Realination

Day for day every living creature has to face reality in order to survive. We have to deal and interact with the world surrounding us, with the world perceived through our senses. But the senses only deliver the raw data that our minds then process and assess. Without being aware of it, our minds filter out the greater part of information to avoid being overwhelmed with futilities. Our minds also interpret what we see, hear, feel, smell and taste, so that what we perceive fits into our logic, into our view of life. There’s no need, nor room for conscious thought in all this.

The individual mind is complex. Not one seems to be like the other. So how can the reality of one mind be the same reality as that of another mind? Isn’t it impossible unless there exists something that could be called the absolute, the ultimate or the objective reality that would be the same for everybody? The problem is that there is no way that allows us ever to find out because our individual minds are always involved. Without a mind there’s no perception, just biochemical and electrical activity of organic tissue. A computer doesn’t perceive, it processes data and that’s it.

My conclusion is that the last reality is completely out of our reach, outside our sphere. Without perception we might still be there, but we wouldn’t know. If there’s no mind, there can be no consciousness of a self existing in a given frame of space and time. As a child I wondered if sleep didn’t just transfer me into another life that was mine too although in a world following different rules. My dreams during the night were no less real to me than my life during the day. Some dreams still feel very real, while I find some real events hard to believe. So what if all life were just a dream?

Many great philosophers asked the same question ever again during the past millennia and tried to answer it with scientific logic and accuracy. To me it isn’t important if this life is a dream or not. It isn’t important to know if we exist in an absolute reality or just in an imagined one. We see, hear, feel, smell and taste. We act and react. We love and hate. In a nutshell: we are living our lives. The reality of our minds, filtered and adapted according to previous experience and sociological background, is all we have for sure. The individual realination must suffice for a lifetime.