Objective reality vs. Subjective reality
In truth, there is only one supreme reality which is objective reality, the neutral reality in which we live in and is the same for everybody. However, people operate and act through their own subjective realities, their own unique perceptions and interpretations of the objective reality. This phenomenon can be easily noted if one looks at how differently people react to the exact same situation. For example, when it rains, people who like rain will like it while the infantry guys hate it because everything gets wet and imagine yourself walking and running with wet boots for 3 straight days. In pure objective and neutral sense, it is just raining and that’s it. It is the subjective reality that comes from our unique perceptions and interpretations of the objective reality that defines and classifies the experience into categories and causes to act accordingly. When quitters face a challenge, they interpret the objective reality-the problem into the negative and usually their subjective reality imposes them to think that such challenge is impossible to overcome and they should just leave it as be. While, the winners when face challenges, they see it as some kind of development opportunity that when made effort to overcome there could be some possible learning experience at present and that slow process of learning can eventually help them overcome the challenge once and for all. When two or more people argue over the same topic, each person is attacking the issue from the angle of not the objective reality but from their own interpreted subjective realities; therefore, argument ensues and people don’t come to an agreement easily. We think we live in objective reality but the fact is we are living in our own subjective, filtered, deviated, opinionated, defined reality. Hence, the popular phrase: Perception is reality.
So, why can’t we just live only with the objective reality without any interpretations? It has to do with our survival mechanism. We have to categorize each experience into their corresponding categories in our memory so that when the same experience happens again, we can then remember the memory and act accordingly. For example, a toddler doesn’t know anything about anything really. He or she starts their lives from the ground zero with no memory. So, they learn to survive through trial and error. If a toddler sees fire for the first time and is eager and interested to make contact with it, the toddler quickly realizes that he cannot catch a hold of fire and if he keeps his hand in the fire for longer period of time then the skin and the flesh gets burnt and suffers pain. So, when he sees fire again, now he knows that he shouldn’t hold his finger in fire for too long.
Well, this is good, isn’t it? This is only good if you can use this mechanism properly. By “properly,” I mean knowing how to use that knowledge embedded in memory, knowing when to use and follow it and when not to; in other words, knowing when to identify and not identify with it. In objective reality, there is just fire, it produces heat and makes the surrounding warmer, when not controlled the fire burns everything in its way and many other objective facts about fire. If we think about fire only in terms of its usefulness for us as salvageable energy, then it is “good.” Meanwhile, if we only think of fire as total burning destruction, then it is “bad.” Now, imagine two people one identifies with the former and another identifies with the latter perspectives of fire arguing about fire. They would never ever come to an agreement. Instead, if these two people completely dis-identify with their notions of fire and immerse themselves with the objective facts about the fire, then they can easily come to an agreement. If the guy who only thinks fire in terms of “good,” finally learns and understands the destructive capacity of fire, then he may also learn that one needs to be extra careful and proper risk management plans should be prepared. When we are too identified with our subjective perceptions of the objective reality, we are only seeing the tiny part of the whole picture. And, fully thinking and believing that that tiny part of the whole picture causes a lot of trouble, I mean a loooot of trouble in our daily lives. There is a famous line by Mark Twain which goes, “What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.” Imagine a guy who is 2.00m tall and is gifted with talent to play basketball. Just by his given athletic ability and natural sense of the game, he easily gets into the NBA. Now, he is competing against the best of the best in the world and his natural raw talent just not enough. He no longer can score at ease, and is just an average bench player. But in his own mind, he still thinks he should get the most minutes, he should be playing on the floor instead of the other guys, but just can’t get it done on the floor. Time and time again, his subjective reality of himself being proven wrong. The objective reality is that his natural raw talent and god given athletics skills and body are just not enough against these superstars, professional players alone; in other words, his current combination of skill, talent, and body are just not good enough to be a productive player on the court. If his goal is to become an all-star player, he needs to improve. But all his life, the game was too easy for him. As a result, he strongly identifies with his subjective reality of him being this superstar and this identification blinds him from seeing the reality. If he fully understands his situation, he would focus on improving his game, learning good habits and getting rid of bad habits, work toward less holes and more solid skills. But, as long as his subjective reality dominates his thought process and perceptions he would never see that objective reality. He thinks he is good but in reality not good enough. As Mark Twain said, it is his thought that he thinks right which ain’t so is getting him into trouble. This phenomenon happens a lot in the NBA. Those athletes who were being at the center of attention from their high-school years, into college, then getting drafted higher in the NBA, he now thinks the game is easy and he would just cruise without any effort just like his past. And, because of their ego and their false subjective reality of themselves, they just don’t see the full picture, the objective reality in which they are existing and deny every possibility suggesting their conceptions of themselves being wrong in objective reality. Then, they just become bench warmers, eventually gets out of the league quickly.
