Does a Rainbow Exist Without Us?
“I just found out there's no such thing as the real world, just a lie you've got to rise above” – ‘No Such Thing', John Mayer

It depends on your point of view (POV).

The famous comparative religion scholar and interpreter of Zen Buddhism, Dr. Alan Watts, explores the theme of consciousness in his discussion “Does a Rainbow exist without us?” (excerpt from his popular radio lecture).

“Viewing a rainbow depends upon three things: 1) the sun, 2) moisture and 3) Us. But there needs to be a special triangulation for all of the three to work together.  The hard floor of stone is like the rainbow.  It is there only if certain conditions of relationship are fulfilled (feeling the ‘stone’ is the same thing as seeing the rainbow or hearing a tree fall).

We like to think that houses and things go on existing in their natural state when we are not around looking at them or feeling them.  But what about the rainbow?  What if there was no one to see it, would it be there?  (similar to the fallen tree and no one was there, did it make a sound?).

This is where we go wrong.  We are supporting the myth that the external world exist without us.  Let’s ask the question in another way:  you are there waiting for the rainbow, but there is no sun just you and moisture, is the rainbow there?  No.  For a rainbow to be ‘there’, it depends upon someone to see it just as it depends upon the sun and moisture.

Now, we try to pretend that the external world exists altogether independently of us.  This is the myth of the Independent Observer: of man coming into a world to which he really doesn’t  belong and that it is going on there and he has nothing to do with it.  He just arrives in here and sees what it always was.  But that’s a joke!

Only people could think that way if they felt completely alienated and did not feel that the external world was continuous with their own organism.  The external world is very continuous with our own organism.  The world is human because it is ‘humaning’".

In the April, 1984 issue of Scientific American (SA), the question was posed, "If a tree were to fall on an uninhabited island, would there be any sound?"
SA replied: "Sound is vibration, transmitted to our senses through the mechanism of the ear, and recognized as sound only at our nerve centers. The falling of the tree or any other disturbance will produce vibration of the air. If there be no ears [or instruments] to hear, there will be no sound."

God in the Quad
When George Berkeley posed the famous question – "Does a tree fall in the forest when no-one can hear it?" – he proposed that objects exist only when perceived by a conscious being.   To avoid the absurdities of this view Berkeley posited that, because God was omnipresent, unseen things exist because they were in God’s consciousness.

Paying tribute to Berkeley’s ‘divine’ epistemological perspective, English theologian Ronald Knox (1888-1957) cleverly sets up and answer’s the falling tree question with his famous limerick, “God in the Quad”.

"There was a young man, who said,
'God, I find it exceedingly odd
that a tree as a tree simply ceases to be
when no one is around in the quad'."

"Young man, your astonishment's odd,
I am always around in the quad,
so the tree as a tree never ceases to be
since observed by yours faithfully,
God."

It is one’s privilege to identify oneself in terms of 'Rationalist', 'Empiricists', 'Nominalist', 'Realists', etc., but those are all in the context of 'Materialist' or 'Mentalist' frameworks.

The Golden Seat takes the position of the spiritual, monistic and even idealistic framework.

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