Tuesday, May 10, 2011

In Sanity

As one travels through the ether of life, knowledge of the universe and its contents is gained. Sometimes, it is learned through experimentation, sometimes, it is learned through situations that we experience, and sometimes, it is learned through our teachers and mentors passing on their knowledge. The real world has much more to show us, and much we have been shown. There is one piece of the puzzle that holds the rest together. A keystone, if you will. That keystone is our ability to agree on whatever is processed through our minds. What if that was taken away? Everyone would disagree about what they see, and nothing would be definite. If every human had his or her own definition of reality, how would ‘we’ know which one it is? The simple answer: we wouldn’t. Everyone would be living in their own reality, governed by their own laws. To make this easier to understand, we will use our reality as the ‘official’ reality, to compare to. While one person sees and does one thing, another person believes their own reality happened. Even when, according to our current reality, neither happened. That does not matter, of course, to these people, for they in fact have no knowledge of any other reality. Theirs is reality. Does this mean that there is no reality that is concrete? Maybe someone a long time ago got through to another person and at that point, two people believed that reality. Then another. There is power in numbers, and eventually, those numbers grow by their own nature. (According to our reality.) Sanity means, in effect, that you agree with the masses. It means that you ‘go with the flow’ and believe in whatever the masses decide. I am part of it. I believe in what I have deemed the ‘official’ reality. I cannot change that. It won’t happen under my own power. I wish I could, believe me, but I cannot. I can only attempt to change the ‘official’ reality to better fit my wants and needs. The only thing that has proven again and again to help someone change their reality is a truly disturbing event, or careful manipulation of the mind. Something that one cannot handle, or something that conditions it to a change in what was reality, and thus their mind escapes to a different reality. They are considered ‘insane’ by those of us in our reality. They are completely sane to themselves, of course. Now I ask, is it right to call them insane? Are they really? What if something happened, something big, which literally split the populations agreement on what is reality? What if there was a new ‘masses’ and so a new ‘official’ reality? Anyone who didn’t come to agree with the new one would be insane and have to be harbored in an asylum. So who is correct? Here is an example: Old Catholicism. Anyone who didn’t believe the way they determined was insane, or, to use the time’s terminology, a devil worshiper. A demon. An enemy. How is that right? You know what? Those devil worshipers convinced a lot of people of a different ‘reality’ that was better, and more believable to some. So reality changed a bit for some, while for others, it stayed the same, while everyone else was lost to them. This is not right at all. Just because more people agree with it than any other does not mean it is right. How do we know it is real? The answer: We can’t. That is the simple truth to our existence. We cannot determine what is real except by what enters our mind, and therefor reality is tainted. Sanity is not statistical (George Orwell, 1984). There is no way to determine reality for sure. The saying “the world has gone insane” is one-hundred percent true. By the same reasoning, the world has gone sane. Each and every person is sane. Depending, of course, on what perspective you view it. People have the tendency to reject anything that is different, which includes someone believing in something that people believe not to exist. I must ask once more: What happens when a particular piece of reality grows large enough that it can be considered reality, yet not quite everyone agrees with it? Enough so that neither side is powerful enough to consider the rest of them insane? That piece of reality gains a name that the world knows all too well. Religion. No one person can say for the rest whether a particular religion is truth or not. If one were to ever be proven, then anyone still believing in the rest would probably be considered insane. That is our reality. It is a sketchy one, continuously being rewritten by new beliefs that come from diverse minds. I personally envy the one who has his or her own reality. They might have the ability to change it themselves, depending on how it is set up. We can’t change ours. There are too many people participating in this one reality to change it. The only thing is to change the people so it isn’t so bad here. Sanity, my friends, depends on who believe it the most. Who can prove it. Who can convince the populace of it. Who know it. There lies only one more question in need of asking…
What do you believe?