March 10, 2008

What is real?

by bwhite @ 10:30 am. Filed under General

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” - Philip K. Dick

A challenging concept.

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3 Responses to “What is real?”

Russ Says:
March 17th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
I REALLY find this concept to be very provocative.
Been thinking about how we affirm our personal reality EVERY DAY.
How each of us, through MANY different little daily rituals of word and deed, affirm our current existence. I’m really coming round to the idea now, that ‘Maybe reality is not as firm as Mr. Dick would like us to believe.’

Maybe our constant, almost subconscious, ritualistic reaffirmations of our current state, are the only things that KEEP us IN our current state.
Maybe the reason these ‘change your mind change your life’ books don’t really work instantaneously is because our current Point Of View in relation to our life, precludes an ability to actually SEE how much we re-affirm our status quo.
In other words, how much our ‘habits’ will undo what we consciously are trying to change by continuing with the subconscious rituals to reaffirm our current reality.

Question:
What if we are like a person in the middle of the ocean treading water? That is all we’ve known….THAT action gets us a ‘reality’ that is our ONLY reference for existence. What if THAT is the metaphor for how we experience the huge thing we call our subjective reality. And what if all we have to do to STOP experiencing the status quo, the same ole same ole…….to DRAMATICALLY CHANGE our reality, is STOP SWIMMING?
Sixkiller Says:
March 17th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
Don’t do it Russ, you’ve got so much to live for.

I think our perception of reality is the key here. Anything we experience is seen through the lenses of our senses. We are far enough away from reality that we can only experience the tiniest sliver of what really is. So much so that we actually define reality through our observation.

Let’s take an object, lets say a chair (pardon me Plato). A carpenter will see the wood it’s made of and note the craftsmanship. A chair collector might look at the design and note the year it was created. A physicist will tell you that it is made of energy condensed into a slow vibration so we perceive it as matter.

But that’s not all. A tired person will see it as a place to sit. A short person will see it as a stepstool to reach something. An angry person might see it as a weapon.

We define the reality of the object through our state of mind.

I have a theory about Bigfoot and Aliens too….
bwhite Says:
March 25th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
I also have to say that Philip K’s concept might work well for gravity, but who knows? How are we ever going to get the majority of people on the planet to stop believing we are limited by gravity? Possibly, if there are many people sharing a belief then that is the belief that manifests because our single belief is one small voice among billions.
It is my understanding that the French as a culture eat a lot of fat, smoke like chimneys and have a much lower rate of heart disease than us. How? They don’t seem to worry about heart disease as a culture like we do.
If you told me at the end of February that a human being could put their finger tips through 4 inches of wood I would have said, “No way.” On March 7th at the annual Tang Soo Do tournament a 21 year old, 155 pound young man did just that. That is a mythical technique. And there is was, real. Reality it slippery for sure. And Philip K doesn’t seem to be privy to that knowledge.

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