Bleeding RealityJune 19, 2011, 23:55
Filed under: UncategorizedI had written a piece about the Autism File television program then last Friday I was in the ticket queue in the cinema where I heard a little girl ask her father, “Is Kung Fu Panda real?” which threw my thoughts into what is reality?
In the cinema it occurred to me that I have five realities in which I live, the reality in my head, the reality most people agree to be reality, empirical reality, the reality of cinema (and television) and the reality of literature. I also realise that for me these realities are not entirely distinct, in fact it requires a certain intellectual discrimination to separate them, and then they tend to bleed into each other.
Although I can intellectually separate realities, experientially they occur as the same. My experience of situations on film feels exactly as if they were empirically real, but logically I know that as I am watching a film they can’t be, feel real very confusing. Memories are even harder as time can blur the boundary between something experienced in a book or film and something actually empirically experienced. I remember once spending many days racking my brain to try and remember from where I knew Philip DeFreitas – the name was stuck in my mind and I was convinced it had to be someone I knew, I am not good with names, but I was so certain! – then I watched the cricket on television and realised I had never met him at all! Obviously the reality of television had bled into my mind’s reality.
The reality upon which most people agree is frequently not empirical – the existence of God or life after death, for example – but it is socially acceptable and sometimes more useful in personal terms than empirical reality, in that a belief however unfounded can provide strength and purpose. The reality of film and literature bleeds particularly into memory providing commentary, and contrast to the narrative of life and embracing all these realities is the Reality of my Mind. My reality is not your reality, my experiences are not your experiences, some of them are not even mine! It is possible that we all live in worlds of our own making, but some of us have less facility with reality. We tend to call our eyes, ears, nose, etc organs of perception, but Kashmir Saivism describes them rather as organs of creation because the world we live in is the world we are continuously creating, the act of perception is the act of creation. The reality in which I live is the reality I have created and that includes the evidence that underpins that reality.
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Monday 20 June 2011
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