Realities About Realities

Views and opinions are, more often than not, based on our interests and prejudices rather than facts. This starts with our selection of those facts that are worthy of our attention and this selection is not made on the basis of free will but on that of subjective necessity. The more we project our subjective desires on to the objective exterior world - the more we succeed in projecting our interior outwards - the more the real world becomes a backdrop for the realities which we have created for ourselves.

The point is underlined by language, which instead of being used to describe things as they really are, gives objects a subjective purpose, which objectively does not suit them. We only need to change the accent a little, and we are confronted with another reality - as an example, for many centuries slaves were treated as servants but referred slaves and in contrast, if we presently try to look for translation for slaves, it would be in vain.

Through films and television etc., media has become a big source of such ideal counter realities. Indeed touted as the unreality industry, films and television demean and trivialize everything and everyone connected with it in as much that we no longer prefer to confront reality directly. For long ago, we learned and accepted the fact that reality has for all practical purposes become unmanageable. Instead we have turned our energies to the proliferation and production of endless amounts of unreality to soothe our tired and fractured egos.

Whether this can lead in an era when, for example, smoking has been demonized. War films, appallingly, showing no soldier smoking even though every soldier’s basic ration included cigarettes. Notwithstanding this, the recent case of a superstar apologizing for his cigar chewing appearance following an uproar on smoking in films. The dedication to fictional realities, especially in religion, is obviously a product of the need for an antithesis to a reality that is felt to be inadequate or even intolerable.

That is why religions place so much emphasis on pointing believers to another reality that fundamentally differs from the uncomfortable reality of this world. In this other reality, phenomena which flatly contradict earthly reality such as miracles may occur and believers can hope for things which are actually impossible.

These 'alternative' realities are often more important to us than the factual, which can for example lead to the contradiction that minors can be sentenced as adults if this seems appropriate to the court. In order to understand the paradox of parallel realities, which are hierarchically arranged, a backward glance to Adam and Eve can be sampled to a good effect.

Even though the first man and woman were expelled from paradise, we have a residual collective memory of the same, so that it continues to exist as an unearthly reality. It is before us and behind us, it is also present and inspires our earthly acts, as though it were never entirely lost, as though it were not entirely of the future.

Source: Milchar