I guess this’ll teach me not to read “The Invisibles” and “The Lathe of Heaven” simultaneously while having an existential crisis.
The language is always going to be an issue. As I learned from The Invisibles, we’ve only been taught half the letters of the true alphabet. This entire experience is created in language and there are things I have no words for.
What I’ve learned from conversations and responses to my inquiry “Why are you doing this?” is that, to various extents, we are all making this up as we go along. We have constructed customized realities, an elaborate latticework of experiences, ideas, and feelings. Parts of these realities are attached to fixtures seemingly independent, though we have also created those fixtures (but have forgotten, forsaken, distanced ourselves from them).
We seek out consensus to reinforce and reaffirm. Each module of the reality, or each “fact”, varies in the amount of consensus needed and this also varies from person to person. Many modules have so much consensus that they give the appearance of being factory installed. This is the realm of macro-level concepts like physics and social mores. Heavy consensus modules require little effort from the individual. So many people believe in the thoughtform that only a tiny processing cycle per person is required to maintain it. These thoughtforms appear inflexible and unassailable.
In isolation, away from consensus, rogue realities flourish. This isolation is also rooted in some inaccessibility of language: the newborn, the person in a foreign country, the person stranded on an island, the child born deaf, blind and mute. What would your reality look like if stripped of consensus? If you could invent new words because it didn’t occur to you that it “just wasn’t done”? There seem to be so many wonderful things in the realm of low-consensus thoughtforms. Cats share wisdom, pots boil when you look away, stars grant wishes, and real love only needs one person to believe in it.
I kept hearing people say variations of “This is what feels right to me.” They had invented purpose for their life and given themselves tools to measure it. But it isn’t usually described that way. There are always these pre-existing tools. There are outside influences. There is a need to distance oneself from from these other factors in order to validate the whole arrangement. We need something that is Not Us. But I think these pre-existing circumstances are invented as well. It is a conspiracy of dissociated terrorist architects. Ask all the ants how the anthill got there and each will point at the other ants. It’s a paradox.
I also kept getting “Make your own meaning.” I think I’m afraid to. I think it might be lonely. And it lead to a thought that I’m still trying to get a handle on: If we’re inventing reality on our own terms and part of that involves creating forces in opposition to us (challenges, measurements, shadows, counterbalance), then the things that are “false” about us (“You’re not smart enough”, “You’re not a good musician”, “You will never find true love”) are actually true. If we think we need them to be.
I’ve done a lot of think about this, and I’ve managed to completely fail to write anything about it.
From a scientists’s perspective, I want to draw a distinction between creating one’s own reality and interpreting reality based on non-reproduceable personal experience. Science is about equations and provable universal truths. Spirituality exists outside of this world. I cannot explain to why I believe what I believe in a way that will make it compelling to you. I cannot tell you to do the things I’ve done and expect you to get the same results. My experiences are my experiences, and they don’t share. That makes spirituality far more difficult to discuss.
Well, actually, I can tell you a bit about myself. I started down the path of believing in a higher power because I was visited by one in a vision while I was sitting in Christmas service at my parents’ church in my early 20s. The vision did not speak, but it gestured to me and told me that it was time to come home.
So, having read that, what do you think? Do you think I am imagining things? Do you think I wanted to believe so badly that a conjured a vision for myself? I’m going to assume that what you DON’T believe unquestioningly is that I was truly granted a vision by God. What’s more, I can’t tell you to go sit in my parents’ church at Christmas to get the same vision. The experience is mine. It was changing for me, but I cannot give it to you.
I think part of approaching religion is to accept that many people have these stories. We cannot validate them. We can only respect them.
I also think that building a spiritualist worldview is one that ought to be personal first and foremost, exactly because our spiritual experiences are personal. Many fundamentalists believe that the exact details of the nature of God must come from a book. I believe that every individual has this quest, and that it is our responsibility to constantly be validating external sources like the Bible against our internal perception of the divine.
This may be considered creating your own reality. In a way it is.
All I’ve got to work with is perception and a memory map of past perceptions.
I think we create a certain amount of our own world that then intersects with other people’s and becomes communal (shared reality). I’d like to think of this like each of us is creating a water color painting, and often times the waters mix in with one another’s work. And since some people can’t/refuse to paint, they have to live in whatever painting someone else has made.
But at the same time, I believe we are all painting on a giant sheet of paper that is the “canvas” created by the universe. And that canvas can bend and stretch to bring us together in happy artistic coincidences with others (distance being no issue) that the canvas thinks might be a good idea or that we have asked for intersection with in our “art.”
But that’s just me… 🙂
Echo, in my reality you received a vision from God. If you had told me that one of your spirit guides had appeared to you, then that is what happened. If you had told me that a future incarnation of yourself had double-backed as an energy matrix, then that is what happened.
But you created the context for the event and assigned it meaning.
Drey, could you expand on that? In your opinion, where does personal truth end and objective truth begin? Or are these even important distinctions?
Objective truth would fit into the category of ideas that have massive amounts of consensus. It is my stance that it is *possible* that “laws of nature” or “facts” are being generated by living things in an infinite chain of dependent causality. We find this reality convincing and we continue to support it.
Pragmatically, personal truth is always going to trump objective truth for me because, ultimately, it is the truth I have to live with. This is not to say that there is not a great deal of overlap.
If I decide that sleeping on the left side of the bed will make me feel better the next day, there is no science or objective truth that can unseat this thought. Especially if it *works*. In fact, “evidence” to the contrary will likely make me unhappy.
And what would be the point in contesting this facet of personal truth? So that someone can be right? Someone who will *never* experience my life by virtue of the fact that they are not me? Would it be to align my views with some other viewpoint that is just as arbitrary yet has more consensus? A viewpoint that I have no desire for?
just a thought: my understanding is that reality is always changing. we are always in flux. “life goes on within you and without you”. that means that the good and the bad are temporary. even such events as death are part of a present situation, and while the event itself may stay the same, the situation that encompasses it changes. nothing is “same as it ever was”. the main constant IS the variable. like trying to put the human variable into an algebraic equation. life itself is not a full circle, but a spiral, that unlike in the book “wrinkle in time” does not merge.
I share my view with Drey that there are universal realities and personal realities. Yet, universal realities are perceived differently by individuals. For example, the brightness at the moon at night is the universal reality of the sun reflecting on its surface. But, for a young couple, it could mean a degree of romanticism. Hot & cold arerealistic degrees of temperature that can be measured by anyone with a thermostat. However, my wife and I feel differently at the same temperature.
Thus, it can be said that all realities can be reduced to personal realities.
Jenny has a good point in stating that reality is in a state of flux, as the saying that “Change” is the only constant in life. My realities today are very far from those I experienced as a child.
My father died, from riding a horse accident, when I was six months old. As a child, I imagined my father riding his horse. One day I had my wish: I “saw” my father riding his horse toward me. I run, looking back, until I fell on the ground and broke two of my front teeth. That was reality for me at age six.
Reading your work makes me feel like, at some point in the past, I traded my access to a vast, dark, yet incredibly shiningly beautiful and intricate landscape for this…fantasy of a normal sane life. Sometimes I regret it. I’m glad you still hold a key to that world.