What is Real?

Everyone has their own methods for testing reality. We develop them from childhood through conditioning and direct experiences. However, most people are not self aware, they are only obedient like little sponges absorbing whatever information is coming into their sense through whatever filters have been established there by parents, relatives, friends and crazy or bad people they have come into contact with.

However, most people are not self aware. Being self Aware means at some point you become your own criteria in regard to the information you are receiving. This means that you begin to see through systems you have been exposed to religious, cultural and social. And often the three are combined in both subtle and/ or devious ways by those around you. Often the people around you are not self aware either.

So, until you learn critical thinking most people cannot be considered to be self aware but only obedient to whatever system they have been taught or contrary to whatever system they have been taught, (one or the other).

So, what is real changes drastically once one develops critical thinking and therefore is not a child whether a child child or an adult child anymore. Through critical thinking one becomes their own criteria of reality from then on.

This doesn't mean you don't pretend to fit into cultural norms when you find it useful. It just means you see through cultural norms as being what they are: "Ways to manipulate and control people to specific ends."

So, you see religious manipulations as about social and economic control of people. You see cultural controls of people as being the same. So, sometimes it is useful to buy into both these types of control (or appear to) and sometimes it isn't.

All people who own businesses and are able to have enough money to travel the world tend to be critical thinkers and capable of seeing through cultural and religious manipulations to a greater or lesser degree.

Most people with college educations are capable of thinking like this as well.

However, just being capable of  critical thinking doesn't make you a good person. Hannibal Lector in Silence of the lambs was a critical thinker too.

So, what makes a critical thinker that one would like to know and be?

Compassion and empathy for other beings.

This is the key component to being a useful and helpful human being.

So, what is reality to me?

Reality is learning to be compassionate to all beings in the universe in the past, present and future of the whole universe.

So, getting beyond idiot compassion to right mindful useful and efficient compassion is often the difference between death and life (both yours and others).