Hopefully, you got what I wrote above and realize and understand that we live in our subjective reality based on the interpretations of the objective reality and when the subjective reality differs from the objective reality and trying to force our subjective reality being truer than any other reality gets us into huge problem. Hence, to be successful, to act right, and to make right decisions our interpretations of the objective reality, our subjective reality must be as close as possible to the object reality. By being aware of the objective reality in its full picture, then we can incorporate every necessary details and influencing factors into consideration to make the best decision and act on that. It sounds easy but it is not. Matter of a fact, I still see elders living in their false subjective realities and die never realizing this truth while I also saw younger guys already aware of this truth and living according to it. I guess, age is just a number. Really, really, really few people on earth knows this and understands this truth fully. You think you know and understand until you fail big time. Trust me. You may be still thinking, no I am better than you, I am smarter than you, I already know and understand this fully. Trust me, I was in your shoes, I also thought the same about myself until I failed a lot and big time. You never know how much you know and understand this until you face the real troubles and failures.
Then, why is it so hard to understand it even if we think we understand? In short, the root cause of us always failing to understand the objective reality has to do with our egos. When we were born, there was no I or the ego. We came as like blank papers. Then, throughout our living years, we accumulated lot of knowledge, perceptions, and impressions. And, these accumulated impressions saved in our memory when combined constitute our ego and we use it as our guiding principle of our lives, based on these accumulated knowledge we make decisions and act in the world. Forsaking all of them by dis-identifying with it means, in our subconscious mind, releasing the hold that we were holding above a cliff and falling down to the pit. We have grown a really close intimate relationship with this ego, or such person whom we think we are and disowning that image is the same thing as disowning your friends, children, or someone closest and dearest to us. We have intense loyalty to that image of ourselves because it has been with us since the day 1 for ALL THESE YEARS. And, we do our best to contain ourselves in that image. We do our best to prove that we are here only to be that image in the world for our whole lives. Even when facts say otherwise, we deny those facts. We start rationalizing, hypothesizing, justifying how such facts are wrong. It is really the same as the picture in which there is a small girl not giving up her small toy when God is trying to give her a big teddy bear.
When we look at this picture, we quickly judge the small child and think how stupid she is holding on to her smaller toy. But in reality, we are laughing and ridiculing at ourselves by laughing at this girl; the girl is us and the god is life. We are this small kid, always reluctant to give up on our subjective perceptions of the objective reality even when objective reality proves them wrong. When we finally understand and accept that we always live in our subjective realities, it would be easier to let go of our egos, those images of ourselves.
Just one time, release that hold you are holding and fall down to the pit. It would be scary for sure, you will be confused as to what to do, you are no longer sure of yourself anymore, you feel you are no longer in control of your life, you will have no idea what is true and what is not; simply, your state would go into pure chaos.
This takes a great deal of courage for sure. Thus, so few dare to do this. You are ultimately jumping to your death essentially. This is why it is hard and so few manage to understand the truth. Truth is always costly while lies are always cheap. Jumping off the cliff and falling down to the pit means getting rid of everything you hold dear to yourself. Having too much attachment to those things makes you unable to let go of them.
But, luckily you won’t really die in literal sense but in metaphorical sense, your old self will die in that bottomless pit if you can manage to climb back up. Those who don’t manage to get back up go crazy, they get lost forever in the spiral of the unknown. Nothing makes sense to them anymore and life loses its meaning to them. Just living becomes an effort, and everything becomes pain and suffering and eventually they live long enough to go crazy or commit suicide to end the pain. They die in that pit literally, mentally, and physically.
