REALITY
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Reality is what you are living now, this instant in time.
Whatever
your circumstances, reality is what you are living now. There is
nothing else. Whether you are new-born or an instant before 'death',
you are in your own reality.
Before your reality of presence upon this earth or planet, that is yours only. Everything else is conjecture.
Howsoever
you are born, nothing exists except the reality of your existence at
that time. From thence forward you gain data from the universe as it is
to you and you progress, positively or negatively towards the end of
that existence.
Positive existence is survival. Negative existence is non-survival.
For a positive survival it is necessary to accumulate data, process it and go forwards.
For negative survival one does not accumulate data and the process does not go forward but ends or stagnates.
I
do not believe that we can truly understand the universe. It is where
we are at a particular time and place to experience it. This experience
depends upon the senses that we have available when we are born and
those we (may) develop into the future. Life is not a still frame in a
film, it is the whole film moving from start to finish. Anything that
requires us to be a still frame is not progress and so not survival.
Learning is survival. Constant regard to change is survival. Observe
any other fauna and including flora.
The human creature has,
apparently, the ability to be aware of being aware. Other animals are
aware of their presence upon the earth but do not, as far as we know,
have the same capability as ourselves, this same awareness of being
aware. Thus we are different but not, as we sometimes suppose, are we
'superior' to these other fauna and flora. 'Superior' is a word
invented by the 'aware of being aware' crowd who only assume their
superiority. It has no place in the natural world, as I see it.
Like
all fauna and flora, what we call Man is only a transient entity on
this planet that we call earth. There is really nothing that makes us
different from anything else except our thoughts that this is so. In
reality, therefore it is only beliefs that are part of our awareness of
being aware that make this so.
In reality, this tiny planet is
less than a speck of dust in the universe. Within that less of a speck
of dust there is also lesser speck of dust. As we can not comprehend
the enormity of the universe of which we are part, neither can we
conceive that this speck of dust is not larger than another speck.
We
assume that there are atoms of the universe which are the smallest
particles, which, broken down reveal smaller and smaller particles,
which may well be (and probably are) only the beginning of something
even smaller, like zooming in on the Mandelbrot Set (for example)
reveals even more complexity which can go on forever.
In the
universe, we are only a scene in the universe-as-a-whole; a tiny speck
that from a distance is not observable in any shape or form any
more than the atoms (or parts thereof).
Human animals have
limited senses. And yes, we do have the ability to 'see' that which
cannot be seen with the naked eyes of our perceptions, but we can have
no knowledge of the smaller or larger, in reality.
Man invents to explain that which he cannot comprehend; yet we assume that we can and therein lies our frailty.
The
World that we have created from the earth upon which we live is, in my
belief, insane. It is insane because we cannot realise that we have
invented it (the World) to make sense of something which we do not and,
(in my view) cannot explain.
Those of us with appropriate
abilities must try and explain our existence, to be sure. Our problem
is the invention of ideas that do not meet the picture of reality which
greets us each morning as we arise. Unless beliefs can match observable
data (through whatever senses are required and we possess) then we are
not in a reality compatible with survival. Explanations must be
compatible with survival.
The problems come about when beliefs
and explanations do not meet a survival mechanism. They may be useful
for an individual to survive but they should not be sold to others if
they do not agree with them because of their own survival. But this is
precisely what is happening in our present reality and is the cause of
our present earthly dilemma.
Beliefs and explanations are a
personal thing and should be seen and acted upon as such. They may be
communicated and agreed upon by some others but they should not
be seen as everyone else's beliefs and explanations.
Man's
language is based (largely) on analogy for explanation. That, in my
view, is a requisite for intelligence (however else defined). To
explain one thing to another person is to form analogies. Analogies are
experiments in communication. If one analogy does not work, then
another has to be tried until some agreement is reached. Analogies are
not sacrosanct, they are possible explanations of events and only
relative to the person to whom you are communicating at the time and
place and circumstances of the event to be explained. They are only
still frames from a whole movie (an analogy, of course!).
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