Reality is whatever you regularly feed your mind, whether you intentionally do so or not.
Do you believe me?
Do you agree that this is what reality is? If not, then you are right. If you agree, then we are both right. And if enough people agree with us, then our beliefs have helped form a collective reality.
The truth has to be capable of being proven before it can be validated as the truth… well, here’s the contradiction – sometimes the truth, even with all the evidence laid before us, still won’t be validated or accepted by some people.
Just like beauty, reality is in the “eye of the beholder”. I knew a teenage girl who had a boyfriend whom no one could see except for her. Since she was the only believer in his existence, does that mean he isn’t real? Does reality operate with “majority rules”?
Perhaps a much more important question to ask ourselves is,
“Can we accept other people’s realities, even if we don’t hold those realities as our own?”
Collective realities can be very dangerous when promoting violence, exclusion of special groups, and harsh judgment on all who don’t share the same beliefs.
Let’s look inward for a moment though. As Earl Nightingale famously said,
“We become what we think about.”
What are some of the things that are constantly running through your mind? It may take deeper self-reflection, but what do you often think about unconsciously as well?
Here’s the beautiful thing about reality – you have some control over it. I’m basically talking about law of attraction here – no, please don’t roll your eyes at me, it’s science! And please don’t roll your eyes at science either – all it does is try to help us by laying out the truth only for extremists to ignore it (which they have every “right” to, but at a dangerous cost).
The law of attraction states, “that you will attract to yourself whatever you put out”.1 I think the most obvious display of the power of our minds that a lot of people can get on board with is when placebos work. When a doctor prescribes a patient a placebo and it works, this just goes to show how powerful someone’s beliefs have on shaping their reality.
As humans, a lot of us operate on faith, faith being a belief in something wholeheartedly even in the absence of proof. Faith has to have a personal relevance to the person who has it though. No one just puts their faith and energies in believing in something that they don’t want to believe.
When a racist believes that another race is somehow lesser than, that has relevance to the racist in some way, whether it’s to inflate their own ego, or whatever else the reason may be.
When a Christian believes in a Savior who died for their sins, that’s relevant to them because it gives them hope of a better life after the constructs of this one fades away.
At the end of the day, when we choose to focus on what we have in common, celebrate our diversity and freedoms, and strive to live harmonious with one another, we can avoid a lot of self-inflicted suffering.
We are all real and complex humans – why not start there?
1 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/is-there-scientific-evide_b_175189