Reality
Last night, after dinner, a friend and I went back to the house, lit the fire and the candles, and we"talked". I put on the always haunting Nick Drake. I am always amazed at the way the same reality can be interpreted in such different ways. The mystic in me knows that reality is subjective...that the Observer is the Observed. But the engineer in me has a real problem letting go of the notion that there is an objective reality out there that can be described rather accurately and that once described, can be manipulated and managed in some rational and productive way.
This morning, I pulled out a book by Don Miguel Ruiz, who is a pop shaman writer, probably mostly famous for the Four Agreements.
I began reading in the seventh chapter of the Mastery of Love, intitled the Dream Master.
It goes:
Every relationship in your life can be healed, every realionship can be wonderful, but it always is going to begin with you. You need to have the courage to use the truth, to talk to yourself with the truth, to be completely honest with yourself. Perhaps you don't have to be honest with the whole world, but you can be honest with yourself. Perhaps you cannot control what is going on around you, but you can control your own reactions. Those reactions are going to guide the dream of your life, your personal dream. Its your reactions that make you so unhappy or make you so happy.
You are responsible for the conseqences of what ever you do, think, say, and feel. You can control your personal dream by making choices. You have to see if you like the consequences of your choices or not. If it's a consequence that you enjoy, the keep doing what you are doing.
But if you don't like what is happening in your life, if you aren't enjoying your dream, then try to find out what is causing the consequences you don't like.
This is the way to transform your dream.
The way we learn to dream is a set up.
With all the beliefs we have that nothing is possible, it's hard to escape the Dream of Fear. In order to awake from the Dream, you need to master the Dream.
That is why the Toltec created the Mastery of Transformation, to break free of the old Dream and to create a new dream where everything is possible, including escaping from the Dream.
In the Mastery of Transformation, the Toltec divide people into Dreamers and Stalkers. The Dreamers know that the dream is an illusion, and they play in that world of illusion, knowing it's an illusion.
The Stalkers are like a tiger, or a jaguar, stalking every action and reaction.
You have to stalk your reactions; you have to work yourself every moment. It takes a lot of time and courage, because its easier to take things personally and react the way you always react. These reactions may only generate more emotional poison and increase the drama.
If you control your reactions, you will find that soon you are going to see, meaning to perceive things as they really are. The mind normally perceives things as they really are, but because of all the programming, all the beliefs we have, we make interpretations of what we perceive, of what we hear, and mainly of what we see.
There is a big difference between seeing the way people see the Dream,
and seeing without judgement,
as it is.
"There is no worse blind man, than the one who doesn't want to see."
Religions say that when humans were created,
that God gave us "free will".
This is true, but the Dream took it away from us and kept it.
because the Dream controls the will of most humans.
We can awake from the Dream.
And create our own dream.
posted by oZ @ 2:02 PM
6 Comments:
miguel is one of my favorites, but I wonder if the piece you quoted actually applies to the subjective/objective question you pose?
I'm going to take a guess at what this is about--- you are having difficulty understanding "what women want"...
that may be true, but that is not what this is about.
this is about the nature of our respective realities, and how subjective the objective can be. or at least I thought it was.
Nick Drake is one my favorites too.
jeesh, reality is as real as real can be. this subjective crap is just that crap.
The word “reality” is derived from the roots “thing” (res) and “think” (revi). The world “realm” refers to any region, sphere, domain, province or territory, esp. of a specified ruling “power” or “force” that has some quality, state, or other essence. ‘Real’ means to exist within a realm. Reality refers to all that is perceived to exist within a realm. Hence “reality” literally means for us “everything you can perceive and think about (i.e. quite specifically and carefully, ALL that your mind makes real for you)”.
“Reality” is thus what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our experience and perceptions (which are trained and aspectual). What we experience and perceive depends upon what we look for (which is trained and usually reductive). What we look for depends upon what we think (which is culturally trained, and in the West reductively analytical). Hence what we think depends upon what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality. The central axis of this process is “what we (or our tools) look for and what we/they think” (which is trained/engineered). And neither our training nor our engineering have even begun to encompass the realm in which we exist.
Which means we can change our reality, literally, from the inside out. And for all practical purposes the possibilities within our realm are unlimited. Imagination is the limit. Again, "Reality" is whatever is perceived to exist within a realm. What is "real" (to someone, or to some instrument, or to some observer) is whatever is perceived or experienced by them/it within the realm that they/it exist within. The observation is that there are MANY realms and those we do not experience or perceive we do not register as "real" or as reality to us. Our "reality" is not the only reality (within the same realm), and our realm is not the only realm. Some realms overlap, some embrace and include others, many interpenetrate, and many do not overlap.
All realities (and the realms that contain or express them) are organised (in-formation) energy. If, for example, there are worlds/peoples, i.e. organised energies, at frequencies a dozen octaves beyond our present utmost abilities to detect such frequencies, they will not be "real" or a reality for us.
This will be true even though they may, even in OUR "physical" terms, interpenetrate us; just the same way complex high-frequency organized energy signals, such as mobile phone traffic, television broadcasts, and synthetic radar etc. interpenetrate us; and just as in the same way WE do not see or sense these signals - (except through specially engineered agreements such as with mobile handsets built to agreements (standards) and tested to function and conform with such agreements).
You are correct Anonymous in saying that "reality is as real as real can be". That's simply a truism of the realm one exists in. "Subjectivity" though, is always the point of view of an observer, and what present day quantum mechanics physics demonstrates, and is more and more clearly seen in our everyday experience, is that our previously thought view of an objective and a subjective world is illusory.
What John von Neumann (one of the founders of quantum mechanics and the originator of quantum logic) saw was this: A state of being is an experience. A description of a state of being is a symbol. Symbols and experiences do not follow the same rules. In 1936, John von Neumann, along with Garrett Birkhoff, published a paper that, in laying the grounds for quantum logic disproved the universality of both classical Aristotelian logic and its modern symbolic form, which until then had been accepted without question as a natural reflection of the nature of reality. The rules that symbols follow they called classical logic. The rules experience follows they called quantum logic.
You say "this subjective crap is just that crap". Yet according to quantum mechanics (and thus the theories responsible for all our semiconductor goods such as radar, TV, computers, et al), there is NO such thing as objectivity. We cannot eliminate ourselves from the picture. We are a part of nature, and when we study nature there is no way around the fact that nature is studying itself. Quantum mechanics tells us clearly that it is not possible to observe reality without changing it. Literally.
Further, quantum theory not only is closely bound to philosophy, but, also - and this is becoming increasingly apparent - to theories of perception. As Carl Jung's friend, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Wolfgang Pauli put it: "From an inner centre the psyche seems to move outward, in the sense of an extraversion, into the physical world...If these men are correct, then physics is the study of the structure of consciousness." It's gradually turning out that the 'objective crap' is the crap.
Q’ai Gon, a Jedi master in the Star Wars movie 'Revenge of the Clones' remarks about the Force: “Your focus determines your reality.” Quantum mechanics experiments now evidence this observation as a repeatable experimental truth at all macroscopic scales and levels.
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