Thursday, April 14, 2011

What is Real? What is Reality?

Growing up in the 1950s in California these weren't difficult questions to answer but they are now for everyone on earth. People who don't believe these questions are more difficult now than then live in the stone ages or some small town somewhere on earth that still lives in the 1950s in reality.

The reason these questions are more pressing on all of us now is that physically we now Actually live in a world international culture whether any of us internationally wanted that or not. However, it IS de facto. In otherwords it is a factual part of everyday life even if we hide our heads to that fact.

So, even if only because of literally thousands of new world Views to deal with rather than one, "What is Real?" and "What is Reality?" actually means a whole lot more now than in the 1950s when it was a much simpler to answer these two questions for most people (at least in the U.S).

So, now it appears to me two different but related questions. When I ask, "What is Real?" I have to ask, "Are you speaking about physical reality or how people think?" Because physical reality is something almost any person on earth could agree on. For example, "Is that person alive or dead physically?" Most of us on earth likely would agree if that person is alive or dead within a couple of minutes.

But, almost any other question outside of the question, "Is this person alive or dead?" or "Has the world blown up from a nuclear war?" might not be a shared useful answer by all people on earth. And it definitely wouldn't be an answer in the same language because there are literally hundreds and possibly even thousands of languages and dialects here on earth. And if you speak more than one language, you also know that the mind works completely differently in the way it perceives reality in each language. So it is almost like every language is its own religion and philosophy of life and different from every other religion and philosophy of life on earth. So if I ask "What is real?" or "What is reality?" in different languages it might not even mean the same thing at all that it does in English.

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