What is “reality”?
Fundamentally, reality is our experience. What we know and understand, what we have seen or felt. It is what our inner self tells us to be true, what we have heard to be the fact of the case and what we have confirmed with observation to be practical.
Reality is what we see, hear and feel. It is what science deals with, what we supposedly know for “certain”. It is the here-and-now, the practical, the everyday, the stuff of life.
Reality is also the basic “self-evident truths” that we think “everyone” understands to be true, such as the law of gravity.
But there is more than one reality. That which is “self-evident” to us is no such thing. To one person, the United States is the greatest country in the world, and to another it is the great Satan, causing disaster. Such value judgments are a part of reality, and both “self-evident” truths, while opposite, are equally a part of each persons reality. Both value judgments are practical for each person, and, if they each live in the U.S., the reality each lives in colors their whole world, all the time.
Why do we depend on reality?
Reality is what we depend on because it is all that we know that has worked. Reality is based on our experience and that experience tells us what can work and what can’t. If we just chose another reality, we are convinced that the other reality just wouldn’t be practical. If, for instance, we believed that we were the president of the United States, we might find it
difficult, nevertheless, to enter the White House. That reality simply wouldn’t be practical.
However, for the most part, alternate realities can work for us. Even if we think that one item is real, others can believe something different and they can live a happy, productive life in that alternative reality—perhaps even happier than the reality we choose.
But not only is reality practical for us, but we are also emotionally dependent on reality. To discover that our concept of reality isn’t true, or practical, will stress us to such a degree, that we often cannot deal with any other option. If someone looks at the blue sky and says, “What a lovely shade of red,” we would laughingly object at first. But if they insisted—no matter how calm they seemed—we would become angry at their refusal to accept the plain truth. And when we discover that we cannot actually prove to them that the sky is blue will only upset us more. Something so obvious should be understood without having to explain it, and it should be proven easily. But it isn’t. It turns out that we are emotionally attached to the fact that the sky is blue. And if anyone tells us otherwise is to not just jar our sense of reality, but it emotionally upsets us.
For this reason, reality isn’t actually something we choose. Reality is something we live with, and it takes a serious event in our lives to chose a different reality to live with. Reality, for the most part, is something handed to us by our parents, our peers, our friends, our television watching, our book reading, our
What is wrong with reality?
Reality is what we live with. It is all we know. How can it be wrong? Frankly, it is wrong because it is insufficient for most of us. The experience of most people is that our lives, our reality that we live with, isn’t enough. We are discontent—and the discontentment we feel isn’t just because we want more than what we really deserve. Rather, the life we have is just missing something. Some of us think we know what is missing. Others just feel discontent without really knowing why.
Sure, there may be a few who are completely content with their lives. They have everything they need and while they might fine tune their lives, they are pretty happy. These self contented folks are looking at all the rest of us—the majority of humanity— and telling us that we just need an attitude adjustment. They figure that the problem we have with reality is that we aren’t looking at it the right way. We just need a positive outlook, or some faith, or whatever. I guess they would look at a starving child and tell her to get a positive outlook, or a homeless drunk on the street and tell them that he just needs to get a life.
What do we really want/need?
Our discontent isn’t just mental. We have basic needs that every human must obtain or they will languish, go insane, do desperate acts and die. The real reason we are discontent with our lives—most of the time—is because our needs are not met. Perhaps we aren’t starving and we have a place to live, but that doesn’t mean that our lives are completely full of everything we need. Even the wealthiest person in the world could be the loneliness; even the most popular person in the world can be wracked with guilt. Every human, no matter who they are, no matter where they live, have six basic needs that must be satisfied:
1. Survival needs
This is the category we usually think of when we consider the “needs of the poor” or just “the needy”. This is the area of physical, bodily needs, without which we would die in short order. We all have need of nutrition, water, warmth, and sleep. We can’t live without it. Some things, however, aren’t considered in our list of needs that must be considered in an urban landscape, for instance, going to the bathroom. Have you ever been in an area of town where there the only restrooms are private ones in businesses, but you had to go… NOW? Also, health is a need. Not necessarily medicine. What we need to recognize is that there is a difference between the need we have and the particular means we use to meet that need. Medicine is one way of obtaining health. There are other ones that have greater or lesser effectiveness. Food is one way of obtaining nutrition, and depending on the kind of food you eat, it may be more or less effective for your nutritional needs. Warmth is necessary, but clothes—although the most socially acceptable method—is not the only method of obtaining warmth. Thus, the basic list is necessary, but there are a variety of methods of obtaining these needs. This is what we will find for the rest of the categories of needs as well. And no one will dispute that these are needs, either. Without nutrition, or water we suffer starvation and dehydration. Without warmth, there are various ailments we get from the cold. Without sleep, we go insane. Without health, we become ineffective and eventually die before our time. Without a place to go to the bathroom… well it gets messy. And the ultimate survival need is life itself. If our bodies do not have life, then we lack the very basic need to our existence.