However, those few who manage to climb back up the pit and get to the surface are reborn. They now understand and accept the objective reality which is pure chaos and emptiness. They now understand that everything can be anything. All rigid forms and shapes are only temporary and are subject to changes throughout time. They now know that there is nothing to hold on to and they must let go of rigidity. By accepting these truths, they keep their sanity and those who can’t accept and forever in search of something solid gets lost in the bottomless spiral of pit. Those who understand and accept the objective reality, leave their old selves in the pit and never look back. In this reborn state, they now have the eye to distinguish the objective reality from the subjective reality. Just like how phoenix dies and gets born again from its ashes, just like how order comes after chaos, he is reborn. By accepting the chaos, the emptiness, the formlessness, the shapelessness, he brings order into his life. He now knows that he is not his ego but his ego can be used, he can identify or dis-identify with his accumulated impressions at will, he is more realistic and down to ground and can quickly distinguish the bullshit from the truth. He no longer clings to the images he believes, he now knows that he can turn into any image he wants to. He now fully understands that there is no solid, set image he needs to be in but he is free to be anything. He now knows himself that there is no him in the world but he can be any him. He now fully understands that only empty cups are useful. He now knows that he doesn’t need to try to keep whatever is in the cup when life demands new stuff to be in it. He now can empty the cup at his will and fill it whatever is necessary at the moment. He now knows that his original and natural state is empty cup not a filled one. He fully realized and understood all these only because he fell down to the pit, left his old self in it, and came back with his sanity. He gave up everything he held dear to himself just to taste the objective reality.
Knowing this, just reading this won’t be enough for you to realize the objective reality. You have to experience this process on yourself to fully understand and be aware of the truth. Also, do not try to go to through the same path as anyone else’s. Everybody has his/her own unique path. We go through our unique paths and everyone’s path leads to the same end, destination. What worked for me won’t necessarily work for you, it may but usually it won’t. If you are interested in the why you have to tread on your own unique path then read Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha.
Lastly, I want to touch on how to know if you are really living according to the objective reality not your subjective reality, just like an empty cup. When one starts living objectively, she no longer divides the world into the good or the bad; or, in other words, she is no longer operating and acting according to the dualism. To her, now everything becomes neutral as it is in the purely objective world. Also, if she catches herself not jumping to conclusions rather trying to seek the whole picture, then she is in the objective reality. If she realizes that she no longer imposes that she has to be this way or that way but finds herself acting flexibly suited to each unique situation, then she is living in the objective reality and many more. Anyone who wants to succeed in anything, master anything, must learn this skill to distinguish his/her subjective reality from the objective reality and also learn the skill to operate and act as closely as possible to the objective truth. After mastering this skill of distinguishing the truth from the lie, then the success becomes only a matter of time because then she can see her mistakes and faults, create follow through plans to correct those mistakes, replace bad habits and routines with better ones and eventually what she sought will come to her; the success becomes only a matter of only performance and execution, how well and fast she is learning and applying in reality. Everything becomes simple and naked.
PS: This is written based on my experience and the books I have read over the last 8 years. During the time I was in the United States Military Academy, I was forced to jump off the cliff into the pit. Spent a lot of time in that pit wondering what was the meaning of my life and who I was. Life was pure pain and misery since there was no meaning anymore until I accepted the fact that there is no inherent meaning in life; rather, I make my own meanings and live accordingly. That moment of acceptance of the fact that life is pure chaos, I stopped seeking rigid guidelines rather focused on what I want to do out of my life. As a result, I finally became a man of my own life, the captain of my own ship. But during that time, I did not realize that I was tasting glimpses of the objective reality until recently. What I do now as a job requires me to be as realistic and close as possible to the objective reality to make decisions and act accordingly, I realized that people act and operate through their subjective perceptions and impressions when the objective reality was completely different. The experience I had when I first jumped off the cliff helped me a lot to dis-identify with my old self, the ego, the accumulated impressions which in turn helped me to realize that I was not operating based on the objective reality rather on my own subjective reality as quickly as possible. When you finally realize that you are not you ego, your life becomes totally different, your life become completely free, you think whatever you wanna think, you feel whatever you wanna feel despite whatever the outside situation is, it is truly liberating experience and should be everyone’s goal to achieve s true liberation.
But the choice is always yours and always will be. Are you willing and courageous enough to be out of the matrix to taste the real life/truth or do you wanna live comfortably in your deception? The choice is always yours. One is easier and one is not but the harder ones always have the best rewards. The choice is always yours.
