Seeing a Dragon?

Should one man lie to another and tell him that he saw a firey, flying dragon yesterday, the other man might politely deny his story by saying that dragons are not real, and he would be quite right to do so.

Yet, in a sense, the man who claimed to see the dragon did relate a story about ideas that are real. He related mental ideas or essences that are real. Serpents are real, fire is real and flying is real. The storyteller simply put these real ideas together into a false combination. The false combination was the lie, not the real ideas that composed it.

The man who denied the story might go a little further by telling the storyteller that since dragons do not exist, then the storyteller actually saw nothing. Nothing was actually that which the storyteller saw, but the mental representations in his mind; that is, the serpent, flying and fire that he put together in his mind to form a mental image of the non-existent dragon were real. In addition, the nothingness that the storyteller saw must also have been real since that was exactly that which he saw. This makes the idea of nothing also real. One who objects that the idea of nothing might not be real must account for its usefulness in a three dimensional world. Anything that is useful must also be real.

If all of the mental ideas that the storyteller saw are real, then where is the unreality of the dragon? The only possible answer to this question is that the dragon non-exists nowhere and at no time. The mind of the storyteller can recognize the nothingness that he saw as being real, but he can in no way imagine the non-existence of the dragon that he cannot see. The non-existence of the dragon lies beyond his consciousness. He can only get an indirect absence of an idea about its non-existence because its non-existence was suggested to him by the idea of nothing which he did see.

It is a universal fact that man can construct true or false combinations, but both always comprise real experiences or ideas. This means that it is impossible for consciousness to experience or even to think about anything that is not real. Consciousness can only experience or imagine the elements of reality. Consciousness can never get any idea of unreality because it always non-exists as hidden by the idea of nothing.