This essay is part of a series called The Big Ideas, where the writer answers one question. What is reality?You can read more by visiting big ideas Series page..
What is the universe made up of? Is there an infinite reality or is there just an accidental reality? Are we part of an infinite sea, or are we isolated beings with nothing to connect us? Is there a god or are we trapped in the emptiness of the universe?
The best answers to these challenges come from the people who build the way we experience them. Plato showed us the allegory of his cave that we are experiencing the world through poorly sensed tools. Indian folk tales have given us the image of a blind person touching an elephant and trying to figure out what the elephant looks like. One is a rope, the other is a wall, and the third is a tree branch.
Artist David Hammons said in 1983 that he Rowing snowballs On the sidewalk in New York. Was the snowball an idea, a sense of values, a part of nature, a social construct, a dream?
Perhaps the ultimate framer of reality is our parents. In my next novel, “The Last Gift of the Master Artist,” I quote what her mother once told me. “It is not who you are that the world respects you, but the power that stands behind you.” In our time, the lack of power behind a vulnerable country led to a takeover war. increase.
In a story my mother often said, all birds around the world are invited to heaven for a feast. Turtles can join them because the bird lent him feathers. Before they leave, turtles claim the name “all of you” and treat the feast for everyone properly. Undoing him happens when the bird regains its wings, and he jumps into a difficult place. His fragmented shell symbolizes what happens when we try to steal the world’s resources for ourselves.
We are all victims of limited awareness and limited science in our time. We don’t know what life is. We don’t know what death is. We do not completely know what consciousness is. Being alive and aware is one of the greatest mysteries of the universe. But we are not exempt from the universe and its laws.
The big meaning of this truth is climate change. We cannot make our environment worse without compromising our lives. The law of causality is true both in our morals and in the larger universe. The flawed reality reminds us that we can escape the consequences of the changes we have implemented.
However, each of us assumes that our own perception of reality is universal, and some speculate that it will determine it. If we have power, we force others to be the result of that recognition. That is the way that created the turmoil in our world.
For centuries, people had guns and thought they were better than those who didn’t. Then they began to conquer those who did not have guns and those who had inferior guns. We believe that power is evidence of a good grasp of reality. This highly illogical idea underlies racism, fascism, inquisition, slavery, genocide, and all sorts of injustices.
The people of the past, who thought they were masters of reality and tried to rule humanity, rose for a while, ruled a part of the world for a while, and sank into the dust. After all, reality defeats all empires.
This is the heart of our ignorance. We act, but we do not know the consequences of the action. I don’t know what works for us. We do not know the infinite network of things, the infinite links. The idea that the universe is random raises the paradox of a meaningless world in which we build civilization and live our destiny. This is also illogical. Why do we need to care about something in a random world? Isn’t it such a perception in the war with reality?
Like the story of the mother’s turtle, humanity is part of the reality in which we all rise together, and when we act to survive, we all fall.
This is why the first true human civilization must be a universal civilization. We are all either together in this human story or there is no story at all. The first true human civilization grasps the interoperability of everything. You know that where there is injustice, there can be no peace. It aims at the well-being of all people.
Without changing our point of view, we will never revolutionize our understanding of reality. Only then will we finally begin to create a world worthy of the magical nature of consciousness and the uplifted quality of life. A deeper understanding of reality will determine what future we have and whether we have a future.
Ben Okri is a Nigerian poet and novelist. He won the Booker Prize fiction in 1991 for his novel “The Famished Road”.