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1- Perception occurs through the meeting of unlike things. In other words, there is no perception without contrast.
The philosophy of Mythorealism is supported by a metaphysics, developed by David Douglas Thompson and further refined by Jason Thompson. This system in its entirety is referred to as Relationship Theory, an epistemology and ontology defined by relationships. Like any system of metaphysics, the goal of Relationship Theory is to address the question of what is fundamentally real, and in what ways we can have knowledge of this reality.
The question of what we consider real has been confused by language, by unstated assumptions within the question itself. Before we can ask what we consider real, we ought to ask what we mean by that. If we mean, somehow, what is absolutely real, then the question is unanswerable. The objective perspective is not available to us, and it is logically untenable that it ever could be- unless a man could somehow step out of the universe, abstract himself from all his particulars, and watch the whole thing from outside. So the question of what is objectively real is an incoherent one- it presupposes what might be called a "God's eye view," which is simply not available to us whether there is a God or not.
The most extreme alternative, however, seems intuitively false- that is, to consider all of reality to be completely subjective, controlled by our thoughts and beliefs alone. According to this view of the universe, all I can say is what is real to me, and my view is no more or less valid than any other- regardless of its relationship to observable fact. This extreme form of subjectivism is simply untenable- when we step off a building, we fall, and it doesn't really matter what we think about it.
The opposite extreme, however, is equally untenable, whether it takes the form of religious fundamentalism or its sister-under-the-skin, the philosophy which could be described as skeptical materialism. Both viewpoints, though bitter enemies, share one thing very much in common, that being their belief in objective truth, of which they portray themselves as the exclusive owners. The only real difference between them is the route to this truth, which fundamentalists construe as a particular mythology, while followers of skeptical materialism rely instead on empirical observation. It must be said that of the two, the empirical method has proven far more effective and accurate as a way of explaining the physical world, but that simply doesn't justify any claims to absolute knowledge. Skeptical materialism (which is not at all the same thing as the science it idolizes) uses our ability to explain the physical world to deny the spiritual, boldly proclaiming that anything that cannot be experimentally confirmed is intrinsically meaningless- although, as such a statement cannot be tested experimentally, it is meaningless by its own terms. It is nothing more, in fact, than a starting assumption around which to build a particular worldview, and in no way superior to any of the other unprovable assumptions around which the world's philosophies are necessarily built.
What is needed is a more precise and yet more flexible understanding of what we mean by reality, one that adequately accounts for all observed phenomena without making any unsupportable claims to objectivity. This is what Relationship Theory attempts to do.
The complete system of Relationship Theory is rather complex, including a method for examining the patterns and changes within networks of relationships known as the Zed Tree, and a system for describing the interactions between ideas known as Information Physics. All of these permutations, however, share a set of foundational principles, beginning with the assertion that there is no perception without contrast.
Suppose any situation in which there is no contrast of any kind- a field of white light or a pitch-black void, to use the most extreme examples- and the result is blindness. An example from the real world would be the condition known as whiteout, in which the white sky of a winter storm and the white of the snow on the ground produce snow blindness. For anyone to see anything, there must be some form of contrast, and this applies to other forms of perception as well. If your hand is at a higher temperature than the water you dip it into, then the water will be perceived as cold. This won't happen if the water and your hand are both at the same temperature. A piece of silk feels smooth to the touch because it is smoother than your own skin. Perception is always a kind of confrontation, in which two things which are in some way unalike come into contact with each other.
This principle, on the face of it, is intuitively obvious, and as such it has been acknowledged for centuries. The early Christian mystic Pseudo-Dionysius, for instance, in his Mystical Theology of the fifth or sixth century AD, describes the light of God, in its sheer abundance, as a "Divine Darkness." Without any form of contrast, light and dark are the same.
What is less obvious to the intuition, however, are the implications of this principle. This encounter between unlike objects is by definition a relationship, an interaction between entities. The moment we encounter the world, we encounter relationship.
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