Subjective Conceptions Shape Our Reality

Image Source   Crackling Burst  by Bill M. Tracer

Objective versus Subjective Reality: One, the Other, or Both?

My inclination is to think that most often extreme ways of thinking are incorrect. Usually it is not an either or proposition, but somewhere in-between the extremes. This contrast of objective with subjective reality is just such an example when actual reality is most likely not one of the extremes, but a measure of both. It does appear that there is indeed a measureable “objective” reality that we all share, but there also appears to be a feature of this objective universe that is malleable, subject to our perceptions. Perhaps our actual reality is not unlike what Michael Talbot in his book Mysticism and the New Physics calls, “Omnijective”.

Cover of Mysticism and the New Physics (Compass)

We are both subject to reality, and reality is subject to the way we perceive it. 

Is Knowing Really Knowing?

The more convinced we are that we know a thing is so, the more it is so within our personal reality. We attenuate our reality through what we believe and don’t believe, and where we look and where we choose to not look.

The vast majority of our limitations are self imposed, and in the process of doing this to ourselves we likewise limit the very reality in which we exist. Now bear in mind, this does not alter objective reality. There was a time when a great number of people believed that the world was flat. That did not make the world actually flat just because such a large number of people failed to understand the most basic nature of the planet on which they lived out their lives. That belief did however limit their behavior and expectations of just how far they dared try to travel. This limitation kept the Western world confined to have a much smaller impact, during that time we now call the Dark Ages, until those with a more progressive understanding of Earth’s nature took bolder steps into a bigger world.

Sometimes Being Held Back Creates Advantages

People have often looked back with disdain at the ignorance that held the Western world in a backwards state for such a long time, but think of the alternative outcome had this not occurred. Likely, Europeans would have ventured across the Atlantic in much greater numbers quite a bit earlier, than they actually did historically. They would not have possessed the greater technological advantages of the later conquistadors, and possibly the spread of diseases from the old world to the new world would have occurred differently, perhaps even in a way that allowed the Mezzo-Americans to acquire a greater immunity before being overwhelmed by the epidemic spread of diseases common to Europeans, but not to the ill-equipped immune systems of the ancient native Americans. These changes might have even tipped the scales in favor of the Aztecs, and possibly even the Incas, setting in motion the ultimate rise of these cultures to higher technological achievements, and a reverse conquest in which Mezzo-American conquers rape and pillage 14th or 15th century Europe. Oddly enough, these speculations lead us to conclude that sometimes being held back by backward thinking can lend your culture certain unforeseen advantages, as long as other advances are still allowed to progress unchecked, at the same time. It’s a kind of pressure cooking effect. And once the “pressure cooking” is complete, the result is a sudden explosive expansion of those setting themselves free from the previously self-imposed limitations.

What Self-Imposed Limitations Currently Hold us in Check?

Do we currently have more self-imposed limitations? Is it even possible for us to see through them, or do they limit us so much that we mistake these subjective aspects of our perspectives as being part of objective reality itself? It may not be achievable for us to see what is now being pressure cooked within our growing global culture, but we can be assured that once the pressure cooking is finished, another explosive change will spread throughout us, which will undoubtedly dwarf the impact of the spread of Western Civilization from the so-called Colonial period to the present day.

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