How to Be Free - the blog: reality

This book is a Get Out of Jail Free card and a passport back into the playground.

The aim of this book is to set you free. But free from what? Free from neurosis. Free from the feeling that you have to obey authority. Free from emotional intimidation. Free from addiction. Free from inhibition.

The key to happiness, mental health and being the most that we can be is absolute and unconditional self-acceptance. The paradox is that many of our problems are caused by trying to improve ourselves, censor our thinking, make up for past misdeeds and struggling with our negative feelings whether of depression or aggression.

But if we consider ourselves in our entirety in this very moment, we know these things :

1. Anything we have done is in the past and cannot be changed, thus it is pointless to do anything else but accept it. No regrets or guilt.

2. While our actions can harm others, our thoughts and emotions, in and of themselves, never can. So we should accept them and allow them to be and go where they will. While emotions sometimes drive actions, those who completely accept their emotions and allow themselves to feel them fully, have more choice over how they act in the light of them.

Self-criticism never made anyone a better person. Anyone who does a “good deed” under pressure from their conscience or to gain the approval of others takes out the frustration involved in some other way. The basis for loving behaviour towards others is the ability to love ourselves. And loving ourselves unconditionally, means loving ourselves exactly as we are at this moment.

This might seem to be complacency, but in fact the natural activity of the individual is healthy growth, and what holds us back from it is fighting with those things we can’t change and the free thought and emotional experience which is the very substance of that growth.

Showing posts with label reality. Show all posts

Wednesday, 20 February 2019

Is Objective Truth Possible?

Surely we are all in denial about something. That's why our social world is so divisive. Partial truths warring against other partial truths. If only some deity would come along and force us to see where we are full of shit. As an unbeliever, perhaps I'm suffering from Apocalypse envy, but sometimes I wish the world could just be blasted with a thunderstorm of incontrovertible truth that would put us all on the same page.

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Wednesday, 29 June 2016

The Hammer or The Key : Exposing the Dictatorship of the Imagined

All of us maintain some kind of relationship between the world as we can perceive it with our five senses and that which we can only imagine.

The approach of science is to study what we can perceive with our senses and deduce from this evidence the laws of nature which cannot be directly perceived but only imagined.

Religious belief often takes the opposite approach. Through our culture we absorb beliefs about something we cannot directly perceive and then allow these beliefs to shape our interpretation of what we can perceive.

I say “often” because religious belief doesn’t always work this way. Some observe the physical world of nature and from its orderly creativity deduce the existence of a deity of some kind. They may add to this perception moral principles derived from observation of nature or society - a direct assessment based on sensory evidence of what produces a harmonious and creative society and what does not.

The relationship between the real and the imagined is a key issue for all of us regardless of our belief system. Every day we make decisions which mediate between the world we can perceive with our senses and that which we can only imagine. If I’m saving up my money to go on a holiday, something imaginary is effecting how I manage my real physical environment. My holiday will be purely imaginary until it occurs.

The imagination is crucial to our existence as creative beings. A healthy relationship to it is one in which it grows like a plant from the soil of our sensory perception of reality. Let it be as wild and prolific in its growth as it wants to be as long as it doesn’t enter into a relationship of hostility to the world of perceptible reality which gave birth to it.

In the extreme, some insist on the submission of the human individual and society generally to the will of a deity who can only be perceived through the use of the imagination. Yet we can all be prone to just such a tendency - trying to make ourselves or others conform to an imaginary vision of how we think things should be.

Love is the alternative to such an approach. Love arises from the forging of connections within perceivable reality. It is improvisational in its nature. It is the creative process through which the potential intrinsic to any social situation realises itself. Thus it cannot be imposed on the basis of a belief in something imagined, but it can be the key to the realisation of that which has previously only been imagined.

When we attempt to make ourselves or others submit to something imagined - be it a deity or a personal ambition or a utopian concept of how the world should be - it is if we are taking a hammer to reality. We are engaging in an act of violence. This is idealism. It is the root of all evil.

What we need is not a hammer with which to shape reality but a key to unlock its intrinsic potential.

When we gather information and seek understanding we are using a key. When we open ourselves up to listen to those with whom we have been in conflict and engage in civilised debate with them we are using a key. When we accept ourselves as we are as a basis for healthy growth, rather than trying to force ourselves to conform to something we imagine, we are using a key. The path of the open mind is the path of the key. The path of equal communication is the path of the key. Love is the path of the key.

It is easy to become confused by all of the conflict in the world. The tendency is to chose sides. By so doing we can find ourselves committing complimentary mistakes. We can end up becoming more like that against which we fight.

