Reality Check

They say seeing is believing.

So if you see something happen, does that make it right, by default? How much is going on behind the scenes that we're not seeing? How much of what we're seeing can we even believe in the first place? What if it's all a dream? How do we even know what is a dream and what isn't?

There was a study done where two groups of rats were each dropped into two separate tanks of water, one with a small "island" that the rats could find and swim onto, and another which was completely filled with water. After one group found the island, both groups were taken out. Researchers repeated the experiment, this time removing the island so both tanks had nothing but water. They found the "island" group kept afloat and swam twice as long as the "haha, you're fucked" group, which aimlessly splashed around in circles. Presumably this was because the "island" group, having memory of an oasis of sorts, had the mental endurance to keep looking for something it believed to exist, even if it no longer existed.

If a rat can push itself twice as hard by that kind of mental image, even if it was just an illusion, what is a human mind capable of?

Let's rattle the clouds here a little: What does that mean about ideas like faith and religion?

I walk down the street and wonder sometimes, how does another person see what I perceive to be my own reality? Do they remember the detailing of arches, lines, and curves of buildings, the collective movement of people, cars, and clouds, or the distinctive scrape of shoe soles against sidewalk, the way I do? When I smell something, I'm reminded of some part of my past, but what does that other person experience? What am I missing out on? When I close my eyes, do other people just see plain black, or a hazy collection of flickering green, purple, and blue lines, as I do?

Reality is what your senses can perceive and gather together in your brain. So it's not really everyone's world we live in, or everyone's reality, to be specific. It's your own reality, and what you make of it. We're all just a bunch of reality-processing organs bumping around in the darkness of what we call a universe, our body parts being the tools we use to interact with that reality.

It's a very sobering thought.

So, you exist in two different forms so far: the body and the mind. The mind processes the reality, and the body interacts. Let's take that thought one step further. What's even higher than that plane of existence? What drives the meaning behind the interactions, the interpretation of the reality presented by the mind?

A soul?

Three forms of existence. Body, mind, and soul.

I think I'll leave it here for today.