If this is not a tree,
then what is it?
For as long as I can remember, I’ve had an interest in the nature of this reality we find ourselves in just now.
The more I look, the less I find and the deeper the rabbit hole goes.
So after years of taking notes on bits of paper, in little note books and emailing my self with random thoughts, I decided to piece them all together and do something with them.
So I made this site and wrote a book to share them.
Geoff
So why “This is not a tree?”
This idea came to me as I was diving into the work of Bernardo Kastrup and Donald Hoffman and listening to them discussing the true, raw nature of reality.
Put simply, we don’t experience the true nature of reality in it’s true, raw nature, just an extremely filtered version of it through our available senses; sight, sound, smell, touch and taste. all of which give a very limited experience of what’s really “out there” in the world we perceive.
I found this tied in with what I’d read from Eckhart Tolle, Osho, Jiddu Krishnamurti and many others, on how we are all conditioned from birth to believe and live our lives through our ego, another heavily filter of reality.
As my understanding deepend beyond intellectual and became experiential, I began to spend time trying to observe things without my mind jumping in an labeling them. At first this was nearly impossible, but that trying was in it’s self an experience in understanding the way the mind and ego works.
The idea to go with “this is not a tree” came to me as I wanted to use an example that would resonate and make people question the statement, and trees are something that we’re all familiar with. So I did a bit or research into this idea and came across “The Treachery of Images” a 1929 painting by Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte. Also known as “This Is Not a Pipe”, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”
Quite a bizarre coincidence I thought, especially when I looked into the meaning behind the painting!
The artwork shows an image of a pipe with the caption “This is not a pipe” written beneath it. At first glance, it seems contradictory—until you realize the deeper message: it’s not a pipe, it’s a representation of a pipe.
Magritte was inviting viewers to question their assumptions about reality. Just because we see a picture—or use a label—doesn’t mean we’re engaging with the thing itself. The image is not the object. The map is not the territory. The word is not the experience, if it where a pipe, one could stuff it with tobacco and smoke it.
My idea with the “tree” was a similar interpretation, but more from the point of revealing the labels we give to all objects and thoughts. Although useful to navigate this reality, they are just labels.
Now to go a little deeper, the “tree” you label, only exists in your brain, what your looking at is a screen, with 1000’s illuminated pixels, and not a tree. I’ll be going much deeper into this in the book and on this site too at some point. when I do, I’ll drop a link in here.