What is reality?

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I often question the concept of reality. This may come as little surprise to anyone that regularly reads my philosophy posts, but regardless here goes another attempt to put into words abstract ideas and gain some semblance of understanding between what I view as my self and all of you, or from my perspective "the other." I've spoken in the past about how I view us all as one and ultimately connected in a higher source of consciousness and how we are all equally necessary to the big picture, and today I'll dive further into that topic. I want to discuss what I think reality actually is and how we all play a part in it.

Reality is as subjective as our perspectives and minds will allow it to be. The issue with getting that point across is that meaning and understanding are also both subjective. Even the words I'm writing now are based on some assumption that we generally share the same basic concept of what all of these words mean and that they evoke the same or similar enough thoughts and ideas in the mind of the reader. In short I could never tell anyone what anything actually means because all of our perspectives and understandings of everything vary, some greater than others. This is our perspective and together all of our perspectives make up the whole perspective which is our shared reality.

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If we then understand that every single person that reads this or uses words is to some degree or another biased to their own interpretations, we can grasp the fundamental concept of reality. We all have our own illusions and assumptions about our own understanding and that of others and ultimately every single one of us is biased to believing that our's is more correct than anyone else's understanding. The truth I've found is that they are all ultimately of equal importance when it comes to things such as communication and collaboration. Some people operate on a more similarly tuned frequency of understanding and can communicate better with each other. It doesn't mean that either is better or worse because to get the whole perspective to make up reality we need all of the pieces to the puzzle.

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In my mind, if we take all of the individual selves and consider that all of our perspectives are equally important and valid to co-creating reality and that none of us view it identically, we can gain more awareness and understanding of reality. Some would argue that reality is simply the way things are and that it can't be different, but reality is really just as shaky as illusion if we understand that everyone's perspective of reality is different and changes over time. I can tell you that the sky is blue and even if 99% of the human population agrees with me, there is still 1% of the world living in a different reality. This is one binary instance with one word that doesn't take into account how many different perspectives the other 1% may hold.

If we look at language and understand that even simple words have multiple meanings, such as "I'm blue," then it should be easy to see how quickly this problem grows out of hand by our minds assuming there is some level of understanding that we may not actually have. Most would assume that I don't mean the pigment of my skin is blue and that I'm referring to my emotional state, but what about those that don't make the connection? Is there any less importance on their understanding and perspective if they don't understand that we as a society collectively make up meanings and colloquialisms as we go? Looking at all of the literary devices in general, they are all ways we try to shape and manipulate understanding. Perhaps reality is little more than a democracy of our shared perspectives and only matters as much as we allow ourselves to buy into it being governed at all. Namaste.

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