ODE to Reality and Dream

Ali Anani PhD and myself are kindred headbangers - there have been many times when he starts something that triggers my imagination, but more importantly allows me to identify contextually to that which pertains to existence as I reside it. The fact that I am resident in this existence does not necessarily mean that I am always living it. At beBee I called these moments "Paradox Wisdom" but here it is thoughts that won't fit in a standard comment box.

I am not answering Ali Anani's question here, but the questions he asks are great jumping off points and it usually takes me to areas I ordinarly would not have paid heed or thought about myself. It is interrelated but also independent of his context :

The first thought it triggered in my mind is our collective preoccupation with reality and equally our obsession with dreams. Martin Luther King Jr''s "I have a dream" speech only became that when added those lines in at the last moment - he had written one of the world's most famous or most well recognized speeches without those very lines. Apparently a woman behind him prompted him "Dr King tell them about the dream". So that line was impromptu - and the cadence and power of it came from years practicing as a preacher. The reality that we prescribe to that dream being about having dreams is not real, it was in the spur of the moment that it became attributed to this one line. The problem with that is we actually lose his real message - which are paying respect to all the other lines of his speech that make the bulk of his message.

My initial reactions were captured in the usual place of the LinkedIn Comment Box - I like utilizing these boxes, especially when they present the 1250 character limit. So it is I have produced a thousand of these 1250's and this one is no different as a flow of thoughts in the moment. Even then what I think is only real as I make it for myself and not everything in life has to be layered with the concrete of realness. It also contains an Eminem track.

We can take real whereever and whenever we want to be real. Real is me typing this right now, but that does not mean that real lasts forever. It comes into being and then it goes. If it ends up being an artifact, object or memory that remains real to us, that is what it becomes.

It is my choice whether I take real to a dark place or a white light place that actually may end up creating a second order effect of blinding us to reality. On the dark-side are those people who want to be real - or at least make it real for others, though that very want is plenty warped and wasteful.

People who cannot deal with their shizen are the ones that try to impose it on us just so they can feel their shizen as becoming real to us. There satisfaction is seeing someone else in pain just because they are in pain – for them this is life’s great equalizer – for us we just came across another jerk. These tiny pricks of pain become new cycles of abuse which we have failed to decouple, but equally failed to learn from. The masochist wants us to feel for them, the sadistic nut wants pain to fill their pleasure-starved existence.

Just because I used the word "shizen" does not make what I say real. It just warps the reality we individually view a single word. Which is probably why it does not take much to bend us out of shape - just one word might leave a lifetime pscyhological scar - even though it is our perception of reality that may have made it so.

We could easily viewed an alternative reality which we call "positive thinking" or "positive framing" but that isn't anymore "real" than the individual trying to make it real for others. We cannot make things real for others anymore than we barely make it real for ourselves. We can leave real scars or create real fantasies but whatever is left remaining is what is real.

If we strap that real upon ourselves, we carry the weight of that reality, which again shows the fine line between reality and our imagination. It is we who make the decision of carrying the weight of our dreams or the burden of our reality. Trying to figure out which is which can become a futile exercise - unless we know how to notice and know how to let go.

When I wrote my thoughts in the comment box at Ali Anani's original posting, Ali Anani graciously said he considered me both a designer and an engineer, but he missed out an important reality of being, for both the designer and engineer part can be outsourced, which is in being the owner. Then that is a reality that is as good as a dream and why I think trying to discern the difference between both is not as important as making dreams real and know the reality of real. Even with ownership we cannot let reality own us or keep us dreaming. Sometimes real is just being present enough to know we exist - the realness of "now".

I love the drawing in the middle banner above, this was drawn by Arrie Wubben.

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