Reality

Elsewhere on this site, I've written about my participation at Landmark Education. One of the most lasting philosophical impacts of this participation has been on my sense of reality versus my interpretation of reality. In short, I have come to think of very little in the world as real. I don't mean to suggest that life is a fantasy but rather that there is very little in the world which is fixed and immutable, very little which is beyond our power to impact. We are not victims of circumstances. We are not at the mercy of "the hand nature has dealt to us," nor are we forced to live a life that we do not find fulfilling. I say that our daily lives are shaped not by the way things are but by the way we think things are. Through our speaking, through our attitudes, through the very way we "be" we can impact anything in our life that is not in service to our path to joy, peace and fulfillment (whatever those may look like for any individual).

Do I believe we can alter the conditions under which we live? Absolutely. Do I believe we alter the physical world around us with our thoughts? I'm less clear about that but more and more as my life goes on, I see even this as possible. Most of us know people who always manage to get a parking space right in front of their destination or who never seem to get a rude waiter at a restaurant. The only-somewhat-removed-from-the-mainstream medical literature contains more than a few cases of so-called "spontaneous remissions" from cancer, AIDS and other "terminal" diseases.

In the course of watching my late first wife struggle with cancer for nearly ten years, I met a number of people who were living evidence to this power. What I noticed (most notably with my wife), was that people's success in battling their disease was tightly linked with the degree to which they bought into the fatal prognostications of their doctors friends and/or families. Those who were told to "go home and die" (it is shocking but true that a number of doctors literally dispense this "advice") generally do. My wife liked her oncologist primarily because, at her request, he never told her what he thought her chances were. Very much after the fact, I discovered that, at the time of her diagnosis, her cancer was so wide-spread that all of the doctors with whom she consulted thought that she would be dead within three to six weeks. She was placed in an experimental treatment program (a protocol for InterLeuken II at New York Hospital) which had shown very limited success (a nurse on the ward told us quite some time later that at the time Michelle completed the treatment, only two of their 102 patients had gone into complete remission from the treatment. Michelle was one of those two). What I observed when I visited her in the hospital was that most of the patients in that program spent their days and nights lying in bed sleeping or complaining of their discomfort (which was, to be sure, extreme...this was no gentle protocol!). Michelle, by contrast, focused on making plans for what she would do when (not if but when) she got out and was back to normal. She also made it a point, at least once a day, no matter how awful she felt, to drag herself out of bed and visit every patient on her ward, even if just to say a quick "hello." Six weeks later, when she was "supposed" to be dead, there was no evidence of further cancer growth. Some will say that she was lucky or that her attitude and her recovery were coincidental. Those who never saw the x-rays may even say that perhaps her cancer was not as severe as the doctors had originally thought. I say that she was simply not willing to participate in a conversation called "I have a terminal illness."

When Michelle finally did die several years later, it was well over a year after her primary-care oncologist (who was seeing her pretty much every day) was telling me, however frequently or infrequently I asked, that she was unlikely to last more than another day or two. Her decline did not begin in earnest until many months after she moved into an environment where people, well-intentioned but probably ill-informed, began more and more to interact with her as a cancer-victim rather than as a cancer-conqueror (see the Tribute to Michelle Disco elsewhere at this site for more on this). I think this ever-growing conversation played a large role in what I can only see as her decision to stop battling the disease.

I say that there are various degrees of reality. Some things are "real" only because we say so (as in "I'm really afraid of the dark"), others are "real" because lots of people agree that they are real (many people believe that Gandhi was a great man or that Jesus was the son of God). The only fairly rigorous test of reality, however, the only "real" reality, if you will, is the reality of something existing in time, in the physical universe (and even then, there are times when such existence is questionable...consider, for example, the not-at-all-intuitive situation in quantum physics in which the very act of measuring something forces it to assume a particular state). Any given "thing" may pass the reality test at one or more of these levels. That a falling object accelerates at 32 ft/sec² is not only specifically measurable, it can also be experienced (to some degree) by an individual and most rational people agree that such an observation is "true." That Ghandi was a great man is widely agreed upon (including by me) but it is not, in any absolute sense, "real" or "true." It is, at best, a widely held opinion. The fact of Jesus being the son of God is, in a different sense, not subject to the "ultimate" reality test insofar as it is ultimately unknowable (devout believers who assert that "I just know" should pull out their dictionaries and ponder the meaning of knowledge versus the meaning of faith). This is not to say that it is or is not "true," but that we can never, at least in this life, know that it is or is not so. And if we are at odds with "absolute" reality, it is certainly the latter that will prevail. As a Landmark course leader once said to me, "if an angry bear comes out of the woods and charges you, your deeply held belief that it's really a man in a bear suit is not likely to save you. Even if everybody around you agrees with your assessment, you're still likely to die."

