I listened to a 2-hour video of this academic saying that Reality isn’t real, there is no reality without someone to perceive it, while I attempted to hand-animate a fat Earth goddess I called “Reality,” because that morning I had imagined praying to Reality, who doesn’t care about my feelings, and also to Mystery, who might. Reality and Mystery, sisters. Systery. My animation failed but I still wanted to draw Them. Is Mystery the snake that twines around the Goddess? Is Mystery Reality’s backside? Is Reality that which can be illuminated but seldom is, while Mystery cannot be illuminated at all? Is Mystery just the parts of Reality we can’t see, or is She something else entirely?
Anyway Mr. Academic says There Is No Reality, only consciousness, and “science” backs that up. Dude, I read The Doors of Perception when I was 17. Sure, “reality” is some informational plasma that doesn’t take shape (as we know it) until we interpret it through our senses. But that plasma triggers multiple flesh-instruments the same way; it can be measured, even if measurements of Reality aren’t Reality itself. He sounded to my ears like a freshman in a light-night dorm room, however:
I do love the idea that nothing is in fact real, that everything is an illusion, because it takes a huge load off. All my pain, search for meaning, criticism, loneliness, frustration, fears: they’re just artifacts of my mind, which is itself an illusion as well as a generator of illusion. My mind isn’t real, my thoughts aren’t real, reality isn’t real. Ohm.
On the same day I saw a video of a young mother who regrets motherhood. She’d always wanted a baby girl; now she has one, and while she loves her daughter infinitely, she hates the experience of motherhood, the physical and psychic changes, the long stretches of boredom and meaninglessness, the absence of fulfillment, becoming a lifelong host for a parasite, the pain and suffering and emptiness despite the love. The disappointment.
And I think: I feel the same way about having been born! What a colossal disappointment.
She urges women to consider not becoming mothers: it’s not worth it. And I encourage ethereal souls to not become incarnated on the human plane: that’s not worth it either. Spare a mother, spare a child, solve multiple problems at once.
Luckily, none of this is real.
Ohm.
Don’t be incarnated on the human plane. That’s my conclusion too. It’s liberating. All these years and I finally understand the purpose of religion right at the time it’s disappearing.