Chapter XX. The original color of the apple

In the most luxurious suite of the Sheraton Grand Adana Hotel, someone for whom luxury meant nothing sat, smoking his cigarette coldly, expelling without hesitation all memories, except for one memory he is still struggling with.

The voice: Did you miss her? He sighed, glimpsed her face on the surface of the river in front of him, took a breath from his cigarette, and puffed it up: No, my friend, I just wonder how is she?

The voice: She is fine, she is still pursuing her work in tourism, and in the newspaper, he was silent for a moment: As for the relationships, there are no relations in her life so far.

He Smiled: I do not know if I should be happy or sad about this news, my friend.

The next morning, they met in the breakfast room, Ruslan started to feel more comfortable, he must have some rest, as he needed it. They had a traditional Turkish breakfast, and a cup of coffee, and then went out for a walk in the hotel garden.

-Ozcan: What do you know about me, Ruslan?

-Ruslan: Ruslan: Until yesterday the things I knew about you were that you are Baibars, you are a brave person, and a fighter, you had so many secrets about the functional, secrecy regulations, and you had such an important role in the things that changed the course of events and turned them upside down, and then you disappeared a while ago nobody knew anything about you.

-Who is your enemy?

-Every oppressor and tyrant, kills people, enslaves them, and deprives them of the right to a decent life

-Who is this tyrant?

-Every time and place has a tyrant and an oppressor, just as it has good men.

-like who?

-Bashar al-Assad, Saddam Hussein, America, Russia, Iran, extremist organizations, Israel, the list goes on.

-Why does the oppressor oppress?

-For his own reconciliation, or the interests of his group, state, or belief

-What if in his view he is not a tyrant, and we are rebellious mutineers, and maybe even tyrants?

-Perspectives do not change the meaning of truth.

-what is the truth?

-Ruslan shrugged his shoulders: The truth is the truth

-It must be defined. Well, can we say that the truth is what most people say?

-No, definitely not

-Is it faith?

-No, there are those who believe in lies and think it is true

-How can we be sure that this tree is true and not a lie

-He was silent for a moment, answered: The senses, what we can prove with our senses, what we can see, touch, hear his voice, is true.

-Have you been to China before? the moon? Mars?

-No

-Do you believe in their existence?

-Yes

– So, you believe in a lot of things that you did not interact with them with any of your senses?

-Because someone did this, the pictures, the news talk about them….

-So sometimes the truth is what people say and what other people’s experiences say

– yes, sometimes

-Sometimes we are satisfied with simulating the senses in indirect ways to reach the truth? A photo, an audio recording for example…

-Yes, right

-Sometimes all of this evidence is not enough and we demand direct sensory evidence, right?

-yes

-When do we require direct sensory evidence?

-When the case is sensitive, important, and entails matters…

-Also, when it does not suit our desires and interests, we ask for more evidence, complicate the matters, and simply refuse to accept it, right?

-Yes, yes, often it is like this

-Persuasion is relative, and our own desires play an important role in it. If you love a girl, and you want to marry her, you will be satisfied with one proof of her purity and feel comfortable with it to move forward in marriage. While if you hate her, you will not be satisfied with a thousand pieces of evidence, right?

-Yes, it’s probably true

-So, the definition of the truth is what can be supported by appropriate evidence to convince us of its subject?

-Ruslan was silent, brainstormed, after thinking, he answered: Yes

-This means that if I lied to you a lie, and supported it with sufficient and appropriate evidence to convince your mind, you would see it as the truth.

-Yes

-If I could communicate with your mind and know its desires and fulfilled them, it would be satisfied with few and fragile evidence and would not complicate matters.

-Right, probably yes

-Ozcan: Don’t you think that might have something to do with making a criminal who he is? What happened with you in Iraq and in Syria with the functional regulations, the answer to what puzzles you may be here, perhaps someone was able to enter their minds, fulfill their hidden desires, so their minds decided to ignore all the facts around them, and they were satisfied with fragile signs because someone was able to fulfill some desire for these minds. No matter how hard you try to convince them, it will not work, their minds will always come up with the right truth, and there will be doubt, uncertainty, and only fragile evidence, to the point that at some point we call fantasy, love it, and decide it is truth, right, even though all the evidence around them says otherwise.