Anyone who has seen the film, The Gods Must Be Crazy will recognize the following illustration. An old-fashioned glass Coke bottle is a Coke bottle (indeed, a bottle) only by virtue of the fact that a large number of people agree that it is so. In fact, the reality of it is that it is a hard, hollow, roughly cylindrical object. Give that bottle to someone who has never heard of Coke (admittedly a difficult task of and in itself) and they may see it as a viable medium for transporting liquids or they may see it as a rolling pin or as a weapon or as a toy or as a musical instrument. In the film, the mysterious appearance of this bottle into this Aborigine tribe ultimately creates so much conflict (because everyone wants to possess this wonderful object that seems to have an endless range of utility) that the tribe comes to agree that what it really is is a resource beyond their ability to manage and so they decide to give it "back to the gods." Is any one of these interpretations more accurate, more real than the others? (If you think yes, you're missing the point of this essay).

Where the power of defining your own reality really shines is in the area of personal relationships...whether a close personal relationship or the kind of personal relationships that keep people in situations (including jobs) that they claim to hate. To my mind, virtually nothing is real in relationships. The only reality is the one we create in our minds (or that others create in our minds or that we create in others' minds). No one really "is" a jerk, no matter how many people agree that it's "true." Yes, there's factual truth in the observation that some people frequently say things that many others find offensive or stupid or insulting, but it is our choice to attach the labels "offensive," "stupid" and/or "insulting" to those comments.

I'm not necessarily advocating that everybody in the world should do or say whatever they feel like in the moment and then wait for the rest of the world to put a Polly-Anna-ish sugar-coating on it but I am suggesting that if what you're up to is creating a powerful relationship with someone you think is a jerk (for many people, this will be their boss), a good place to start would be taking everything you find "jerky" about that person and start looking at what else you could make each of those things mean. I can say quite honestly that virtually every single failed relationship or uncomfortable interaction I've ever had with anyone, from grocery store clerks to government officials, from casual acquaintances to long-term friends and lovers, has failed primarily because I was unwilling to let go of some notion of how something should look. In short, they failed because I was unwilling to create an alternate illusion of reality. (I suspect, by the way, that the handful of cases in which I don't see this as the source of failure are indicative not of some other cause so much as they indicate such a rigid adherence to a particular belief that I can't even see that I'm holding on to that belief.

The kind of "malleable reality" of which I speak is not intended to be an "airy-fairy" disregard for circumstances that may pertain at any point in time. I'm not about to walk slowly (or quickly, for that matter) down the middle of an interstate highway proclaiming that the cars aren't real. The cars do pass my ultimate test for reality and the basic physics of what happens to a relatively soft and light-weight human body when two or three thousand pounds of steel hits it at 70 MPH are not likely to be altered by my beliefs (I should add, however, that although I'm unwilling to try it, I can imagine (albeit in my wildest flights of fancy) the conceivability of someone actually creating something (call it an aura, a force-field or what-have-you) that has them walk down the highway with cars "magically" missing him or her). Nonetheless, I do believe that we are responsible for how our lives turn out. The trite version of this includes (but is not necessarily limited to) "when life gives you lemons, make lemonade." I prefer a version that goes more like, "if you don't like how things are, examine the basic, objective facts of the situation and, out of those facts, build an alternate interpretation of those facts that empowers you to take actions that create a situation you want" (OK, so that's not as catchy as the lemonade image). Given the facts of my wife's disease (tumors on several major body organs growing at a rapid rate and the doctors' assessments that the cancer had been there for a number of years and would very soon kill her), a predictable interpretation would be "Oh my God, this person's going to die." What my wife chose to make of these facts was a combination of "I have a great number of incompletions in my life and the pent-up resentment is eating away at my body so I'm going to start cleaning up all those incompletions," and "I may or may not have a lot of time left in this world so let's start making every single day count." The struggle with a difficult situation (she never thought of it as terminal) made life seem very precious to her...something worth savoring.

The concept of what is real can be discussed in highly philosophical terms and, in so doing, hairs can be split ad infinitum. However, there are profound practical results available from adopting an attitude that we create our own reality in many ways. The more we are able to distinguish between the very basic things in the world which are, in some sense, real and the vast plethora of multiple interpretations, opinions and judgments we heap on top of those facts, the more we are able to gain some power over a situation. When we take responsibility for what we are creating, we gain control over the mechanism (our thought processes) which we use to maintain the status quo. This is perhaps easier said than done. I've been deeply engaged with these notions for a number of years now and I don't begin to claim any degree of mastery in them. The results which I have produced thus far, however, hold such powerful promise that I gladly continue to engage in the inquiry.

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