This Is a Reality Trip

Be agnostic about everything.

I am gentle with reality. I am aware that even our best science is not even sure what reality is. I still respect reality, I’m just not sure if my sense of it is accurate. While we certainly have our perceptions about reality and what it means to us, science has built instruments to see more clearly what reality is, and I’m not even sure if what our instruments tell us about reality is consistent with our experience. I know enough about science to know that what we call reality is really just something that our brain constructs to make sense of what is around us.

So I’m agnostic about everything. I have tried to build and use beliefs, but beliefs are disappointing. Beliefs build expectations, and expectations lead to disappointments. So I shed every belief that doesn’t work for me. I test every theory I might have about people, places, and things to see if they fit, to see if they work for me. Anything that doesn’t work for me gets tossed. I take what I like and I leave the rest behind me.

It’s easy to get caught up in the news, the predictions, the prognostications, and the pronouncements. The fact of the matter is that whatever we read is almost purely subjective, written from a particular frame of reference, a particular point in time, with limited knowledge of the events at hand. It’s almost as if the universe was designed by nature to require us to collaborate in order to make sense of it.