What is real? and what is not real?
Surely the people, places and things around us are real. We can touch them, feel them, and they have mass and physical dimensions and/or biometrics we can sense. They exist outside of us, and they are perceived by and interact with others who can confirm their reality with us.
What about ideas, things like freedom, love or justice? Are they real? By the above definition, they should be because they exist outside of us and we all perceive them as concepts, embodied perhaps with different memories and symbols specific to our own life experiences and knowledge bases, but still a shared reality of ideas.
What about your mind? Is it real? We can touch and feel your brain, your neurons and supporting systems that our best science suggests is the seat of the "mind," but we cannot point out a definitive, finite biologic structure that is one's "mind."
Your mind also does not exist outside of you, and is not independently perceived or interacted with by others. They talk or email you, and they can see that you have a mind but they cannot independently access it without going through you.
So is your mind real? Maybe, maybe not. Could it be an illusion brought on by self-awareness, or is it the seat of self-awareness> What if your mind is not contained in one organ or system like our brain and nerves, but is somehow anchored in every part of you, from small to large? Are cells the basic unit? are atoms?
What about thoughts; are thoughts real? Thoughts are both the input and output of your mind, and once, somewhere real shared ideas like freedom, love and justice began as thoughts in the mind of one or a few humans. If they are now "real," then must not all thoughts also be "real?"
"But Chris, what you're saying is that if someone, anyone, anywhere, EVER thought of something, no matter how casually or in passing, then that thing is real?"
Yes: perception, expectation and intention create reality, constantly and always. Every thing any conscious life thinks about becomes a part of reality, whether shared or not, whether initiated from outside stimulus or simply from thinking within.
Thoughts are real. Good or bad, "right" or "wrong," each exerting an influential force on our selves and our world. Some grow, mature and attract more and more attention, get practiced over and over, by more and more people and those thoughts become beliefs and values and principles like freedom and love and justice.
Clearly, something the mind does to thought, something our collective minds do to shared thoughts, makes them more real, more concrete and more powerful in our lives. Yet one new thought can always change the way we think, and thus change the world.
Perhaps our mind's are the true and only limits of reality. Perhaps our shared part of the collective whole is such that no one mind truly exists without the infrastructure of all the minds together, and it is not just all of our body that is our mind, but all of everything, everywhere and everyone.
We are each a "real" individual body and mind, and yet that reality only exists, only finds meaning in the context of our collective minds.
We think, therefore I am
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