Reality
The word reality ultimately comes from the Greek word 'reo', which means 'to say'. If we can say it and it can be confirmed by another, then it is real. That which can be said.
Reality is when you can talk about it; in other words when the experience is shared with another, and the concept in your head is consistent with what is outside of it. Unreal would be when the concept experienced in your head is inconsistent with what is outside of it, confirmable by someone else.
The Greek word 'reo', also means 'to flow'. To say it, is to tell a story, and the story is always the flow of the universe, and it is this flowing of the universe which is what reality ultimately is, regardless of what our story is. 'Reo' is also equivalent to 'ero', which other than it meaning "I will say", has the meaning of 'love' as well; and so at the end of this tortuous path of reality, lies love. The ultimate reality at the end of it all, is simply love.
With reality being such a subjective experience, it is no wonder that the word and its meaning, having travelled through the human understanding for millennia, has an obscure and undefined etymology. It is still difficult if not impossible, to pin down what reality actually is. At the quantum level there is no way of saying what reality is; it is perpetually fizzing in and out of existence. It could be that knowing what reality is, is an oxymoron.
~
Any story told is creating a story within a story. Choose whichever story helps you the most, but don't start believing it's true. Those illusions of past and future can be re-writ to tell other stories more to your liking, though no story will set you free. To be truly free within the reality, your mind needs to be free from thoughts, with no story creating the illusions which cage you in your thinking reality. No story will set you free!
The story always has you in the centre, and the universe turns around you, and that is the same for all others in a myriad of stories, none of them true. There is only one story that is true: the universe — One Story, and we cannot know that story because it includes the future as well.
Choose a story that is beneficial to you. If you are going to create a story around you, you might as well make it a good one; one that will help you. Just don't get too wrapped up in it or start believing that it is true or anything. All stories are untrue. There are an infinity of stories. Getting a good story can be the changing of the default ego track. Get a good ego to use between the 'no stories' state.
Whatever I write, the reader is quite likely to overlay their own story on top of it, even to the point of thinking that what I am saying is exactly the opposite to my intention. We all create our own reality. We each create a fiction of the world around us, superimposing our opinions of others in a fantasy which persistently lies to us. How it all works at all is unbelievable!
We choose our reality by only seeing what we choose to see. Of the information which is presented to us, we select a part of it to focus on. You can either see the good or the bad in something, selectively choosing the aspects you imagine of it and receiving confirmation through your mind's filtering. You create what you see in imagination first, and the mind makes up the rest from observations which concur with your prejudice.
Our free will is where we choose to focus our awareness, though this choosing of course is also determined by the past. Where we focus our awareness is our point of control; our creation of reality for us. But free will cannot be separate from the universe, it has to be part of it. The will is not free; it is heavily subsidised by the past.
Our mental processes are slightly behind the cellular mechanical processes which are working on an automatic level, responding to what has just happened and in a pattern built from previous occurrences, in a way which to all intents and purposes are a predetermined course or at least an inevitably selected manner. This results in our mental processes being just observers of what is happening and means we are just following the inevitable physical unfolding of the universe. We like to think that we determine what is about to happen but in fact we just follow what is already set in place. We cannot observe this because our observations lag behind, but because we only have our observations, we have led ourselves to believe that we lead, when in fact we just follow. Free will is just a name for it! Free will is just a reconstruction of a story that is edited and amended to fit some paradigm, in a sequence of events that would happen anyway. The story is incidental.
The difference between free will and fate, is that one tells the story from the beginning, and the other tells the story from the end. They are both just stories.
There is no choice that we have ever made that is not the part of a history of events and thoughts that has preceded it. It is just a story that we make of it as we go along. It is all just retrospective stories telling of the thoughts of the mind's interplaying with the occurrences of events. Desires are little more than prognosticative possibilities — sometimes they happen, sometimes they don't. Faith is the action of ignoring when they don't. Grace is a bit like not caring.
~
Everything we do detracts from the core of ourselves — the First Self — as our attention is transferred from there. This transference becomes the default state, and a world is created by the repetitions. To try to continue concentrating on the core of your self while looking in a mirror, shows how much we become absorbed in the cognition. The distraction of the reflection has become the only way you see yourself. But seeing yourself while concentrating on the core produces a very different experience, as you do not identify with the image in the same way. We can all experience this just by not letting go of the physical sensation of our being while we are looking at ourselves in the mirror. This is why dogs and cats are not interested in their reflections; it is not that they do not recognise themselves, but that the reflection is just unimportant — it isn't them. Their awareness of themselves is in the physical sensation of themselves, and this is not reflected.
The distraction that we experience when we see ourselves in the mirror, is what is happening all the time with everything that we see. We are sucked into the world and behave and respond with the conditioning that makes it become the reality that we think it is. To disengage this mode of operation is to see the world with very different eyes, which then seems unreal in this empty state of perception from the divine.
~
There isn't anything that happens now which isn't carried into the future, and there isn't anything that is happening now that hasn't been carried here from the past. Even our observing of it is an effect from the past and influences the future. We are just inside it and it inside us. Whatever we do cannot be wrong because it is just a part of the way. The way has to be right or there wouldn't be any here now. Justification — making it right — is just a story we tell around it which superficially works in some way. It can never tell the whole story because we cannot see the whole picture and the way everything bounces off each other and creates reality. This is why we have to trust in it. We don't really have any other choice.
The fact that this universe exists as it does, that it exists at all, that we are even here, is so incredible that we have to believe that anything we do is just part of it doing it. We are not really here. We are just a story that is told alongside it; reality is what we say it is. It is all just happening and is incredibly wondrous. How dare we criticise it; how dare we think that we know what it should be!
There is no destination. There are just different pathways through the same paradise. One life can't be better than another; whose judgement would that be, and within what parameters?
The experience of reality is a human story. The real reality has nothing to do with human beings, or their brain and conceptualising's from sensory information. It is the universe without qualification or judgement. It is love.
