Posts tagged Senses

Reality is subjective. What is real for us is not necessarily real for someone else.

We might consider reality to be truth, but the same principle would apply, and our truth is not always going to be the truth of another.

Reality is what we know from our own personal experience. It describes a physical thing we can sense or have sensed, touched, smelt, tasted, heard, seen; but it also describes emotional sensations we have had in our lives such as love, enjoyment, embarrassment, and all those supposedly deadly sins, envy, pride, hate and all the rest.

A well-balanced individual with no hang-ups and no psychological problems will find it relatively easy to describe reality. It is what they know or have known. But for someone who struggles with emotional or psychological disturbance of any kind, there may be more of a problem. For them reality may be the inability to cope. It may be the overpowering sense of worthlessness which they carry – a feeling so intense that it colors the whole of their life, distorting experiences and twisting their reality into a shape no-one else could possibly recognize.

For a new born baby reality is light, hunger, pain and food – little else. That is all there is.

As time passes, and the baby’s brain begins to develop and take some sort of conscious shape, reality becomes more complex, not just with differing senses and experiences, but with inter-relationships between those senses and experiences. Life becomes more complex and reality, for this young individual, begins to expand.

So reality, for each one of us, is the sum total of our life experiences. Where we have been. What we have seen. What we have eaten. etc., etc.

But for some, a major part of reality is what we believe. This aspect of reality is more difficult to describe, as we need to ascribe a sense of being to something never seen, or heard, or touched. Nevertheless, for some, the reality of what they believe can be so strong, so powerful and intense, that it takes an all important place above the physical reality of their lives.

How can this be? Surely reality, by definition, concerns things which are real. How can it possibly include facets of the imagination? Because the imagination is so powerful that sometimes it can persuade us that something we merely think, is in fact, reality.

Of course, those who believe in something would not consider that belief to be a facet of their imagination. For these people it is, in fact, reality. As much as if it was a physical part of their life.

So there are different types of reality, some easier to describe than others. The room we see around us, the trees outside and the birds we hear singing are part of the actual reality of our lives. The sum total of all our experiences. But some of the things we think can also be so strong as to become a part of our reality. The love we feel for someone, and know we receive in return, will be very much a part of the reality of our life, but much more difficult to describe as it is only a sensation.

Explained or not – described or not – our reality is what makes us “us”.