seeing, along with hearing, feeling, tasting and smelling are just aspects of perceiving, which is just another word for consciousness. So, the objects of our experience are made out of consciousness. In fact, there are no objects at all until we create them in our minds. Before we conceptualize a particular perception, there isn’t an actual apple there – there is just a field of seeing. This field of seeing is then objectified – by thinking – into solid objects with an imagined reality to them, making us believe that we are experiencing a world of many objects, not realizing that all that we are ever experiencing is experiencing itself – pure objectless consciousness.