REALITY
_________

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!).


Return to CONTENTS page