He added: Sometimes we call it brainwashing, but it may be something much deeper than the common concept of brainwashing, in which the brain is not the subject, the victim, the innocent, who has been manipulated, but the perpetrator and the executioner. However, the matter is deeper than the functional regulations, my brother.

He stood in front of an ornamental tree, the garden around them was full of green spaces, ornamental trees, Seyhan River, birds everywhere, and a clear sky with some clouds. He cut a piece of its leaves, hold it between the thumb and forefinger, and lift it.

-What if I told you that this is a bird?

– it is not a bird

– Why not a bird?

Because it is a leaf, it cannot fly

He blew on it, the leaf flew through his fingers

-and now? Has it become a bird?

– No, it is still a leaf

-What if I subjected you to physical and psychological torture for a period of time, until you realize that your salvation from this torment will not be removed unless you see the leaf as a bird? Do you think you would see it like this?

-Yes, maybe I would assume that it is a bird, perhaps. This happened and psychiatric patients see such things. In inhumane prisons, prisoners imagine things that do not exist or that are not what they are.

-Do you think you will see it as a bird with all your heart?

-Yes, psychopaths, insane, can imagine that it is a bird, and they are completely convinced of that, and they even see that whoever sees the opposite is sick and insane.

-Imagine it or see it, what is the difference?

-The difference is that its reality is a leaf, and as a result of a circumstance you imagined that it was a bird.

-What if you are now subjected to physical and psychological torment, and your salvation lies in your delusion that a bird is a leaf?

-Then its reality is that it is a bird

– So, if we are now subjected to torment, we often see things that do not exist, perhaps the whole world around us is not as we see it, right?

Ruslan remained silent; he had no answer.

-Who decides the truth, Ruslan? Who interprets colors, shapes, paints the picture of this thing in your head, and makes you hear its voice, who decides what is all around us? Who will show you the bird as a leaf or the leaf as a bird? If I expose you to sufficient torment? Or mess with your senses? Or made you take some kind of drug?

-My mind for sure.

-So, can we define truth as what your mind wants it to be?

-No, the truth is the truth.

-But you are absolutely certain that the truth is based on the way your mind deals with the data received from the body’s senses. If your mind decided to interpret the data of the leaf as a bird, you would see it as a bird, and if you had a defect in the senses and sent wrong data to your mind, it would see something else, right?

-If you took a kind of drug that tampers with your sense of sight, or were exposed to optical deception, your mind would receive false information, and the leaf would be seen as a bird or vice versa. This is what they call magic out of science, optical deception, Pharaoh’s magicians manipulated people’s minds and made them see ropes as snakes.

Ruslan remained silent, and Ozcan continued: What makes the color green, green? Is it being green? Or because they told you so?

When you were a kid, you saw a color, you asked them, what is this, they said, Green, and your mind started to react to this color as their minds react to green, but what if you had a disorder that made you see it red, and they told you that the name of this color you see is green? So, my green is your red.

And there is no way to prove that you see a different color from what they see, your mind interacts with it just as their minds interact with the green color. So, learn, watch their interaction with this color, interact like them in everything, and learn that its name is green. You see it red, when in fact it is green.

Or maybe its reality is red as you see it, and they are the ones who suffer from a disorder and see it as green. The truth is not necessarily what people agree on.

Despite this, the balance occurred, you agreed on the concepts, for your red is green for them; When you tell someone I want a green apple, you mean red, he will go into the kitchen and get you one that he will see green, while you will see red. Balance occurred, you got what you wanted, no matter what color he sees.

It was not difficult for Ruslan to understand this, as he spent years of his life in meditation, focusing on details, in emptiness, in nothingness.

Ozcan completed: Now what if the brain had its own code, such as a fingerprint, or an eye print and our minds all receive data and interpret them in different ways, each according to its own code, but we agreed on concepts and labels, is that what makes us harmonious or understanding?

He took in his hand a yellow scrap of paper, thrown under a tree, called the gardener, he came quickly, he spoke in Turkish: “Üzgünüm, şimdi bahçeyi temizliyorum, henüz o kısma gelmedim”. *

*Sir, I am sorry, I am cleaning the garden now, I have not reached that part yet.

