Sunday Morning Musings

How do I know I’m real?

This is really weird shit… something from the polished oak ministerial pulpit of the Church of Holy Crap.

It’s a pretty easy question, no? I can feel, taste, see, hear, smell... I must be real. How do I prove it? René Descartes’s set about trying to prove we are real and wrote an entire tome to demonstrate it. He came up with… “I think, therefore I am”. But, if thinking is merely the passing of energy from one synapse to another, what is thought? Is it real?

It gets weirder.

Recent discoveries in quantum physics reveal that atoms, the smallest particle in the universe, aren’t solid at all. They are energy. What does that mean? Atoms aren’t really real. They are waves of energy spinning round and round at such a high rate of speed, the electron’s path around the nucleus isn’t easily penetrated by touch or sight and feels solid.

Err… it only looks real.

If everything in the known universe is made of atoms, and atoms aren’t really real, it follows that nothing is real. So, why can’t I walk through walls? Or, when I fall out of bed, why do I land with a thud rather than pass through the Earth and continue out into space. It might be a pretty cool ride to float out into space and see all the interesting stuff out there… but would it be real?

Back on point.

If everything is made of atoms and atoms aren’t real, then everything I do, see, smell, touch, feel and hear isn’t real either. It’s simply my perception of the energy flowing around me. If all I experience is simply perception of energy, can I change the perception thereby changing the reality?

The simple answer is “yes”.

If we change the perception of events in our lives, our experience changes as well. Nothing is solid. Nothing is fixed in place. Quantum physics shows that nothing is in a fixed state until we perceive it as fixed. If we change our perception, our own energy changes and attracts similar energy and, thus, changes the direction of our life.

Our senses take in four million bits of information about events around us every second. Our brains filter out those bits of information to a mere two thousand manageable bits. That is our reality. Our reality is made up of less than one thousandth of what is really going on around us. What we focus on becomes our reality. Our brains are trained to filter out things it has learned not to pay attention to. We can retrain our brains to focus on different things… and change our reality.

But then, nothing is really real anyway so why does it matter? It matters because it is our perceived experience that determines our life experience, not the other way around.

Our life experience is manufactured by our choice to perceive events in a certain way. We are a collection of our perceptions. Until we view events differently and change the energy patterns (thoughts and feelings), the sum total remains the same. This is where the saying, “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results” comes from.

To paraphrase, the axiom might go like this… the definition of insanity is to perceive things the same way and expect a different life experience.

The further we go along the scientific path, the more we seem to understand nothing is real except that our perception makes it so. Therefore, the only thing that might be construed as real is my perception of things and events.

For all I know, none of you are really out there and this whole life event of mine has been manufactured in my own mind. There is nothing behind me until I turn around and observe what I think the energy around me should look like.

I wonder if the responses to this will be real. I guess it depends on how I take them.

I think I need a coffee…

Then I think it’s time to go kayaking and see how I perceive nature.

Namaste