The Conundrum of ‘Reality’
Which should keep us reveling in the wonder of it all
On ‘reality’
Everything you can imagine is real. Pablo Picasso
Everything — I repeat — everything is a state of mind.
All perception arising in a human’s brain — the consciousness if you will — is what the human imagines, notices, and thinks about the noticed things.
All of that complicated stuff bundled together is the human’s reality.
It’s what an individual calls as “the world” even.
We quickly transcend from personal to universal scope. Very quickly, throwing caution to the wind in fact. I feel it’s hilarious, because this is who we are —
You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.
― Alan Watts
Such is our audacious faith in our puny knowledge about something we know and accept to be infinite and omnipresent. The irony.
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.
― Albert Einstein
A thinking man wants to argue whether there’s any objective reality at all?
Everything manifesting inside our thinking heads — is a direct effect of what we imagine, notice, perceive, and ruminate on. Thoughts, feelings, emotions, biases.
So much of our realities are imagined.
Our perception becomes our reality. What we refer to when we mean our truths. The facts that we know of and acknowledge. The heady cocktail of information and bias we create unwittingly in our waking hours.
You and I, we are individuals with wildly different truths. What we call as our worlds and our lives.
It is said that ‘thoughts become things’ in the same way imagination creates reality. This is actually an amazing driver for positive self-affirmation.
Believe something and the Universe is on its way to being changed. Because you’ve changed, by believing. Once you’ve changed, other things start to follow. Isn’t that the way it works?
― Diane Duane, So You Want to Be a Wizard
Each individual colours their own ‘real world’ in personal flavours.
There’s your truth, and there’s my truth, and none of us have any clue about the universal truth.
Think about what you consider as your world, or the world in general —
It’s your opinions, coupled with some others’ that you get to know of and then choose to accept or reject, plus few natural facts. Like the earth is a big lump of rock floating in a dark void lit up by some stars and light from somewhere the creation started.
And if you think about this ‘fact’ hard enough, it is actually the scientific community’s opinion with veritable proofs to the extent they’ve been able to spread their scope of investigation and powers of deduction. And many of us have chosen to trust the principles of science and the truths it unveils.
Philosophically, it still remains a subjective fact.
I think the point of life is not to get lost in rigorous demystification of everything around us.
We can, with our feeble intellect, boil down any astronomical feature of this grand cosmos to a blah Physics fact. The way I casually mentioned that life on a bluish boulder floating in hostile, infinite void as a mere fact is a case in point. Yawn. Boring outlook much?
This demystification doesn’t amp up our experience in this roller coaster of a journey.
It doesn’t help explain the philosophical implications of our astronomically impossible existence.
It doesn’t tickle our sense of wonder, which in turn catalyses our hope.
It’s nice to be objective-minded, but not always. It’s subjectivity which hands us our powers of imagination.
I think, that the point of life is to stay in awe of the possibilities, and more importantly, the present.
We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.
― Ray Bradbury
There’s boundless enrichment in reveling in the wonders all around us, courtesy the omnipresent nature.
There’s a beautiful song composed by the enigmatic world poet, Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali polymath, that touches this uplifting topic with absolute reverence. Here’s my weak but brave attempt at translation:
Get out of your head, and stand outside,
You will feel the rhythm of the universe in your heart.
This immense wave rising up — let it dance on your floor,
Let your whole being resonate with it.
Do sit, bumblebee — take a seat in this blue cosmos
Smeared with golden pollen of the resplendent rays.
Where there is abundant recess — spread those two wings of yours,
You’ll find freedom amongst everyone, everything.
Nature really compels us, I think, to stay childlike in our awe of the universe. It just shows us, whenever we are receptive and sensitive enough to really perceive it — that we’re miracles that are incredibly alive at this point of time.
You and I. Fantastic serendipities.
All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it’s pretty damn complicated in the first place.
― Douglas Adams
It’s healthy for our souls to stay young.
To be in awe of the unsurmountable, colossally inexplicable universe around us.
To keep our minds aired and sunlit.
Let’s try to live with this state of mind. Instead of being a bunch of no-good, insistently unimaginative, inflexible grumblers.
Everything — I repeat — everything is a state of mind. Let’s cultivate the abundance mindset.
And hardly any better guide to help with it than nature, I believe.
Nita Bajoria (The Leap)
Shangri-La is a state of mind... If you’re happy, then everything around you will be okay and in harmony. Nothing is perfect anywhere. We must find our own paradise amidst the chaos. Just the way a beautiful lotus blooms in dirty water.
