[ reality is not a word, dept. ]
It seems that legions of us live at home in our heads, in our ‘current working hypothesis’. In believing that we know, or will know, what’s ‘really going on,’ with more study and effort, yes? Me too, for yonks. 🙂 That’s all well and good enough it seems, for some. For some others, we’re still not yet somehow given to know. To Know. We linger long and long in doubts that seem to multiply. There’s always some kind of battle going on in our head and heart. Seems we’ve spent a lifetime fighting the good fight – to live another day, another way in another life – other than the one we’re living.
And there’s other’s, apparently – perhaps painfully brought to their knees – who happen to notice they were acting, reciting other peoples lies. Still others who glimpse the seduction of their spirit, who see that they got caught up as children in a kind of self assembly, a pretending, a composing of a ‘me’ that’s limited to the mind’s notions (desires and fears) about who we think we are and what we believe reality is. Indeed, thinking, feeling and believing are what makes our world turn with its groans and travails, yes. 🙂
NO PEACE OF MIND IN CONCEPTUAL REALITY
A ‘reality’ the mind – specifically the brain – can only symbolize, re-present and reimagine with concepts – words about words, thoughts about thoughts. Mind is conditioned and binary; it compares and contrasts, sifts and sorts right/wrong, good/bad etc. variously well, but can never conclude – even though it wants to ‘know’ and thinks it can. 🙂
What we are and this is, – pure spirit, aka ‘awareness’ – is unknown because unmeasurable and unknowable; it’s formless, vast and infinite and merely described and hinted at with words like love, peace, beauty. In fact, in reality, we may come to realize we’re not limited to working concepts about it. We may see that “Mind makes a good servant but a poor master”.
REALITY IS NOT WHAT WE THINK IT IS
Indeed, reality is not an idea, not an ideal. Still, often in silence and quietude, we may be graced to ‘know’ it as T S Eliot represented it: “And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.” In choicelessly – mindlessly – exploring that deep unknown, one wonders and delights and is daily visited with a surprisingly relevant and useful thought: “In aware living, you never know.”
Indeed, we’re free to not know; to not need to know. There’s real freedom in constantly learning; it’s – in so many words that barely point – a ‘knowing’ that’s not accumulated like hypothetical knowledge. Reality – what is – is always new, fresh, here and now only. It changes, but That which alertly, lovingly, openly, watches it is changeless. Some of us call that whole thing ‘reality.’ Some say it’s just what’s really happening.
At bottom, reality is not a word, not an idea, not an emotion, not an ideal. Whatever it is, it’s beautiful – just like you, yes. 🙂
Love it all, and be well
