If we want to know what reality is, perhaps we need to forget everything we have learned about what it is? Perhaps we need to divest ourselves of everything we have been told about it? This means questioning all the conditioning / brainwashing that the society we live in has overlayed on us. It means questioning the status quo where we are or have been brought up, and it means questioning our own gurus and teachers - the ones we have persued to find gleanings of what reality is.
Breaking through the dogma and hypnotic influence of the society we live in is surely important in our quest to know what reality is? Time and place can fix our minds, such that we become unable to appreciate or respect other times and places.
Anything and everything that we believe ... must surely be put into question, in our search for reality? Surely we must question all our assumptions. Our beliefs can fix us in a sort of “virtual reality machine” of our own mind’s making.
One of the key tasks of finding and knowing reality, seems to be learning how to stay open and flexible in our thinking - and perhaps not coming to too many conclusions about it. Let us not forget that an elephant looks quite different from different perspectives - depending on how close or distant we are from it, or at what angle we view it from, how big or small we are, and so on. Defining and describing anything is always “according to a particular perspective”, and in the case of some-thing that is not a “thing”, not an object, at all, the number of possible perspectives must surely be infinite?
So, when we hear someone talking about what it is like “in the real world”, or when we hear scientists and would-be experts, gurus and the like banging on about “reality”, or how to find reality, or how to define it, maybe it is the time to laugh. Some words become meaningless simply because so many people use them to try to define “the impossible to define”. So whatever reality is, let us just be open to it, and not try to capture it directly in words. It may be so much more ... or less, than we could ever imagine.
(16 May 2022)
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