Jim Kata said:
This is exactly my point. In my definition of reality there is room for things that can not be measured. I'm not saying these things are physical manifestations. I'm saying just because something is imagined or hallucinated does not mean it is of no value. If you were to have a spiritual experience while on ayahuasca that changed your perception of the world, would you trivialize it because it wan't "measurably real"? I don't know what value to place on dreams or hallucinations, but since we spend one third of our lives asleep and a good portion of that dreaming, I think we should place some value on these things. In the end, all we will have of our lives is our memories and other thoughts stored in our mind.
I think a less confused way to put it is to make a distinction between our ideas and impressions, or if you prefer, our long-term memories and current states of perception.
Everything we know about reality boils down to perception. And perception in turn is about an interaction between our general ideas about what should be "out there" and immediate impressions of what might be out there.
So given the same sensory input - like a light in the sky - we can have a very different impression of it, depending on the idea being used to frame it. UFO or sea gull catching the sun on its back, for instance.
Now ghosts and spirits would be a general idea. A way we could frame our experiences. And so would be a rational scientific outlook that says instead there are no such things, and any impression of such would be mistaken on closer examination.
Note that both versions of reality have a tendency to want to confirm their prejudices. So ghost-believers will look for evidence that ghosts are real. Rationalists will look for evidence they are fakes or illusions.
So as you say, we only have our mental models of reality. And they are real to us to the extent that they are some over-arching idea into which we attempt to integrate our impressions. If you have an animistic view of reality - where you think everything else is alive and mindful, just like yourself - then that is why "through out all cultures" there is a tendency to frame impressions in this manner.
Science comes along and offers its own better general model. But it is still just an idea. (But OK, a much better idea
).
Then what about vivid dreams and hallucinations? These are more impressions than ideas. That is, they are less about an organised projection of our beliefs on current sensory input - the kind of top-down interpretation that shapes up impressions of experiencing a ghost or UFO - and more about raw bottom-up sensory patterning that forces itself upon us in an uninterpreted feeling way.
The higher levels of functioning are switched off in some fashion, and so we get a shifting, unstable, play of confused imagery.
Afterwards, we may then take these unorganised experiences and try to assimilate them to our general ideas. So we may either believe that was a brief trip into the spiritual plane, or a brief trip into a disorganised brain state.
As a further point, most people cannot accurately introspect on their dream states because they have the "wrong idea" about what to expect. They try to impose a more story-like and flowing structure on dream imagery than actually exists.
It takes practice and knowing what to expect to experience dreams as the collection of meaningless instances - a disconnected succession of sensory frames - that they are, rather than to try to read them as the kind of continuous experience that a reality should present to our senses.