2. Security
We all need to feel safe. If we do not feel that we can safely leave our houses, then we spend much of our energy just attempting to do what we need to do on a daily basis. If we do not feel safe within our homes, then we find reasons to avoid being there. Security is, for the most part, in our heads. This is why the tough man will say to the fearful boy, “Get a grip! It’s all in your head!” But fear is based on the survival need of living, and the compulsion to avoid things that cause us to lose our survival needs. We will do what we need to do to keep our job because of fear of losing our housing or food. We will be nervous the first time we drive because there are two-ton fast-moving vehicles out there that could kill us and we are suddenly in charge of one. Yes, we can call it anxiety, and it is mostly in our head, but the fears are based on a real, survival-threatening situation.
So we create situation in which we can be safe. We avoid people and situations which have caused us anxiety in the past. We create securities, sometimes having little to do with real security, in which care we can feel safe. And sometimes we attack those who make us feel fear. The foundation of war is fear, not drive for power or glory. Without some sense of security, a feeling that we can do something about the scary world that surrounds us, then we live in tremendous anxiety, always vulnerable, unable to live. If we see someone walking by and see them as a threat, we might attack them, even if they did nothing wrong. So a sense of security is necessary, not only for ourselves, but for those around us.
3. Society
Aristotle has been misquoted, “Man is a social animal.” John Donne said, “No man is an island.” Apart from their anthropomorphisms, they are absolutely right. Sometimes people drive us crazy, but we are all driven to be with people. There are hermits—exceedingly rare—but even they connect with humanity on occasion, because they find that they cannot live without other humans. A single individual cannot perpetually live without other humans. Each individual is like a puzzle piece that makes no sense, has no meaning, without other humans. Unless humans get together there is no conversation, no truth, no children, no significance, no meaning to life. Human individuals were never meant to be alone. To be isolated is the road to bitterness, to depression, to insanity.
4. Honor
The term “honor” is often associated with machismo, the strange concept that receiving respect is more important than life. But as much as we might put down the actions of the Latin male, they have put their finger on a basic need of humanity. Even if we do not all demand respect, we all need it. If a wife gets no respect from her husband, she will seethe in bitterness or languish in depression. If a business deal is not lubricated with respect, it will never happen. If polite conversation is not had with strangers, then resentment and angry words may surface. On the surface, it may seem strange to call honor a basic human need. After all, we know people who seem to live without it. But the ones who truly gain no honor, have nothing in their lives that they can tell themselves that others respect or find praiseworthy, these are the self-haters, the shamed, the useless, the fearful and the desperate. If a person has everything in their lives going well, but they lack honor, they will set aside their well-being and their very lives to obtain it. More people have committed suicide because of the need of having others honor them than depression. Yes, these honorable deaths are heroic and praised, so we don’t call them suicide, but what they really mean is that the hero didn’t take enough precautions to protect themselves. For a hero, death is not as strong as the honor that lingers far longer than one’s life.
5. Inner peace
We all deal with stress. Stress is a huge part of life, and we have systems in our bodies whose major function is to deal with the stresses we deal with. There is a good stress that uses those systems to help us accomplish things. And there is bad stress that overwhelms these systems, and makes us unbearable to be around. To deal appropriately with stress is to have inner peace, to deal with all we have around us in the best way possible. We can deal with life because we have had time to consider the best course of action in a given situation and we have the energy to take that action. To not have this inner peace is to live in turmoil, confusion, self-doubt and rejection by others. To lack inner peace, ultimately, is insanity. It is to be driven to do things that harms oneself or others in order to obtain that peace.
6. Pleasure
If you look at the various lists of needs that psychiatrists have created over a half-century of study (for instance, google Abraham Maslow), pleasure or joy is the one area that is never listed. Yes, most of us agree, we all seek pleasure. We giggle at the fundamentalists who try to separate areas of pleasure out of their lives, only to be caught up in it as hypocrites. And looking for pleasure may take up a lot of our time. But it isn’t really a “need.” Most of us sound like an alcoholic saying we don’t really need the drink. We all are in need of some pleasure, some joy. The most basic form of pleasure in interest or curiosity. We gain this pleasure simply by walking down the street and seeing the people walk by. We obtain pleasure by looking at beauty in nature, in listening to a fine piece of music. Now imagine never having any pleasure at all. Never gaining any joy. Never having interest in anything. Being completely apathetic about everything. In psychiatry they call this chronic depression. Without pleasure or joy in anything, we become listless, merciless, and suicidal.
