Notions of Reality

What is reality?

What is reality?

Well, everything is real. Every little bit of creation is real. Love and light and bodies and thoughts and energy and colours and fairies and demons and anything you can think of or imagine. It is all real. It all exists somewhere, somehow, in one dimension or another, in some way, shape or form.

So what is this discussion about?

Two things. The first one is to bring to your conscious awareness how your personal experience of reality may differ from the consensus reality of the human community that you live in. The second one is to describe a picture of reality that is as all inclusive as human imagination and experience can put into words. 

Consensus Reality and Personal Subjective Reality

Consensus reality is what a group of people agree that reality is. This is different in every culture and group within the culture. This is what people teach to their children and how they think about the world. Sometimes people will even think that their notion of reality is the only right one and they will punish people who think differently or send their people out to persuade others that this is the right way of thinking and seeing things.

Your personal subjective reality is what you believe. Chances are this will conform with the reality of your family and community unless you have experiences that are different, or come across ideas from people or books that you instinctively identify with.

In my culture, there are many people who believe that only what they perceive through the five physical body senses is real. They believe that they only live this one time and there is nothing before or after this life. What is in stories or the imagination or even their own thoughts or dreams is not real to them. They base their decisions for how they act in this lifetime as if nothing after their death matters to them.

In other ways of thinking, I have read about, the physical world is considered to be an illusion, not real at all. Only spirit is real and this lifetime is but a small insignificant drop in a great ocean of illusion.

For most people, beliefs of what is real lie somewhere in between these two extremes. They may believe that angels are real, but not fairies. They may believe they can talk to plants but not rocks. They may believe that they have a soul but that it only lives in a body on earth one time and then spends the rest of eternity in heaven or hell. There are as many variations of beliefs of notions of reality as there are people thinking about them. Like snowflakes or fingerprints, each person has a very unique experience of reality. And then there is the story they tell themselves and others about that experience. You may know who is calling on the phone when it rings before you answer it. You may say it was just a coincidence or you may say that you are connected with that person so that you know when they are thinking about you. In the first story you are not believing there is a reason for why you knew this, in the second story, you are believing there is a psychic or telepathic perception at work.