A wiser approach is not to look for right or wrong sides in a conflict but to look for creative or destructive strategies. On either side of any conflict we might find those who use the hammer and those who use the key. If we seek the people of the key and shun the people of the hammer, regardless of their allegiance, then we will be moving towards real solutions to the problems we face.

Saturday, 16 April 2016

Is Reality Real? - From Plato's Cave to The Matrix

For more vintage movie theatre photos visit the Old Wolf.

A philosopher walks into a cinema that is showing a very old soft porn movie.

“This is not reality!” he shouts, pointing at the screen.

Then he casts his fiery glance around the audience with their eyes fixed on the screen.

“You’re just sitting in the dark watching the shadows of dead people pretending to fuck,” he points out.

He starts trying to tell them about the world outside the cinema and what sunshine is like.

The audience members tell him to shut up so they can hear the movie.

He grabs one of them and tries to drag him out of the cinema. The patron puts up a hell of a fight.

Eventually the usher arrives and throws the philosopher out into the street.

This is the essence of Plato’s famous cave analogy from his dialogue The Republic. Since they didn’t have cinemas in 380 BC when Plato was writing he had to resort to talking about people being tied down in a cave while watching the shadows cast on a wall by clay figures being moved back and forth in front of a fire.

What did Plato mean by saying that what we think of as reality is not reality?

Plato believed in a world of ideal forms of which the details of the world we can perceive with our senses are a poor copy. Numbers and geometrical shapes are examples of ideal forms. And he also believed in an ethical ideal which he referred to as the Form of the Good.

So the cave analogy seems to be saying that what we take to be real blinds us to what is ideal.

We could see the cave analogy as a bit of a confidence trick. If the ideal forms exist only in the imagination, maybe we are really outside the cinema living in the real world and he is trying to persuade us to go into the cinema to watch a movie called Ideal Forms (not a bad title for a soft porn flick.)

Sometimes a symbol is so powerful that it transcends the ideology of the person who gives expression to it. I think this is true of the cave analogy.

Plato’s cave helped to inspire the 1999 science fiction film The Matrix. Here it turns out that humans are living in a simulated reality while actually being used as bioenergy batteries by parasitic machines. The hero Neo is given an choice to swallow a red pill which will enable him to see reality or a blue one which will allow him to go back to the illusory world.

Laurence Fishburne from The Matrix

This has provided a powerful metaphor to conspiracy theorists, libertarians, anarchists, and other critics of “the dominant paradigm.” The world is full of red pill pushers.

Is there a sense in which the world we take to be real is not real? Is there a reason such ideas resonate with us?

I think it may be helpful to turn Plato on his head. What keeps us from seeing reality is that we are blinded by abstract forms.

Here is an example. I love the sight of a beautiful woman. Am I really seeing the woman? She is a living organism performing a vast variety of functions. She is an ecosystem within which live a multitude of other living things. She is a conscious entity alive with emotions, memories, thoughts and desires. She was once an egg and a sperm. One day she will be dust. Her beauty blinds me to much of this. Only as I become desensitised to it somewhat do I see more. What am I seeing when I see her beauty? What we call beautiful in a woman is generally that which gives a youthful appearance. When we were young we were free of the bitterness or egotism which blocks love. So beauty is a symbol for love. So I’m blinded to the reality by an idea - the idea of love.

All the time we project and we filter. The world we see around us is a world distorted by our needs. We will see those things which serve to boost our insecure ego and we will block out those which might threaten it.

This is particularly true if we are believers in a dogma. We maintain our belief by concentrating on that which appears to support it and evading that which contradicts it. This is known as confirmation bias.

So how can we leave the cinema and live in the real world?

We need to have a secure ego. The ego is the conscious thinking self. We put down “ego” because our ego is usually insecure and thus embattled and thus a barrier to love and truth. But our conscious thinking self can become secure enough to go wide-eyed and naked in the world.

If we don’t become secure then we may take someone’s red pill only to find that they have led us from one Matrix into another. We may be woken up to how we have been a slave of capitalism only to find ourselves a slave of socialism. We are in the cinema because it makes us feel secure. Unless we learn to provide our own security, the best we will be able to do is to go from a cinema showing one kind of a movie to one showing another.

We cultivate our own security of ego by practicing unconditional self-acceptance. Our insecurity comes from being at war with our self, feeling we need to try to control our thoughts or our emotions. We don’t need to think the right thoughts or feel the right feelings. All of us are a mess of contradictions, but when we allow ourselves to be such without judgement, a deeper and truer integrity gradually forms.

The sunshine which lights the world outside the cinema is love. Love is really being with others, not just with the forms our embattled ego needed to project onto them.