Reality

One bright day in the middle of the night two dead boys rose to fight.
Back to back they faced each other, drew their swords and shot one another.
A deaf policeman heard the noise, and saved the lives of the two dead boys.
If you don't believe this lie is true, ask the blind man, he saw it too.
~Author Unknown

Think about this:

What if the world as you see it is different from the world as I see it?
What if there is no absolute truth?
What if there is nothing out there in the world?
What if we don't have a purpose in life?
What if everything we perceive is governed by some factors that are different for every person?
What if there is just self and everything else is just happening around you and has no significance?

These are some of the many questions that have bothered me.
The concept of reality has intrigued me very much. So, I will make an attempt to write about what I make of reality and the world around us.

For each one of us, the reality about an event, a person, a situation is different. In spite of that, all of us like to believe that our interpretation is "THE" absolute reality.
This is the core of all human conflicts.

Some of the ways we perceive reality are through our personal checks for reality like our:
Past experiences
Senses
Feelings
Beliefs
Intuition
Thoughts
Personal logic

Most of us base our present and future according to our past experiences. We modify our behaviour and the way we look at things based on the past. By doing this, we force ourselves to look at the present and the future through the spectacles of the past. This limits our experience of life and makes us judge the situations.
Similarly, our five senses, thoughts and feelings govern so much of our perception. We judge others based on our feelings and thoughts.
More than that, most people think about their beliefs as if those were reality. All of us have a set of beliefs about everything - such as code of conduct, moral values and ethics.

We base our life according to all these personal checks for reality. All our actions are based on our perception that is a result of these.
Even right now, each one of you has your own interpretation about this blog article and about me. We all have our own thoughts and feelings creating our stories.
Using our perception and interpretation we decide if something is right or wrong OR good or bad. And that is what results in unhappiness, dissatisfaction and suffering. Have you ever wondered what our life would be without this perception and the meanings we create out of every event?
If we didn't have this perception, I suppose we would live in a perfect bliss with our circumstances just reduced to something happening in the background.
Most of the religions in this world teach us to be in this natural state of existence - in that state one has complete love for others and oneself and there is no expectation from any events or from other people. Buddhism even has a kind of meditation called Vipassana which teaches how to simply observe such thoughts/feelings/judgements and ignore those to alleviate the suffering of human beings.
It's very difficult to completely ignore all these factors and is highly impractical in this world. But by not giving too much importance to this perception of circumstances and people, we could make our life much simpler and happier.
To conclude, I would like to quote Albert Einstein:
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.