It's hard to overstate just how insane it is to believe in something called matter, independent of mind. I know this sounds outlandish to many people, but the belief in one thing called matter and another thing called mind exists primarily because of the extremely low standard of public education in our world today. None of us are exempt.
For thousands of years, there have been philosophies describing the primacy of matter, the coexistence of matter and mind, the primacy of consciousness, and everything else in between. Yet our educational systems bear down and lean into a kind of religion of matter as if it is in some way more scientific or more rational. It is not. Then, we adults spend our lives trying to bridge something called mind and matter, the mind-body divide, spirituality and science, and so on. Along the way, we ponder the apparently intractable problem of why there are so many diseases that are incurable.
I've talked about this several times before, but once in a while, the insanity of it becomes so terrifically striking as I hear somebody commenting on one of the many topics this understanding touches (like health, disease, cure) that I simply have to post this again
Remember that we are one society in a vast quilt of history, of which we know relatively little. We are one civilization on one planet among an infinite sea of planets. What passes for knowledge here may be the very foundation of ignorance among more advanced societies. This is not to criticize anyone in particular, but hopefully to bring some perspective to what the indicators of knowledge and education are beyond degrees conferred by institutions that are teaching by habit rather than self-assessment and development, and to give our kids a better education about the nature of the world and what is possible before they forget.
If we do not know mind, we cannot know matter. All attempts to study matter deeply will lead back to mind, bewilderingly. See quantum physics. If we do not know matter, we cannot completely know mind. All attempts to fully understand mind will also lead to matter. So, are they really two? Or is it just that our standard of education (not our capacity) is far too low?
One caveat. If you see these two terms as interchangeable and if you see no other category clearly demarcated from these, then it really doesn't matter what word you use to describe what you see. Call it mind. Call it matter. Call it nothing at all. Add divisions. What matters is the vision, experience, understanding - not the word.
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