Suppose you see a lake. Then you walk a few paces to one side and look at the lake again. You see a lake but is it the same lake? Our common convention is that it is the same lake but we should examine the question more closely.
Most of the nearby lakes are at least partly surrounded by houses and gardens. Likely, such a lake is often being seen by someone but not necessarily all of the time. Each one who sees a lake sees their own lake, the presence of the lake in their own awareness. It is common to consider the awareness of different individuals as separate and distinct. In this sense each image of the lake, or at least each individual’s personal collection of images of the lake, is separate and distinct from the presence of the lake in another person’s awareness. So where is the lake? What is the lake that is seen? Is it the set of multiple apparitions which appear to separate people or is it some external body or power self residing? It is common now for many people to accept the second alternative, that the lake is there of its own.
We communicating awarenesses (e.g., humans) might suppose that the lake is there of itself because when we compare our sets of lake images there seems to be much that is shared between different people: the shiny, wavy, sparkling surface, birds swimming, fishing and flying above the lake, the alternation of grey-blue-silver, and so on. Indeed, that is why we call it seeing a lake. This is not to say that a particular collection of individuals compares notes to find what is common among their observations, but rather that something similar, although more subtle and complex, had occurred long ago and keeps on occurring.
What we have established is that there is some commonality of events of awareness which in the historical process has come to be associated with the idea of an entity, which in English we call ‘lake’. And it is not necessarily difficult to specify this more exactly for a particular lake. Or is it more difficult?
As a thought experiment let us imagine that the lake, some particular lake with which we may be familiar, is a thing, an entity existing of its own, a body of water held semiflat in a depression by gravity, with watery egress and ingress in average balance, with a surrounding shoreline, a bottom and a surface, where the bottom is usually inhabited by various animals and plants, where the body of the water often has fish and sometimes turtles swimming there, where the surface is lit by the sun and moon and sometimes shrouded in foggy dark, rippled and splashed by the winds...
Each of the lake phenomena we have mentioned is either an image or set of images of direct experience and perception or not, in which case we may call them explanations or ideas coordinating sets of direct experiences.
Let us agree that the lake is there as an agreement of experience, a concept coordinating a set of thoughts and perceptions. But let us also consider the further hypothesis that the lake is something existent of its own accord, prior, perhaps, to our experiences of the lake in awareness. Then what is that lake?
We would commonly say that the primary and essential constituent of a lake is water. But water itself names an agreement of experience, a name and concept denoting a collective structure of thought, perception and other acts of cognition. But what is water of itself? According to physical science water is composed, at the simplest level, of similar molecules beginning with the fundamental association of one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms. And furthermore this simple molecule is, in actual water, accompanied by many variations both of chemical radicals and of multi molecular associations, all held together, although not entirely, in an envelope of surface tension. These atomic and molecular structures are themselves more fundamentally conceived as held together and organized as electromagnetic field patterns. But yet more fundamentally these atomic and electromagnetic patterns are organized by deeper theories of mechanics and quantum mechanics which describe mathematical regularities and exceptions which induce the thinker to believe that the water of the lake is subjected to at least a preliminary understanding.
Yet all of these levels of consideration of the form and substance of the self existent lake are readily to be seen, in their actual experiential existence, as sets of perceptions, thoughts, feelings and assents in awareness. Even at these levels the lake is still an agreement of awareness, of experience in awareness.
But what of the lake itself? We have lost its water physics to acts of awareness; by a similar process the history, geology and biology of the lake could be described as events of awareness. But what remains of the lake itself, external and prior to our awareness of it? The lake both is and is not water, surface, shape, light, smell, sound, birds, fish, mud, coolness,...,atoms, fields, particles,... Of itself, prior to and beyond our awareness, the lake may very well be; it is persistent to imagine that there is something there. But what is there of itself, the lake itself, beyond our awareness, is not only completely mysterious and unknown but must and will always remain so.
Suppose we were to meet, either in our dreams or awake, some spirit of the lake which said to us: “I am the lake.” And suppose that we were to believe the voice and say to ourselves: “This is the real lake, the essence.” And suppose we were right to do so in some important ways. Then still, still, that spirit of the lake is known to us in awareness and not, or no longer, as beyond or out of our awareness. We are not saying that the lake either does or does not exist of its own outside of our awareness but rather that that existence is unknowable. If we watch the lake shore and the water, the water and the beach form a reality in our experience. This awareness exists. What if we were not here, not in existence? That reality would not exist. Would the lake and the beach exist? Whatever might be there, it would not be the lake and the beach we see, certainly not from the points of view of physics, physiology and psychophysics. Whatever might be there, if there were no observers, would at most be a smudgy thing, formless and indefinite, like an uncollapsed wave function. It would be much the same as nothing.