Forest Wizard

Tag: magic

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  • The (In)Stability of our Realities, and the Importance of Silence

    The (In)Stability of our Realities, and the Importance of Silence

    Pretext: Reality, Magic, and the MAGA Mindset

    Reality

    As mentioned in the above linked blog post, reality is how an individual realizes the actuality. What we individually understand to be the real world is, in fact, our own reality, which is itself only our physical body’s interpretation of the stimuli around it.

    Think about that for a minute. We have spent our lives believing that what we see through our eyes is exactly the same as what every other set of eyes see. We believe we live in a physical, objective world based on facts and laws and math.

    The truth, though, is more complicated. We, instead, have created a world built on the assumption that we are all having the same experience, and we have created language in an attempt to share said experience. To make sense of the experience, we have created systems and structures (like math) to act as scaffolds, allowing us to climb closer to understanding.

    Our brains interpret stimuli that is collected by our sense organs (ears, eyes, skin, nose, tongue) and, together with the knowledge stored within it, our brains then turn all of that information into something we can make sense of: Reality.

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  • Reality, Magic, and the MAGA Mindset

    Reality, Magic, and the MAGA Mindset

    Concepts

    Reality

    Studying Rosicrucianism introduced me to the concept of actuality vs reality. The problem in using the concept of reality as a measure of truth, they say, is that none of us can experience the reality of another person or being. The reason for this, of course, is that each of us can only interpret the environment around us with the help of sense organs integrated into our physical bodies.

    I use my eyes to identify a color or shape, for example. You use your eyes to do the same. We can communicate and agree that what we see is a given shape or color. However, we cannot literally see through another set of eyes. We cannot interpret that visual stimuli in the way another does. In short, we have no way to know if the way we interpret the world around us is the same way another does.

    Of course, there are methods of dealing with this, if there weren’t, we’d have a much harder time creating stuff like language and society. In fact, we have all agreed (by way of early childhood socialization) on foundational Truths, such as the real-ness of the physical, and the un-real-ness of the non-physical.

    Despite these large-scale shared Truths, they are still, at the end of the day, a part of our own, unique, personal reality.

    Actuality

    So, if we all experience our own unique reality that no other living being can experience, what, if anything, exists outside of that? What holds our shared realities?

    (more…)
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