Abstract Ideas

Last night I went to see “Inception” with some good friends and interestingly enough in an IMAX theater. After seeing what felt like an entire 30 minutes of previews I got to experience a film that was so good it may be the best film of our time. I wont get into specifics because quite frankly if you haven’t seen it, you should. One of the major themes in the film is the concept of reality.

The concept of reality.

Reality is based on perception, perception is based on perspective, perspective is based on an amalgamation of knowledge, and much of that knowledge is based in experience. Experiences can in most cases never be duplicated. If all that is true, then reality itself is subjective.
With that in mind let us begin.
What is truth? What is the difference between what’s real and what’s just us inserting information from past experiences to fill in the gaps of the unknown?
Why is this important or even worth talking about?

Relationships.

And I don’t mean just romantic relationships but friendships are prone to this as well.
The human mind has been proven (even beyond all rational thought) to attempt to organize things it cannot easily identify or understand into patterns. For this reason when you show several individuals a picture of an inkblot and ask them to tell you what they see you could get several different answers. This biological, social, knowledge and experienced based conjecture begins to form our “reality”.

How does this affect relationships?

“Everything is not always as it seems.” That statement is regarded as a sort of universal truth. However when confronted with situations we have no control over or have an increased difficulty understanding we begin to attempt to organize the situation in our mind so that it will begin to make sense even without facts or context.

Why isn’t (s)he talking to me?
Why hasn’t (s)he come to see me this week? We always hang out on Fridays…
I don’t even understand why (s)he’s mad I didn’t do anything wrong!

Here is where I tie all these admittedly abstract concepts together.

Your mind seeks to understand, to make a pattern of things that at the time do not make sense and because of it we can create problems all on our own. The questions above are prime examples of how we can drive ourselves bat shit crazy “trying to figure out what’s going on”. We tend to fill in the blanks with negatives or false positives like “theres someone else” or “hes just really busy” or “(insert any seemingly positive or REALLY negative reason for emotional or personal distance here).

The fact of the matter is we never really KNOW anything about another persons motivations, actions or even their reasoning because its all subjective guess work and reality isn’t reality at all and if its just our perception that shapes our reality then…..reality isn’t real?