The sun sets on another day…
The sky was so clear that the pure white edge of night became darkness with nary a change except the slowly fading oranges falling away to gray. It was still stunning and I smiled at it all.
I had a discussion recently about reality. We were discussing concepts and ideas about how we perceive the world including time, space, and the essence of what we are. The fall colors were here, and I loved the contrasts as the night closed in.
Along the way I introduced a few things that were about as foreign as a Martian scrambling across the Sahara Desert. The idea that the construct of reality is in our mind and if our mind believes in something else it can be as real as what we experience in our day-to-day life.
Of course that turned into a debate. There’s always something out there that straddles along the edge and makes you want to believe that everything is based on our five senses and nothing else. I was amazed.
After all, our five senses do not necessarily reflect reality. Our five senses can be so easily deceived and if we use that as a measure for our success and our ability to perceive what is real and what is not, it can easily be removed from our point of view.
Somewhere in the back of my mind there is a television show called perception. In that show the main character is so intelligent that when he is trying to visualize concepts he ends up speaking to visit his visible only to him and in the process thinks through a variety of solutions that he might not see if he didn’t have that hallucination running in front of him. It is real to him, but it doesn’t exist anywhere else.
That reminds me of a memory. When I was 5 years old I got a fever and it was up to 103.5. I was burning up and I remember clearly tossing and turning and trying to understand what was going on in my life. At that point I didn’t really have a concept of life but I did have a concept of reality. As I was in my bed I looked to the window and saw a series of bright lights, like buttons, climbing out through the window into my room. It walked towards me and as it was walking towards me I was hearing voices. Not just one or a hundred but thousands of voices at once and all of those voices were telling me different things. The strange part is in the dream I remembered Discerning them all and now, almost 60 years later, I only remember a few dozen abstract thoughts that were everything from why am I so hungry to did you see that. All of it was unique but that day I remember with clarity.
It’s funny how things like that work. I find myself thinking back to different things and different parts of my life and reviewing times that I shouldn’t be able to remember. Sometimes the memories are good, sometimes they’re not. Always, it is interesting.
I remember that that day the voices were real, the button person coming to me was real, and I never saw everything exactly the same again. Whatever happened that night was just another part in a series of changes in my life, and I found myself feeling pretty amazing and enjoying it all.
Do you ever get stuck in a memory? Do you ever find yourself questioning the reality around you? When you do, how do you verify what’s real? Do you have a method?
So as the sun sets on another day, I hope the world is real to you. I hope you find a way to feel and see and know everything around you. Mostly I hope that no matter how you perceive the world that you have an amazing day, everyday, no matter what.
Sleep sweet, love life, and live strong…