| A Short Essay on Reality Which for All Intents and Purposes is Meaningless and should be Disregarded Slowly realizing around every creature is the world in which they live. This place, their home, is their solace. They live there from birth slowly testing the verity of its differentiation from the organism, slowly judging each intimate structure, carefully analyzing its every detail, and not for one moment doubting. What could it doubt? It’s there is it not? What they experience through sight, touch, smell, taste and sound is undoubtedly there. It must not only be there but must be as they witnessed it. It must be for their senses told them so. It must be because their senses would not lie. For senses do not lie. They do not err. What they observe to exist is real. It is reality. Everything around us is reality. Reality is our world. But no one questions reality. No questions its validity. They take reality as is for if it can be felt it exists and is therefore real. However, they are ignorant and may well be wrong. As they entered the room they saw the archaic bookshelf which housed a myriad of books. Further into its dusty hall they shuffled, and as they were shuffling in they saw a man. After slight contemplation one of them decided to approach it, and then it disappeared. A ghost they thought at first, it was surely an apparition. Later they learned it was simply light reflecting off the dust. They were fooled, but until it was proven that it was just dust they fervently argued that it was a ghost. They thought that because they had experienced it, it was true. Senses can lie. Senses are mistaken. Senses are not infallible. Simply because something is thought to have been experienced does not make it true. Sensing does not make truth. Sensing does not make reality. Reality cannot simply be sensed; there is much more to it than that. The experience felt by individuals thought to be reality is in actuality solely perception. Perception is not reality. Or maybe it’s better said “reality is not perception” for perception is, in a way, reality. You see, what any being perceives is in actuality its perception of reality, which is simply accepted as reality itself. This is obviously inaccurate for perception does not objectively represent reality. Perception is utterly subjective. There is no greater subjective entity extant. What an individual perceives is partially physiological. The chemical systems within them receive and decipher stimuli in ways particular to them. Also, at times, a system is unable to receive the data because it may be of the incorrect type or damage may have been done to the receptor. The system may also have trouble deciphering the message due to physical damage to certain areas or chemical imbalances. Perception can also be effectually distorted by various types of conditioning. Almost any being can be trained to fail to recognize an object, effectively making the object nonexistent (and therefore not real) to that creature. Often, special training is unnecessary since habituation causes organisms to block out persistent innocuous entities. Since perception is not necessarily representative of reality it is inherently false. Hence, perception is an individual’s false reality and is not reality itself. True reality is obstructed by one other entity which I shall name by using the title of a famous work of art, the persistence of memory. Yes, the phenomenon known as memory is the final deterrent of real reality. As soon as one witnesses a scene it is instantly engraved in memory, and for that instant it is of the most pristine quality. After the first instant the image begins to degrade and gradually becomes distorted. And through time the distortions become more distorted resulting in an inaccurate mental record of the event. In this way memory is not persistent. In this way memory falsifies reality. But however non-pervasive memory is in the accumulation of true reality, it is equally persistent in the accumulation of distorted reality. The constant accrual of distorted reality also contributes to the falsifying of real reality. Memory distorts records of reality. Memory retains these fallacies. Memory is the final hindrance of actual reality. The exploration of the various fallacies of reality spawns the question “What truly is reality?” as though the answer was extremely difficult to find. It is quite simple, real reality is the inherent existence of any entity. This innate state of being, naturally, cannot be perceived. It is the objective existence of the entity. It is the state in which it recognizes itself without bearing witness to itself. It is the way it shows itself to itself. This is reality. It cannot be truly experienced by entities other than itself. And even within itself it is difficult to show itself, and therefore know its reality, its truth. Experiencing true reality is impossible. |