There is a general sense that individuals, groups, society, and the environment are all struggling like never before. But what if this sense is misleading? And what if revisiting our notions about reality led us to find a much more valid model that, in an entirely new way, ‘dissolved’ many of our apparent issues? In short: what if things do need work, but what if they’re also much better than we think they are?
This model explains virtually everything about reality that is currently deemed mysterious. It’s a bold assertion I know, so I am prepared to provide excellent evidence.
Of course, we, and everything around us, is in a constant state of change. Yet, despite that guarantee of change, our brains rarely update their models for reality. This means that major course corrections have always been required. And once we know how to find them, it’s not hard to look back and see that many shifts in reality have already taken place in both our personal and societal histories.
Unfortunately, under our current model for reality, human egos only notice these slow-moving but inevitable changes once we’re a long way off course, and we’re painfully slamming into new realities we never intended to visit or create.
Even before the 2020 pandemic, when it came to our relationships, our personal mental health, the health of our societies, our systems, or the health of our surrounding environment, a significant portion of humans had concluded that there must be some better way of living life. And that inkling in us represents a kind of wisdom that has kept life going for eons.
The simple fact is: any time we choose to engage with a thought-based illusion as a way of resisting reality, we will create psychological pressure within ourselves and/or our societies. Our only remedy is to accept that this new model for ‘reality’ is our best and most unified version of ‘the truth.’ And our challenge is that almost no one can currently tell their personalized illusions from General Reality.
We all know that journalists, scientists, justice, and even our personal relationships demand some useful form of ‘the truth.’ Yet, despite that, socially, politically, and personally, we don’t even have an agreed-upon definition of what ‘the truth’ is. Because we cannot settle that, we can’t even agree on what we’re discussing.
That confusion results in a strange kind of ‘general opposition,’ that largely only exists because people cannot agree on a central ‘truth.’ And our disagreements over ‘the truth’ have proven challenging for the world to manage. Also, on a personal level it also means that too many people spend far too much of their life in an insecure state; hating the world, hating others, hating themselves, or hating their lives.
Fortunately, as stated at the outset, society’s routine reassessments of reality are always preceded by the chaos that exposes that the old reality was not working. This means our current situation may appear to be a terrible state of affairs. But, viewed another way, it is the fertile ground for an inevitable revolution in thinking. After all, we can’t add fresh tea to a full cup. People need to be sick and tired of their old ideas about themselves, and the world, before they will open up their minds to new ways of thinking.
too many people spend far too much of their life in an insecure state; hating the world, hating others, hating themselves, or hating their lives.
If we have trouble imagining a change this massive, just think of what it must have been like for people before the end of The Divine Right of Kings, or before slaves were seen as fellow humans. Prior to those revolutions of thought, many peasants literally believed that noble families were a separate type of demi-God-like being, just as many slave owners thought of slaves as being more like property.
From today’s perspectives, where we have things like The Rule of Law and modern citizenship, the North Korean belief that their political leader is an all-powerful God looks insane. Likewise, very few people are prepared to believe that a person in bondage ceases to be a person. But it is important to remember that those ideas did, (and in some places still do), reign over much of the Earth. Until individuals challenged those thoughts, they were the accepted reality. Which begs the question, what realities are we currently and voluntarily accepting only because we cannot see them?
Since people are not aware of their reality-generation, parents unwittingly teach their children to perpetuate beliefs in old realities by describing them in ways that make them feel obligatory. But the fact is, the peasants theoretically could have freed themselves of all-powerful leaders long before they did. But until they had enough people prepared to believe freedom was possible, they never made plans or took action—which is how conscious thoughts create collective realities like democracy, etc.
Because we do not properly understand reality-generation, just as previous generations did under Kings and Queens, we currently live inside many false and limiting realities, each filled with unnecessary suffering. To be clear: freeing ourselves from those false realities will not lead to some pain-free utopia. But, by seeing things more clearly, we can truly come to recognize that many of the things we think we don’t want in our lives, are actually valuable parts of what makes any life worth living.
By accepting pain, we can ironically rid ourselves of the unnecessary suffering that gets created by our desire for a false and impossible reality, where nothing ‘bad’ happens. That desire avoid suffering—all when pain is an inextricable aspect of life—is the act of us using our ego-based thoughts to create the very illusion that so successfully conceals reality from us. This book is about dissolving that illusion by increasing our awareness of reality formation.
peace. s
A serious childhood brain injury lead Scott to spend his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and identity. It made others as strange to him as he was to them. When he realized people were confused by their own over-thinking, Scott began teaching others to understand reality. He is currently CBC Radio Active’s Wellness Columnist, as well as a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB where he still finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.