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What the Alcoholic Sees

What the Alcoholic Sees

For a long time, I thought Maya was just some dusty, abstract philosophical term for "illusion".

Last month I heard a story that changed how I look at the world. It involves a simple analogy about an alcoholic person, but it points to a truth that is deeply unsettling.

The Man Who Sees Eight Fingers

Imagine a man who has had too much to drink. He holds up his hands and looks at it. To him, it is an absolute fact: He sees eight fingers.

We stand next to him and we tell him he is wrong. There are only four fingers.

The man was not lying. In his mind, at that very moment, those eight fingers are as real as the ground he is standing on. His vision is telling him one thing, and our vision is telling us another. We call him drunk and ourselves sober to explain the difference. But the man is convinced of his own truth.

This leads to a question that we almost never ask: What is the guarantee that our four fingers are the absolute truth?

The Majority is not Always Right

We believe we are right simply because most people see what we see. We have agreed on a normal way of looking at things.

But if the entire world were born with the vision of that alcoholic, eight fingers would be the truth taught in schools. The person who saw only four fingers would be considered the one with the problem.

This shows us, what we call reality, is often just a common agreement based on how our human senses work.

Why Our Senses Cannot Be Trusted

We think our eyes and ears show us the world exactly as it is. But do they?

We see only certain colors. Many animals see colors we cannot even imagine. We see objects as solid. But science tells us they are mostly hollow atoms. We see the world in a way that helps us survive, not necessarily in a way that is "True".

The Search for the Constant

In Indian schools of thought, specifically in Advaita Vedanta, truth, or satya, is categorized into three levels to help us understand this confusion:

So, what stays the same? The only thing that does not change is the Awareness. Whether you see four fingers or eight, the You that is witnessing the sight is the same. Or, is it not? :)

TLDR; We spend our whole lives arguing about our opinions, our beliefs and our facts. We are so certain that our four is better than someone else's eight.