Opinion
The Unrealities of Reality
How come he died like that? How come a train could hit a human?
How come that father had to hold the severed corpse of his child?
How come all this has been happening throughout the world, throughout the ages?
Does all this seem real to you? Isn’t there always the tinge of the unreal accompanying all the cruelties of reality as if an ungodly of all the nightmares?
But sadly, we get to see and experience all this in the very reality that we live in, breathe in, and hold so dear to ourselves.
The reality in which we love the dear ones we have. And, then, lose them at times. Many of us, sometimes.
How? Why?
How could reality be so unflinchingly unreal in the types of cruelties that it inflicts on living beings?
Not humans only.
I can’t even imagine the types of unrealities other living beings like stray dogs, cats, and farm animals have to go through in most parts of the world.
I’m terming these as unrealities because these intense moments of extravagant suffering are the ones that seem most unreal to me.
The highest levels of joy and peace even seem very much real. But I can’t make myself understand how that extent of cruelty can exist in reality and existence.
Maybe it is the faithful believer of goodness in me that subconsciously refuses to believe these cruel realities and produces the tinge of unreal feelings associated with them.
But if all this mind-blowing bullshit is unreal, then so is the experienced peace, bliss, and happiness.
Where’s the blurred line between real and unreal?
Is reality real?
Is unreal real?
Is everything real?
Or is everything unreal?
I can live with the good parts of life being not real, but can’t live with the mindless cruelty being real.
Life has to be a dreamlike scenario. The word simulation or projection is all the rage now, even in the scientific communities.
Then, there’s the philosophic idea of reality being inside the mind of God.
Just like we think and imagine all the myriads of worlds and forms in our minds, God is also thinking and imagining us and all the other forms and worlds that are in existence.
It’s just because the thoughts, forms, and everything else are in God’s mind, everything is living on its own as well.
But even then, no matter how unreal all this is, it still feels real, very much real, and is real to the beings going through all these experiences.
And no amount of tomfoolery can justify this much torture.
Indian philosophies say that God itself turned itself into existence and all the forms and beings there are.
God is playing around with existence, experiencing all the infinite experiences itself through you and me, that cat and dog, and the amoeba and bacteria. So, it’s It that is subjecting itself to all this mindless torture.
The sage argues that we can’t blame It (God), us, or anybody else for this sorry state of stuff.
This, as well, kinda feels a bit bonkers to me. Why does God have to be so masochistic?
But there are so many things that I don’t know. Maybe all the experiences, no matter how bad, have a place in the infinite symphony of experiences God has set about to experience.
Maybe someday it will all make sense. But that day certainly seems far when the stings of suffering still feel so unreally real!
