I often refer to Reality and reality in my writing—it’s just a shorthand to relay objective and subjective meanings of the concept of reality. But there’s the rub: conceptual. The way we think about things frames our world as we appear to experience it; we can never exit our brains and experience anything truly “objectively”. Now there’s the real rub—there IS NO objective reality, in a sense.
However.
I use those two terms (Reality and reality) to differentiate between what’s Actually Happening and our interpretation of what’s happening.
I continually come back to what Byron Katie expressed regarding a scenario in which her daughter is out late at night and Katie, sitting at home waiting for her, is worried—what might be happening? A drunk driver may hit her car! She may be lying dead in the street! etc.
That’s “reality”. Katie’s subjective reality.
But what’s REALLY happening? She asks.
What’s really happening is that a woman is sitting in a chair.
That’s Reality.
Our brains are story-spinning machines; they make things make sense. These wondrous hat-rack-organs deftly craft narratives, fill in blanks, create gestalts—that we subsequently mistake for Reality.
Among other things, that’s just what brains do. Without this, we couldn’t operate in the world. But if we’re (I know, who is WE? I’m getting there) aware that that’s what the brain does, and that it might not always be perceiving accurately, we can somewhat take that into account (with selfsame brain?—I’ll also address this in a sec) and at least make some corrections and adjustments.
How do we do that?
Come back, bring the attention back from reality (the reality that your brain is creating) and focus on what is actually happening—Byron Katie-it: I’m sitting in a chair at my desk and I’m typing on my laptop. The dehydrator is humming. My dog is sighing. My upper back is a bit sore. Etc.
It’s the age-old tried and true anti-anxiety technique—bring yourself out of your head and into your awareness of physical sensations: what I call “feel the steering wheel” i.e., stop making up stories and then believing them. It’s actually something we have the ability to do.
If I’m thinking something freak-outish, my body is going to react to that as if it is Reality and prepare for the worst, cortisol, cortisol, cortisol, whatever whatever…which is detrimental to my health.
Also
If I’m thinking something freak-outish, I’m missing out on what’s actually happening HERE. Maybe my daughter is talking to me, needing my attention, but I’m trapped in a brain-spin loop about what someone said to me over text a minute ago…which is detrimental to my body, my brain AND my daughter and my relationship with her.
I see massive benefits to coming back to What’s Happening Now, OUTSIDE of my head.
While we cannot possibly ever truly exit our own brains and their complex compilations of neurological wizardry that also create the perceptual world (Reality) as we know it, and we never know if what we think of as “shared reality” is experienced in the same way by any two people (BK in fact says, “No two people have ever met”), or digging deeper, what is Actually (Reality), in this physical form, underneath the apparent illusion of separateness (we know there is a part of the brain that creates the illusion of separation and when it is damaged, we don’t experience a sense of separation), we can, by process of elimination, at least conclude that what we may be thinking is not, at least always, Reality.
**Yes that was one sentence and I’m okay with it, Kevin.**
Or CAN we exit our brains?? Remove our attention? Does our attention originate in our brain?? What is attention? Were we ever IN our brain in the first place?? Who is WE?
More in a moment.
Sorry to tell you, but you’re clearly not going to get out of this post alive.
Ahem. To come back to What is Happening Now (which might be that my brain is creating a story that you don’t like me because you haven’t responded to my email—which we all know may or may not be the case—we don’t know until we “reality-check”—which should be called shared-reality-check—with the other person), and step back into observing that, affords us a space to come out of the story and into at least something more Real, and less unreal.
Why?
In further explication of my freak-out examples…because when we’re fully engulfed in unreality (fantasizing, reminiscing, worrying), while these may serve us in some ways at some times (escape, stress reduction, visioning for future action, planning), we need to have a firm understanding that it is not Reality—so that we understand we can USE those actions, or INDULGE in them by choice, but that we can also instantly abandon them, recognize them for what they are, and readjust our awareness to HERE.
Everything everything always always comes back to this: HERE.
Here here. Hear here. See hear. See and hear HERE.
Here is all there is. There is never anything else. Thinking about past and future is just that: THINKING about past and future in the NOW. It’s still happening, but it’s a distant cousin of Reality…it’s at least once-removed.
Perhaps our experience of Reality is on a spectrum. Of course it is.
I’m not saying we should never think about past or future—obviously not only is this generally not possible (except in death, brain death, coma, and deep meditation—our brains think, period), I’m saying we would do well to realize that’s what it is: thinking, and that the content of this, by definition, is not What is Happening Now (except in my head). Again, fantasy of all types is sometimes useful, sometimes necessary, but often detrimental.
Physically, I am always HERE. My body is always NOW. If it wasn’t, I would die. It couldn’t be the incredibly accurate self-monitoring, homeostatic organism that it is. My brain? Useful in the extreme, but limited, at least in reference to thought, in its scope of application.
I can always come back to awareness of what’s happening NOW in my body (including the activity of my brain) to gain some perspective and often some physical regulation and thus mental ease and engagement with my environment=Real Life.
As opposed to fake-life I’m creating in my head. None of this makes sense when you get down to it. Atomic level, things are not as they seem…
But let’s just keep following the white rabbit for just another minute; it’s fun, a little scary. Where might he be going? Why is he wearing that vest and looking at that watch?? How will I get back to Dinah???
Isn’t it interesting that there is so clearly an awareness of both the body and the brain-thoughts? That we can somehow observe the existence and activity of both from somewhere else? ISness. Awareness of ISness, IMHO, is what it is to be HUMAN.
This is a simplistic discussion and breakdown. Obv there are other factors (who thinks the thought? Does thought have much at all to do with decision making? How do we know anything is Real at all? And on and on.) I’m just talking about this here in this way in reference to how we experience our lives, which, for those of you who, like myself, have the worst FOMO on my Actual Life, might be of some value (by the way, I think missing out ACTUALLY happens when we spend tons of time thinking about what Actual Life IS and how we can NOT miss it (laugh-cry emoji)…that said, I think nailing down the basics of how I want to experience it is at least somewhat useful—but that could just be another narrative—all I know is I seem to enjoy it).
I bolded “I” and “think” as these are just examples of concepts we don’t actually know anything about. But this is Life. What is Life???
Insane yet???
Is it Reality that I’m writing to you about these things?
Yes. In the sense that we understand Reality.
I’m here typing. That’s Reality. Is what I’m WRITING to you about Reality, Reality? It’s reality that there are words on the screen, but, as much as I’d like to think otherwise, everything else is conceptual—although I can discuss Reality, and the fact that that is happening is Reality. But I’m just spilling out onto the page what my brain is spinning up. Narrative? Story? Truth?
Decide for yourself.
Hey there, your crazy seems to match mine, almost anyway. I’ll dig a little deeper. Check out some of my “writings” if you find time. Caution though, we are positively MAD in this here and now.
Yes... it seems it's all one entire sentence. *sigh*
...but is it really?