Look around you: everything you see or touch or smell or hear or taste is absolutely real. All experience, from birth to the present time, confirms this truth. Never in your entire life have you woken up and found that the material world has somehow shifted in its authenticity. The coffee stains I was too lazy to deal with yesterday are still here today, just as we all would expect.
Reality is the anchor line of the self and the common ground shared with others. In light of this, it is utterly frightening to turn inward and look upon our own minds. The mind does not really inspire anything close to the real world’s confident truthfulness. Mental stuff just doesn’t have the same variety of homely nearness. Instead, it is pretty much just anarchy.
The contrast between the swirling half-and-half in my cup of coffee and the swirling cauldron of stress, hope and serenity between my ears could not be starker. Yet, despite the differences, we are all walking along the border between these two warring states. "How is this a war?" you might ask. I say this because I see the "casualties." Since we humans have way too much free time, we end up spending a lot of time comparing the two places. And when you do that, the weird fluxing stuff in our heads starts to look kind of janky, or even fake.
I'm going to go out on a limb and call that a bad thing. Mainly because the assorted silliness in our heads is actually real and thinking otherwise leads to nothing but insecurity. Ultimately, we are made of these thought things. It doesn't seem like a good idea to deny their legitimacy.
Also, I'm not saying our thoughts are only real for us; just like with physical reality, we share the mental terrain with each other. I know, this probably sounds crazy. You are probably imagining me as some bleary-eyed stoner spitballing nonsense after a bad high. You are also incorrect. You might have heard of a thing called “culture.” What exactly do you think that is? That’s right. Just a bunch of things that a group of people thinks. Also, let’s not forget things like friendship. Just another thing made from our intellectual innards.
Basically, everything we think is real in a sense. I know I can’t “prove” that, at least not in an article like this. Besides, I’m not a psychologist; that’s not my job. But you can’t deny that there is something that rings true here. Most people care immensely, perhaps too much, about what other people are thinking. Sometimes it seems that all the world is merely a pile of emotion and instinct fighting itself. Maybe I am being naive, but I want to believe that such a giant struggle isn’t for naught. At least as a way to make life intelligible, we must assume that the thoughts and emotions of the self are real and meaningful.
