For most purposes there is no such thing as reality, not as far as anyone can effectively define it. But there is the virtual reality and the value of reality models is based on functionality.

How well does your model of reality empower you to deal with things that occur in your life? Manage, not fix. The idea that people have absolute solutions is delusional, nor is any solution so sound as to be universally applicable. But there is something that must be observed, and something that we often break from more than is good for us.

We are inherently social creatures which means we are inherently communicative. The seemingly meaningless small talk that people are forever doing, as well as the corporate interest serving media and political rhetoric, all serve to create an experience that we instinctively subscribe to. To a degree, this unwritten newsletter is functional, and we do need to check in with its reports. This has been called the consensus reality among other things.

Even in the discipline of philosophy where people stretch their intellectual legs as much as possible and consider some very strange things as well as mundane things in strange ways, there is still a definitive need for agreement of terms. Otherwise no meaningful philosophical discussion can happen at all.

There are people who will proudly declare that they are not philosophers. This is a philosophy. A rationale for eschewing any form of conceptual exploration usually because they have an ego investment in some sort of absolute reality model. Every time you speak a single sentence, every speech habit you have, is your philosophy. Any statement you make is one of belief. You chat with someone briefly and say that the weather is nice. That is a philosophical statement. It means you believe in nice days. It also means you believe that some days are not as nice as others.

Are you saying your observation is a philosophy? Yes, because your observation is a process of description.

So we see life through our own eyes? Actually, we see life through our own mouths. Until an experience reaches the level of articulation, it lacks much of what we consider reality. This is why the “unspeakable” is automatically suspect, and if you try to relate something to somebody and discover you can’t, you begin to doubt it yourself. What we see is the hologram created by the interplay between our hearts and minds.

Speaking is validating our experience? Well, speaking is more than validating. For our functional purposes, it’s perceiving. They say seeing is believing, but this isn’t correct, and people see a great many things that they don’t notice or recall in a day. This is so powerful a process that the person talking can forget simple things like what they had for lunch because they were busy talking about something else. You can’t think and chew bubble gum at the same time, to adapt a popular turn of phrase.

And it’s true of everyone, even those who aren’t talking out loud are doing so in their head. You are correct. It doesn’t matter if you are literally talking. Your brain talks on auto-pilot and most people rarely shift it out of gear.

They just filter it more. Analyzing. Yes. The person who always remembers what they ate last is also likely someone who thinks about food when not eating or needing to eat.

Is that why the mind goes blank when someone asks, “What are you thinking about?” That’s correct. The mind doesn’t switch tracks between talking in one way and talking in another. The heart can’t speak with a forked tongue, and the mind can’t speak on one thing at a time. So the whole shift just grinds your mental gears.

So do liars truly believe their lies? They wind up believing them, yes. The liar ultimately outwits themselves. The liar can’t retain knowledge of the truth for very long. They either rehearse their lie really well and forget what they were lying about, or they keep their mind on the truth and cease being able to lie about it.

The dissonance would otherwise break them. It does everyone. In fact, the root of our social mental health problems is not in our intellects. You will find that a great many of the mentally ill are rather clever, even down right sharp. Where their mind breaks is in the language. Their throat center starts taking in a spouting garbage. As they say, garbage in – garbage out. They don’t do it on purpose. They don’t need to. The consensus reality has some serious bugs in it. As Carl Jung said, “Insanity is a sane response to an insane situation.”

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~