On reality…

Reality. That which is ultimately real is beyond words. Words are always one step removed from what is real because they are a method of description, not the thing itself.

For example, you may describe your experience right now as reding these words and being calmly aware of the ambient sounds, smells and sights of your surroundings, wherever you are. However, if you think about that for a minute, it’s actually an extremely impoverished view of what is really happening. At best, it’s a broadly accurate skeleton and at worst a vague regurgitation of someone else’s description of a similar experience. If you were to become fully aware of what is actually happening right now in your immediate experience, you would find it impossible to describe. Indeed, you would find yourself sitting within an entirely original and infinitely nuanced experience.

Words in general are like a shared life raft we all sit on in order to maintain the pretense that our methods of description, however refined they may be, actually have some fundamental ground in reality. We do this because it creates the illusion of control and of a shared-known. The truth is that all language is, strictly speaking, baseless. Nobody in the history of human communication has ever spoken one meaningful word about what is real. This is because reality, the world of direct experience, is infinite, as is most obviously demonstrated by the electromagnetic spectrum. It cannot be contained by linguistic classifications because it is immeasurable, and language is essentially, ‘the world as measured,’ by conscious thought.

Is this useful to know? Hell no. Kind of interesting though to think that the only reality we all share is something that exists beyond all our interminable narratives of difference, power, law, blame, praise etc., simply being, as it always has done and always will do, regardless of the language games we humans play with each other. We spend so much time and energy attempting to forge conditional, sandcastle relationships with each other by creating flimsy linguistic binds when it would be so simple just to stop and recognize the only reality we all already share. Still, where’s the fun in that?