I have long been interested in the question of what counts as “real” in our periods of existence on this planet. It seems to me that humans are awfully good at creating abstract notions that they then use to limit their behaviour and the way they relate to each other. Often to the point where they’re given more validity than things that actually exist in a concrete way. For example the *idea* that cats might be in league with the Devil arguably led to the Black Death because the fear of cats led to the deaths of so many which allowed the rats that carried the disease bearing fleas to flourish. In a similar fashion we have seen that certain people are more concerned with the state of the economy than people’s lives in the Covid pandemic. Quite apart from the fact that putting money ahead of life is repugnant, this rather overlooks that money isn’t actually real, but something that has worth because we believe it does as a species. If we stopped believing in money tomorrow, it would be valueless. I believe in Hinduism this is called Maya, or illusion, and it feels as if we are caught up in it most of the time, despite the fact that it’s just not real.
Today, I would argue that the “real world” is largely a hallucination composed of ideas about how we should live and what we should do while we are alive. It has become synonymous with “society”, and “world”, really: all three terms really mean “how we live now” and the idea that to be alive requires conformity to these ideas. To stray outside them is to risk being branded an outcast, one who has lost their sense of reality, or is a social disgrace, or doesn’t live in “the real world”. It is quite odd, I suppose, that in a Christian country, the adherents of these intertwined ideas overlook that Yeshua ben Miriam must have done exactly these things - walking out on his family to preach, roving the countryside with his friends, and generally being thoroughly disreputable. These are exactly the sorts of things people who are living in the “real world” aren’t meant to do, after all. Assuming there is a Second Coming, presumably the Messiah would be moved on from the place they and their followers have parked their caravans and motorhomes because they’re lowering the house prices (sadly the Gospels don’t tell us about Yeshua’s attitude towards littering or public drunkenness though turning water into wine might suggest he was fond of the odd drinkie).
Returning to the subject, this “reality” is a construct. It’s assembled from what we consider normal from our childhoods, what society tells us is important, the biases of our brains and our nature as a troop based primate with complex social hierarchy and status system where we’re all trying to get a leg up on each other even when we don’t seem to be. It’s also based on what our media feeds us about the “world” and how that informs what we know. When we consider that to be successful a piece of technology must be geared either towards war, shopping, or sex, (and I would argue possibly cooking as well), it is perhaps no surprise that our main drives happen to be related to these elements, and that everything else more or less crowds in on top of them.
Consequently there’s perhaps a question that, in the same way that Anais Nin tells us that we don’t see the world the way it is, but the way we are, so we should question our assumptions; we should treat everyone else’s pronouncements about the world and reality with a certain amount of scepticism and ask questions of their statements. Is the person who declares that you have to have a 9 to 5 job and that’s the be all and end all actually done one? Have they had a job they hated, or one that affected their mental health? Have the people, usually men, who dismiss period pain, any real idea of how much one hurts? Where does their experience, and therefore what they’re qualified to talk about, end?
There is no one reality, no “real world”, only interlocking and enmeshing realities that are all intensely personal. My experience of the species and how it interacts isn’t likely to be the same as yours, though we can hope it would be similar.
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