Subjective Reality

Remember being in high school taking a science class?  All I remember, besides sitting next to Teresa Watson, was taking notes while the teacher showed them to the class from a projector.  Probably thought, when I wasn't bored or tired, I was witnessing state of the art technology.  Friends described physics class to me and I simply thought the math would make it too difficult--which would certainly make me ineligible to play on the basketball team.  As an adult, my best understanding of science comes from TV, especially the Science Channel and all things science-fiction.  If math is involved I listen, but never fully grasp. 

The best way to define reality just may be through science and math; however, movies like The Truman Show and The Matrix are what got my attention, twisted my noodle and sent me forever down the road of studying reality.  It's a hobby at best. In fact, I can't even watch a few minutes of The Truman Show without second guessing reality.  Street lights illuminate neighborhoods at night, which in my world, just may double as movie lighting that allows the producers, whomever they are, of our waking life to capture the whole think on film--in high-definition.  Sometimes my surroundings look more like a movie set to me than anything real. With that mentality it obviously  stands to reason that people I know-- have known my entire life--are actors.  People that literally feel this way supposedly have something called The Truman Show Delusion and they sometimes go to great lengths to find their way off "the show." 

One guy climbed the Statue of Liberty, in New York, to meet up with his "real girlfriend," completing his mission and getting off the show.  A few of these accounts dealing with delusions makes me feel great about the power film has to suck one into thinking differently about reality.  Not that I think I'm the star of the show--my thinking is more like, "who's filming this, really?”  Is something or someone stringing us along, keeping the nature of reality a bit out of our grasp, almost close enough to grab and digest, yet far enough away that we spend a lot of time arguing more about beliefs and customs  than ideas.  I think it’s possible that if we are in some type of simulation, then sure, entities of some kind might know how to keep the game of life going and our understanding limited by the frequencies we decode—always hidden away, like the fog  at the top of some mountain or beneath the deepest cave in the bottom of the  sea. The same manipulators most likely are mentioned in religious texts, mythology, and various folklore tales as a way to keep information, hidden in symbols for the enlightened ones to understand. I don’t know, but doesn’t it seem like with any old texts we find, someone always seems to be around to explain how to interpret each symbol. Think of the people who didn’t want the common folk to know the Earth revolved around the sun or even that it was round. We are all susceptible to the powers of persuasion. Aren’t we always guessing, even when we use science and math to get down to what’s real?  As strange as anything found in fiction can be, to me, anything written in stone, so to speak, can limit our perceptions and give us the luxury of becoming complacent in our quest for truth. I’m hoping whatever the truth is, that it ends up being stranger than fiction. Perception is reality, I guess.  

A friend described private logic to me and that makes sense: How one fits in the world shapes one's understanding of self. What if we lived a long time ago and this whole life we are living already happened?  If we have the ability to comprehend a programmed reality, and futurist’s say singularity is inevitable, then it may be too late and we are actors or sims in some cosmic video game.  Think of your memories.  How many of those do you still have access to?  A lot?  At least a few, right?  I can remember walking to my grandma and grandpa’s house when I was three, but I couldn’t tell you what I had for lunch yesterday.  Actually the only thing that makes sense to me, so far, is the idea of life being a programmed reality. Sometimes I look at the water, watching the vibrations; other times it’s the way light reflects off of manicured lawns that cause me to take a moment to wonder what we are all a part of.I Don’t know how it works, never will. My suspicion and gambling spirit tell me that nothing is real except the program we’re in and I like the odds I’m getting. Maybe life is simply a grand Truman Show that an intelligent designer conjured up for whatever reason.  After allowing the program we call our life—in this reality-- to loop itself, we must finally be in the stage where technology has given us the ability to question things like, ‘what if we’re not even real?’ All the while, the copy/program (us) is being played back, over and over, on some super computer that recorded real life a long time ago and it cannot distinguish between the copy and original.