What is reality?

This is going to be a bit of a mindf*ck

Apr 18, 2023

I’m going to ask you to read the following piece from the point of your experience not your conceptual understanding of the world. For example, if I ask you to think of the World, you can conceptualise it but in terms of experience, you can’t experience the entire world. The only thing you experience is your perception of where you are here and now.

So the only thing you know for sure is what you experience and everything else is just a belief/concept/story. If it still seems a bit confusing, strap in.

What one finds during meditation

Although it feels as if we’re agents of our own experience, what you find if you do insight meditation long enough, is that things are just appearing.

For example, tune in to any sound in your environment now. Are you producing the sound? Are you able to stop the sound? That car that just went by, did you have anything to do with hearing that sound? Are you able to make it last any longer than it does? It came and it went without you ‘doing’ anything aka it appeared.

The same goes for your thoughts. You can tune in for some time and it appears as if you’re producing your thoughts but most of the time your thoughts are just automatic appearances in consciousness you take yourself to be the producer of.

That’s the nature of our experience. A person walks into the room and they appear in our consciousness. When they walk out, they disappear from our consciousness. As far as your experience is concerned, things are appearing and disappearing without you doing anything. Even when you close your eyes, darkness appears. You’re not producing the darkness, it’s appearing in consciousness.

What we actually perceive

We don’t experience the actual world but receive data from the senses, and the brain produces the experience for us. So the five senses (smell, touch, vision, hearing, taste) and the brain act as buffers between us and reality. This means that we have never experienced the real reality, only our perception of the real world (one could even argue whether there’s such a thing as real world given that no one has experienced it outside of their five senses?).

So if we never experience the real world and our experience of reality is interpreted by a piece of meat in our skull how can we say that we know what objective reality is? How can we say that anything beyond our experience is real if we’ve never seen anything outside of our experience to verify that there’s the ‘real’ reality out there?

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So we could say anything that is beyond our experience is a belief.

Far-fetched, I know. But Rima, there are objective facts that science told us about like the Universe is real and it’s full of black holes and ever-expanding. But it’s a story about how the Universe functions not a fact. It’s belief. Have you ever seen the Universe? Like the entire thing. Have the scientists seen the entire Universe? No, bro. They saw a teenie-tiny piece of it through a telescope (due to the way light travels in space, that’s forever looking into the past btw) and then mathematically deducted some knowledge about it but none of them has seen the actual thing.

This isn’t to say that scientists are wrong per se. My point is, no human being can really know reality because of the built-in nature of the mind. So everything we engage in on a collective level, like science is a story rather than real reality. If you can’t perceive anything outside of your perception what makes you think others (scientists) can? I know, I’m insane. Or am I?

Consensus reality

The reality we all live in is a consensus reality aka we agreed or observed those things to be true rather than them actually being true. We can’t know if they’re true. We can theorise, conceptualise, and deduct, but we don’t know.

A thought experiment: if all humans were to disappear from the Earth right now, would there still be reality? The answer is: we don’t know. We can guess and philosophize but we don’t know because none of us would be there to check.

The only reality you can know (not believe) as real is the one you experience. If you try to walk through a wall and can’t (and others report to you that they can’t too) this doesn’t mean it’s an objective reality, it just means we all share the experience of not being able to walk through the wall (ok, I’m taking this too far now and will leave this for another article but physicality of course, exists).

Ok, what’s the point of this?

This a legit question to ask. Isn’t this line of thinking just mental masturbation?

Well if I know that the only real reality is the one I experience and what we collectively call objective reality is a collective belief, maybe we all dream our individual reality into existence? Everyone automatically creates their own reality based on their past experiences and how they’re wired.

To clarify, I’m not saying that you can create a reality where you start flying or get run over by a bus and still live. We are constrained by the physicalness of things, of course. But on an experiential level, we can create our own reality.

Let me remind you again that we experience the world through the 5 senses which send data to our brain stored in the darkroom (skull) not directly interacting with the world yet producing the experience of the world. Our brain is malleable (as per neuroscience) and offers a view of the world based on our underlying assumptions. This would suggest that by changing our assumptions and sensory input (5 senses) we could create a different perception (aka reality).

Conclusion

But we can’t change all of our sensory inputs and assumptions. We can change some of it but not all of it. So what's left if thoughts, emotions, sounds, sensations and things just appear in consciousness?

If the only thing that we ever interact with is what’s appearing in our consciousness is it fair to say that as far as experience is concerned, our personal reality happens in consciousness, not in the objective reality we imagine to inhabit?

So, consciousness is what’s left as the only real thing in the Universe. Everything else is a dream.