Ozcan barely understood what he said, he smiled at him and turned to Ruslan: What if I see this color black, and you see it blue, and this gardener sees it white, but we all agreed its name was yellow because they taught us this? so our minds have learnt to interact with it in one way.

Then our minds show the same reaction, regardless of what each of us sees.

So, if you go to the ophthalmologist, and he put that color in front of us, we will all show the same effect, the same dilation of the pupils, the same indicators, and this will be the yellow color, which the ophthalmologist sees in turn red.

And if the brain of this gardener interacts with this color differently, then we decide that he has something wrong, we say that he has an illness that makes him see yellow as a different color, and we give him the necessary treatment, psychological sessions, so that he can see it correctly, in other words, so that his mind learns to react to it the way our minds do.

Have you ever seen a child? Holding a blue ball says to his mother this is green, so she corrects him, no, this is blue, so he repeats blue behind her and begins to interact with it as blue, and when he shows the same reaction to blue, we decide that he learned the color correctly.

He put his purple paper in the basket, patted the worker’s shoulder, and walked away.

He continued: If each of us had his own code, which is not repeated between two people, such as fingerprint and eye print, then there is no problem, although we see things in different ways, hear them differently, feel, smell, taste, each according to his own code, but we agreed on the names, the concepts, and we began to show the same reaction to them.

Is this possible, Ruslan?

-Sort of, I get what you said, but I need to focus more on it, go on.

-Ozcan: The important question is, what is the original color of the apple before our minds receive anything around them and interpret it with anything?

Have you ever seen a picture of a dazzling colorful space? How beautiful the colors are, how wonderful they are: nebulae, dust and gas clouds, stars and planets, explosions, collisions.

Do you know their truth? They are just rays without colors, they do not reach these colors in the first place; telescopes receive them in the form of rays, and color them according to their strength, degree, and spectrum. If the computer had a defect, and it received the spectrum of the color pink and interpreted it as green, we would see it green. Rather, if, during millions of years of its travels in space, a ray was exposed to something that changed the strength of its degree, it would reach us in a different color.

He added: But despite this, these rays still have a color, something between black and white, so we can receive them. Is it black? Is the whole world black and our minds are the ones who color it, each according to his mind code?

-Ruslan: But black is one of the colors.

-Ozcan: So, what is it? Is it a color we do not know? Our minds cannot receive any data about it, and therefore cannot explain anything? Suppose there is a color that we do not know, which is the original color of the apple, and everyone sees it differently and we agree that its name is red, so what is this color?

-Ruslan was silent, something inside his head is resisting, he did not know what to say, then he replied: It is nothing at all because we cannot receive any data about it.

-Ozcan: So, it is nothing. Imagine that we live in a world of matter, with no color, no taste, no smell, no touch, no sound. Our five senses cannot receive any information about it. So, we live in nothing, our minds decide what it is, and our need to communicate has created languages, terms, and common concepts. I may see and hear nothing but what you see and hear, but we have agreed on terms and concepts that unite us on them.

Ozcan added: But nothing is still a thing, our five senses restrict us, perhaps if we had five additional senses to receive the data of this nothing, our minds would interpret it, and deal with it. We need additional senses to receive data that we do not know anything about. Ten senses, for example? Are they enough? What if the nature of this substance needs an extra sense yet? Well, a hundred senses? What if the right sense is not among them? In the end, we do not need a large number of senses, but rather the appropriate sense to receive the necessary data about this substance.

The next question, Ruslan: What if we got this sense, and then our mind rejected the reality of matter for some reason? And decided not to interpret the data correctly? Or ignored it? As it often does with our five senses.

-What is deafness?

-A defect in the ear, due to which the mind does not receive any information about sounds.

-But sometimes the mind simply decides to ignore sounds despite receiving data. When it is engaged in something, for example, sleeping, our minds often receive sounds and decide to ignore them, just like that, even though there is no hearing impairment. Sight, touch, taste, smell, the mind can ignore its input if it so desires.

He looked directly into his eyes, and advanced towards him a little, he said in a tone of ambiguity: But what if we already have this appropriate sense, Ruslan, but our minds interpret their data at will. Or decided to ignore it completely for some reason.

And what is this sense? Let’s agree to call it zero sense. The sense through which we can receive the data of the original color of the apple.