In the last video, I started talking about raw reality and escaping from reality, and I was going to get into escapism, but then it just got sidetracked into realizing that, just as humans, we always have some kind of separation from raw reality.
We always have some kind of a layer that is built up, and we live within kind of a bubble of human construction.
It’s always going to be true, I believe, to some degree.
And, you know, you can see, you know, going out into the forest and surviving, but even then we still have our tools and our system of knowledge.
And so the idea of, you know, just facing raw reality: there’s always some limit to it.
But what I originally wanted to talk about is this idea of reality, facing reality, and the question of how much reality do we insist on? How much do we demand? How real do you need your life to be? Now, I think most people would agree that, you know, “I want reality.
I don’t want to live in some fake world.
You know, I want something real.” And who wouldn’t want something real, because that’s how you- you know, when something’s real, you get the real thing.
You get something that lasts.
Something that’s fake is something that might sparkle for a short time, it might appear for a short time, but it has no reliability.
It’ll just disappear, just evaporate like a cloud.
And so anything that is fake is untrustworthy, whereas something that is real, something that has some kind of a trust you can put into it, something that’s reliable, like a solid stone foundation, like that gives us a sense of real, versus a house made out of a cloud, which would be very unreliable.
So in principle, it seems like we like reality.
But in practice, you know, how far are we willing to take reality? How much do we want reality? How uncomfortable are we willing to get in order to have that taste of truth and reality? Because it seems like when we’re feeling strong, and you know, ready to take on the world, then it’s like “OK, bring on the difficult reality.
I’m ready.
I want something real, so bring on the challenge.” But when we’re feeling weak, when we’re feeling like we just want to break.
“Just give me a break already”, then it starts to get very tempting that “OK, you know, I’m willing to sacrifice a little bit of this raw reality so that I can get something that’s more comfortable.” Because once we’re willing to accept the fake, we have so much more flexibility in what we can experience.
Because, you know, reality can be very limiting, that you know, it has to sort of resonate with reality.
It has to be something real and unmanufactured, and sort of like built up out of nature, and being close to something that is there in the natural world.
We can build something out of it, but it’s always going to be close to reality, because it is something that is grounded in reality.
It’s like being grounded, where you know, we’re stuck on the ground.
But as soon as we’re willing to forgo that and accept that things don’t have to be real, suddenly we can imagine whatever we want.
The sky’s the limit.
We can go off to the moon.
We can imagine any sort of world we want.
We can imagine that we are whoever we want.
All the chains of reality are cut, and we can simply make our life anything we want.
But the cost of it being that it isn’t real.
And that’s just like building the castle out of a cloud, that when the winds change, it evaporates as if it was never there.
So it seems like there’s always this struggle and this balance that we deal with, where on the one side, we just want pure reality, no matter how ugly it is, no matter how difficult.
“I want something that is genuine.” Versus, “You know, I wouldn’t mind a nice little story right now.
I wouldn’t mind being comforted by a story that makes me feel better.” And maybe the deciding factor is: how much reality do we insist on? Do we insist all the way that, you know, we just want nothing but raw ugly truth? Or do we allow a little bit of nudging and fudging and nuancing and imagining, and maybe allowing a little bit of creative licence, you might say, on the truth, which can then lead to a lot more comfort? But of course, going too far that way, it ends up being fake.
So I wonder: is this raw reality approach, is that really the ideal way? Or should there be a little bit of this creative licence as part of how we live? I mean, as much as the truth is an ideal maybe there’s a certain step back from pure raw reality that is part of our creative life and the way we interpret our lives.
And yet, that seems like a dangerous step to make, anytime we pull away from the truth and into creating fictions that are more pleasing to us.
So I’d be curious to hear what you think about this.
How much is it OK to pull back from pure reality and be creative with the truth, versus being completely plugged in to reality? What level of reality do we insist on?
#tooreal #reallife #reality