Longer observation (6): Everything is Real: Speaking informally, in ordinary language, not scientifically or even logically, we can say, from a psychological angle, that everything is real, but, at the same time, it is also part of the Imagination, part of our Thoughts, and filled with our Feelings and Emotions.
Short idea (16): Everything you experience is real, but not everything is real in the same way: Some things are useful and substantial and important to you; others are dangerous; others are pale reflections, elusive and amorphous and hard to describe and maybe fleeting and unrepeatable and useless; others mislead you like a delusion that comes into the head while lying in bed on a long Winter's night.
Short idea (30): For whatever it's worth: I've come to believe that either there are two realities or one reality with two "faces." I prefer the second. If true, then one face appears in our dreams, and the other appears when we wake up.
Short idea (74): If you watch an horror movie and get anxious, and even feel some fear, this is real anxiety and real fear, but it is caused by events in the movie. What percent of all the anxiety and fear a person feels in life is caused by events in inner "movies"?
Short idea (99): The Imagination usually does not come clothed in the words "I am your Imagination at work here." Usually it comes with words like: "So and so is trying to hurt me!" or "What a wonderful thing this is!" or "He is a prince of a man!" or "She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen!"
Short idea (107): I think psychology could (and should) be a meeting ground for all religions, a common ground. The deepest religious experiences are experiences, vague perceptions of the deepest levels of our psyches, and can, I think, be taken as psychological perceptions. Here are five explanatory points: 1) Religious dogma is not the same as living religious experience. 2) My view implies that no religion has exclusive access to reality; each is a different window into reality. 3) Religion should not feel in competition with science or with other religions; they are all searching for reality. 4) Religion is not "primitive superstition" but an attempt to express truths that are difficult to express in ordinary language. 5) Religion should be viewed as bringing to light new areas for scientific research; it should not feel pushed into standing against science in order to defend the objective territory it knows it has found and knows it has been exploring for millennia, often heroically.
(Psychological Paradoxes & Puzzles — 4)
The Paradox of Trying to Run from and of Trying to Stay within Reality
Errors, Illusions, Hallucinations, Delusions:
A simple error or a mistake isn't always an illusion or hallucination or delusion. You can be tired and adding a series of numbers and make a mistake. Or you can hear it will rain today and believe it and be wrong.
"Big" Dream 3 (September, 2013)
(from the series of "Big" dreams)
This is not a "big" dream in the sense of its subject being of importance to more than the dreamer. The dreamer did not feel the dream was of importance to anyone but himself. I give it here because it is an example of a powerfully disturbing nightmare that feels real. Even if a dream is "only a dream," it can feel real and powerful and important, often as much as waking experiences.
Psychological Exercise 1: Experiencing Opposites
This exercise, like many that require introspection, is best done at night or in the evening when inactive and when it is quiet. The first part of the exercise is to pick something, anything, and then focus your attention on it.
Read more: Psychological Exercise 01: Experiencing Opposites
Short idea (200): Perhaps the most seductive things in the world are words — including the words that come into your head.
Short idea (203): Psychology has set up its store at the intersection of Reality and Imagination, at the corner of the Literal and the Metaphorical — there in that fire pit, in that cauldron.
Thinking, Truth, and Reality
I separate Thinking (which is an activity), Truth (which can be the result of Thinking, and Reality.
Using spatial metaphors, thinking can be used to make a point or a series of points. It can be a series of unrelated points, or it can proceed in a line from one point to the next. This can be done in a step by step manner that obeys the rules of logic, or in a more random and, perhaps, intuitive manner. Logical thinking involves work and is active. It can be sharp and clear and clean or fuzzy and muddy and confused. Thinking can arrive at the truth or hit on the truth or lead us to truths.
All Thinking is Real and part of Reality. Truth is Real and part of Reality. Thinking can help us deal with Reality, but it Thinking does not give or take us to Reality. Thinking is one dimensional (points) or two dimensional (lines of thought), but any Reality is multi-dimensional. Though thinking is part of reality, a piece of reality, it can also be a veil that keeps a thinker away from other parts of reality. It can be a buffer between a person and reality. Thinking is about something: Reality, on the whole, isn't about anything — it just is. Thinking is an activity (passive or active) done by someone and felt to be going on now; Reality, on the whole is not done by anyone and is not felt by anyone to be anything or at any time.
Thinking is one or two dimensional, but there can be different lines of thoughts about the same topic. So it is possible to have a whole web of thought, as it were, and this web can be thought of as three dimensional. In so far a thought process or series of thought processes take place over time, thinking can be thought of having a fourth dimension, the dimension of time. But each line of thought (qua line of thought) can be thought of as represented by a series of positive real numbers. Reality is thick with Reality, as it were. Continuing with the mathematical metaphor, it has more than four dimensions, and many (or all) can not be represented with real numbers. The dimensions of Reality would be represented by irrational numbers.
Thinking, at best, gives the Truth, but the corresponding Reality is always bigger than the thought or the truth about it. Thinking never gives Reality. At best it gives Truth. In a parallel manner, it can lead to Falsehood but not Unreality.
There is such a thing as the Set of all Thoughts of all human beings. There is no Set of all Real Things.
No matter how logical a person's thinking, no matter how true his or her conclusion, this does not mean the person has fathomed or grasped the Reality about which he or she is thinking. Reality always escapes thought. Reality is not a series of Truths; it is bigger and deeper and thicker and richer, to use another series of metaphors.
Finding a Truth can be dangerous for a thinker in that, it can lead to an incorrect feeling of security that one has mastered the corresponding Reality. Thinking about war and arriving at Truths about war is not the Reality of war. Truths about sex and thinking about sex are not sex.