Secondary needs
These six are the basic needs that all humans have without exception. At this point, many of us would jump up and say, “But what about housing? That wasn’t mentioned. And what about employment? What about sex? What about power? And money?” It is true, for most people these things are necessary. So why didn’t they make the list? First, because these items aren’t necessary for every human, like the top six are. In our society, these items—like money and sex—loom so large that they seem absolutely necessary to everyone. However, there are many who live without these items. There are still entire cultures that do not need money and many individuals have made the choice to live without sex. So we know that these aren’t absolutely necessary as a basic human need.
Also, these items are actually systems of meeting the needs already mentioned. Sex is significant in our lives because it is a means to many ends. Sex provides pleasure, it helps us connect with and be intimate with another human and it perpetuates the survival of humanity at large, and so it is a popular means of obtaining at least three of the six basic needs. Money is not a need in and of itself, but it is a popular method of obtaining all of the basic needs. Employment isn’t absolutely necessary, but it has proven to be a successful means to obtaining money—but employment also is in itself a system of giving honor, self-satisfaction, social interaction and sometimes pleasure to those who work in that system. But there are other means of meeting needs than that.
So I call these systems of meeting needs “secondary needs”—not absolutely necessary, but they are the systems our society and culture created in order to meet the six basic needs we all have.
Contrary needs
So back to our discussion of reality. If these are the basic needs of humanity, and our societies have developed strategies that are typically successful to meet these needs, why are most of us so miserable? Why haven't we reached utopia, where everyone’s needs are met? Because, ultimately, for the majority of people, our lives and societies have been unsuccessful in reaching a proper balance of needs for all people.
Within each of us, a battle rages between one set of needs and another. At times, our needs work harmoniously together so that we find overall satisfaction. But often our needs are in conflict against one another. For some people, a drive for something that interests them—to avoid boredom—puts them in perilous situations. These are the adventurers, those who put themselves in danger—like halfway up a steep mountainside—to keep themselves enjoying life. Sure, their security may be compromised, and they are acting against their drive for inner peace, but at least they aren’t bored. Others are so desperate for honor that allow their own lives to be threatened—the heroes as mentioned above.
And we often put our inner peace in jeopardy in order to obtain other needs. Sometimes we can’t stand to be with people, we need to be alone to regroup, but guests come over and it isn’t polite (it is dishonorable) to ask them to leave, so you stay and talk (which meets a social need, but not your peace need). Or we may stay at a job in which we are daily dishonored because we need the money to pay for our housing and food (survival needs). We make choices like this almost every day—allowing one need to be crushed in order to meet another.
Our lives are also miserable because of conflict with others. It happens so often, in our minds, that to meet our need is to not allow another person’s need to be met. For many people, to obtain honor is to dishonor another person—if you give one person lower esteem, it raises your own. For others, it is easier to obtain nutrition or rest by taking it away from other people. For others, security is maintained by making sure that other people’s security is threatened. The easiest way to meet needs, for many, is to see what fulfills other people’s needs and take it away from them to obtain it for oneself.
Thus, our society remains in conflict, and the things that meets people’s needs are passed around, the ones with the greatest resources having while others with fewer resources lacking.
One other thing takes people away from meeting their needs—the insistence of others who think they know what other’s needs are and how to meet them. This is a weird twist on “do unto others as you would have them do to them.” Have you ever had a well-meaning relative force you into an uncomfortable situation—a blind date, an unpleasant job, going to some quack—all to meet some “need” they think you must have? Well, whole groups of society are doing the same thing to the poor, the mentally ill, the elderly, the disabled, the outcasts, the lonely, the hated, the criminals. And rather than meeting the needs of the needy, they end up perpetuating the problems because they never understood what makes these specialized groups of people tick.
