Solipsistic Trap

All of conventional contemporary Western philosophy is based on the primacy of objective reality. This view assumes a duality of object and subject together with the concept that objective reality is independent of any subject’s perception of this reality. This inevitably leads to the following solipsistic trap.

Knowledge of the objective world is acquired through the senses as a combination of raw sensory experience mediated by a subjective mental process of concept formation to produce perceptions. There is an inherent impossibility to be certain that subjective perceptions match objective reality, since the possibility of illusion, mirage, or hallucination can not be logically proved to be absent. In the extreme, it cannot be logically proved that the entire perceived subjective reality has any corresponding objective reality at all. This is the solipsistic trap.

Both Eastern mysticism and Western phenomenology avoid this trap by emphasizing raw experience, prior to interpretation and conceptualization, as the primal reality. Each such raw experience is a combined interaction between what are conventionally identified as both components of various dualities: self and other, subject and object, mind and body, etc. Thus there is no separation of subjective and objective to match or not match. Eastern mysticism, including Buddhism, would refer to the product of the solipsistic trap as the "illusory" world. This is the world shared by our collective minds and created by the influences of the cultural memes on our interpretations of our raw experiences as our conceptualizations are formed. In other words, the reason that conventional Western philosophy sees physical reality as having this inescapable solipsistic character is, from the mystic's perspective, the fact that the totality of the conceptualizations we have of this physical reality is the "illusory" world.

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