It's not a philosophical statement, it's a practical statement. What do you propose to work with (in a Dhamma sense), if not your experiences?binocular wrote:But this is just a step away from solipsism!mikenz66 wrote:I agree with Chownah and Reflection that all we have to work with is our experience
These questions of reality might not be a waste of time in some cases, but I think they are very often a waste of time in the contexts I specified (e.g. making measurements in a lab). They are a waste of time when they take time and effort away from useful action. And I don't think that such philosophical analysis is central to the point of the Buddha's teachings.binocular wrote:It's not a "waste of time." It's acknowledging the assumptions one works with. It is sometimes indeed counterproductive to do so, but the solution isn't to take them for granted. It's by taking things for granted that we can get into all kinds of problems.To me, any attempt to confirm or deny that there is a "real world" misses the point. That most of us, in ordinary life, or in more technical areas such as science, use a working model that there is something out there, and that is what we are measuring or experiencing, and use language that builds in that assumption. We don't necessarily take it seriously, but we don't waste time thinking:
"I will go into the laboratory and measure the wavelength of this light that may or may not be real with this apparatus that also may or may not be real. And, by the way, my very concept of wavelength is built on the assumption of ..."
Mike