Needs and the Basic Human Desire
But humanity has never given up on tweeking their particular society to see if it will become the utopia they imagine is just around the corner. Idealistically, each individual human wants to see all of their own needs met and be satisfied with their lives. Some make it, but most don’t. And large groups of humanity want to see the whole of humanity have their needs met. To have one’s needs met, completely is what is called in religions, “salvation.” And it is also the needs of a large group met, if not all humanity. This “salvation” is the goal of new nations, the goal of politics, the goal of philosophy, the goal of education, the goal of most non-profits, the goal of psychiatry, the goal of economics. The basic human desire is the meeting of human needs—our own first, then our society’s and, in some cases, the worlds’.
But this basic human desire has never been met. And it is not being met for most people. Just knowing what the needs are don’t meet them. And telling people to be content doesn’t make them so. Life has always been unsatisfactory. And there is little evidence to see that it ever will be, for most people. The basic human desire, “salvation”, is perpetually beyond our grasp, although we continually imagine it to be at our fingertips.
Ultimately, our reality—all of our experience, knowledge, all that we love and are comfortable with, what we believe and what we have—is inadequate. If you consider your life to be miserable or difficult, it doesn’t meet your needs. If the people you know and agree with and share everything with are miserable and no matter how much they tried and changed in order to improve their lives, they are still miserable and without any real hope, then your reality—the reality you both share—has failed them.
What other options do we have?
If our reality is inadequate—if it doesn’t meet our needs nor the needs of the people closest to us—what can we do? I mean, reality is all there is, right? How can we get beyond the miserable existence that is part of who we are, the foundation of our very being? Well, to a certain degree, we can’t. We’re stuck with what we’ve got. But humans throughout history in every society has tried to solve this problem, to figure out what to do with reality to fix it or to at least deal with what is here. There have been four basic solutions that humans have come up with to deal with the miserable reality we live in and with:
1. Accept reality
Many have said, “Reality is what it is. There’s nothing to be done about it. As miserable as it is, we need to be content with what we’ve got.” Some have said that we can find our needs being met and our lives having meaning within the meaningless reality. In a sense, this is a trick of the mind, an illusion of the consciousness to take on a single event or person or thing and pour all meaning and languishing needs into the one aspect of life. This aspect could be a relationship, or one’s work or an event of the past which fulfills one’s life and all the missed needs or desires are pushed aside to obtain a limited contentment, at least for oneself, The basic plan of this person is to accept reality, whatever it is, however you can. If you can’t find satisfaction for anyone else, at least you can find it for oneself.
2. Search for Utopia
Others have said, “There must be someplace where one’s needs can be met.” And they go to search it out. These will look for inner peace in yoga or other kinds of meditation. They may look into counseling or psychiatry. They might go to other lands and cultures to see if they have been more successful than the culture they grew up in. And not all of these searches are fruitless. Some people have found personal meaning and satisfaction through an inner search. And some have found another culture that they were more satisfied with and that met their needs better than the reality. However, this kind of search doesn’t help everyone, nor does it ever help humanity. For every person who changes worldviews or realities and finds satisfaction in doing so, there are a million who cannot, or who find their needs unmet in the very reality that someone else finds to be paradise.
3. Attempt to change reality
Some say, “We may not have our needs met now, but in the future it will be different.” While this was popularized by Star Trek, the idea is an ancient one, promoted by such famous names as Plato, Karl Marx and Martin Luther King, Jr. They all felt that somehow, somewhere, there would be an agent of change, which would transform their respective societies as an ideal. They were all highly critical of the reality they lived in, and yet they did not despair. They saw a seed of possibility that could create a completely just society that would meet everyone’s need. And soon after their time, they each saw a partial fulfillment of their ideal, but those fulfillments did not accomplish their dreams of justice. And this is the usual end of the hope for future justice. All idealistic politics, all transformational philosophies or religions—they all begin with a dream that is partly fulfilled, but ultimately leaving the future as just a little better than it was, but falling far short of meeting human needs.
4. Connect with an alternative reality
Finally, there are some who say, “Yes, this reality is miserable and nothing can fix it. We can try all we like, but in the end we need help from outside.” There are many—frankly, most people in the world—who have some evidence of an alternative reality outside of our current knowledge. Those who adhere to this—like almost every religion in the world— believe that we can’t fix our reality ourselves. There is someone, they say, outside out reality who has a more objective perspective on our issues and problems and can actually meet our needs better than we can ourselves.
Is this so? Can we really find another reality? Is there any real proof of it? And if there is, can they really help us, is there any real way to connect to them? The greatest authority of all time on an alternative universe, Jesus, says that there is. And, he says, he knows it, because he’s been there. And we can have our needs met, if we would just accompany Him to ask the alternative reality for help. To find if this is true or not, all we have to do is ask.
