Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.
With 8 billion people on this planet, we have 8 billion different ways to see the world. Not even conjoined twins see the same reality.
Is my experience of the colour blue the same as yours? Do I taste chocolate like you do? Are our wishes and desires the same? No.
We find our tribes that like similar things: sports, hobbies, food, music, pets, occupations, and anything that allows us to see others in a similar light. But no matter how similar, we still have a different slant on reality.
You are uniquely you. I am uniquely me. Our realities may collide, but what we observe is only for us to interpret and experience. Our interpretations and experiences will never match another’s. We live a singular reality.
That is why a tragedy for one is a lesson for another. An unforgivable act for one is the reason for forgiveness for another. A moment of peaceful solitude for one is a slow, uncomfortable moment of boredom for another. Here is where our life experiences are created, where we control our own narrative, create our own destiny… design our very own reality like no other.
One of my favourite responses when someone asks me how I’m doing is “Living the dream!”
Yesterday I wrote about how there seems to be many people who think they ‘took the red pill‘ – revealing an unpleasant truth, but they have actually taken the blue pill – remaining in blissful ignorance.
Then this morning I was listening to a podcast and musician Baba Brinkman was quoted as saying, “What we call reality is just when we all agree about our hallucinations.”
This made me realize how much reality right now (for many if not all of us) is literally like being in a dream. Let me explain… In a dream, when something doesn’t fit with reality, it doesn’t always trigger a response.
Examples:
You are in a dream talking to someone and turn away, you turn back and now it’s a different person, but having the same conversation.
You are in a dream and in it you are in your own house, you change rooms and now you are in a room you’ve never seen before, or even outside.
You are in a dream and cars can fly, or you can fly.
In each of these cases, had it been reality, the experience would be jarring, but in a dream it just makes sense.
Well in today’s reality, I think many people are living in a dream. So, you give an anti-vaxer, or a flat earther some profound point that undermines their belief, and what happens? Nothing. It doesn’t interrupt the dream. It isn’t jarring, it doesn’t ‘wake them up’. Their reality includes points and counterpoints that do not trigger a wakeful response. So, the dream can keep going… uninterrupted.
“What we call reality is just when we all agree about our hallucinations.”
The problem today is that too many people are agreeing on hallucinations that just don’t fit our reality; hallucinations that undermine our future reality… and I’m not sure how we can wake them up?
Have you ever thought of your bandwidth of sensory observation?
We can’t hear a dog whistle, but the sound is still there when someone blows one. We can’t see ultraviolet light. Our fingers can detect the location of a touch that are backs can not. Some people love cilantro while others think it tastes like soap. Dogs and other animals can smell things we can’t. Some of us see colours that others can not.
We are all, in our own way, like radio receivers, who can hear certain stations and not others. As we get older, our bandwidth decreases in what we are able to hear. But in keeping with the metaphor, that doesn’t mean the radio stations aren’t still playing.
We have limiting and limited senses with which to observe our world. We are only capable of witnessing and observing a narrow set of frequencies, because our receivers are limited… and imperfect.
Even within the scope of what we can mutually observe our shared reality isn’t fully shared. We see, hear, feel, taste, and smell things differently. Our cultures and upbringing influence this as well… some cultures can’t see/distinguish certain colours, some can’t pronounce certain sounds, some have vastly different tastes.
Our shared reality isn’t always as shared as we think. This invites conflict and miss understanding. It also invites the joy of seeing things from another perspective, and learning to appreciate our, and other’s, understanding of our world.
Let’s help each other expand our views of our shared reality. Let’s celebrate the difference and find joy in creating mutually appreciated, shared events.
We know that bees can see ultraviolet light that humans can not see. We know that dogs and other animals can hear sounds that humans can not hear. Scientists understand Newton’s laws, until the laws fall apart when studying the smallest of particles and objects traveling at very fast speeds. When we look for light to act light a particle it acts like a particle and when we look for light to act like a wave it acts like a wave… we still don’t really understand all there is to know about light.
And yet somehow we think we have a grasp on reality. We don’t. We do not yet have a full scientific grasp of our universe, we don’t even understand what consciousness is. What we do know is that our perception of the world is based on models of the world and not actually the world itself. We have very faulty user interfaces, insufficient sensors, that warp our perception of reality.
Think about the diversity of human perception for a moment. We know that there are people who can not see colour. There are even people who see colours that are not present, like Daniel Tammet, ‘The Boy With The Incredible Brain‘.
Watching this video makes me think about how my user interface differs from someone with autism, someone who might be overloaded with stimulus (information) in the environment that does not overwhelm me, and who might at the same time be blind (or at least unaware) of facial expressions that I find easy to read or interpret. Even for those that can interpret facial expressions, this is not an exact science and so we are each noticing different things with some people being far more perceptive than others.
Take this another step further and think of the incompleteness of the memories that we have. We make lousy eyewitnesses, and we reconstruct memories slightly differently over time. This is even more exaggerated when we add heightened emotions to an event. Have you ever heard someone talking about an experience from an emotional standpoint arguing with someone talking about the same experience from a logical standpoint? It’s like they are living in two different realities. In fact, each and every one of us perceive the world in drastically different ways, and our emotional state influences our perception, and our ability to recall our experience.
Our user interface with the world is not accurate, we know this, but we also know that the world isn’t just an illusion. We know the sun emits light and heat, we can see the light on surfaces in our field of vision, and we can feel the heat on our faces. But I can’t know that my experience of the colour blue is exactly like yours, or that my comfort with the heat of the sun is similar to yours either. But I wonder how much our upbringing, and the culture we live in influence how we interpret the world around us?
I remember learning in an anthropology class that some tribes that live in the dense forest struggle with the idea of seeing an image of an animal in the distance as an animal that is far way, instead thinking of them as tiny animals. Their model of the world does not include a full-sized tiger that can be seen a hundred meters away. Their visual perception of the world is different than someone raised in a desert.
How else does our environment that we live in influence what we can and do perceive? How does our politics, our ethics, and our beliefs influence our perception?
How different is my world from your world? And what consensuses can we come to in order to make it a better world for everyone?
