What is real?
The nature of reality is nebulous and our writing can be too.
What is real? For a long time I thought I knew the answer to that question. What I could see, touch, taste, feel was definitely real. And those things were the same for everyone. I was real. My husband was real and all the places we went and things we did together were real. The “facts” that had been presented to me at school about physics, biology and chemistry and how they related to humans, animals, plants and the cosmos, were indisputably real. Scientists had made these discoveries and there was nothing more to be revealed. The same with the historians - the stories in the history books they told were the reality of humanity’s past.
When I believed all of this without question, my writing was very real too. I worked as a freelance journalist sharing factual stories about environmental sustainability and all of my fiction was firmly based in the real world. But then I started to be less certain about everything. After a while the only thing I realised that I knew for definite, was that I didn’t know the definitive answers to anything about how and why we are all here on this planet.
So I started to look at all the different ideas from science and spirituality that were trying to figure out the same thing. I knew that mainstream science wouldn’t give me anything very different to what I’d been taught in my school years so I started to look in the margins, to the outliers who were doing and saying things that upset many of their peers in the science world. I turned to Daoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Christianity to see what ideas they had.
One of the people that I came across on this journey is Gregg Braden and I watched his documentary series, Missing Links, on Gaia, and this made me realise that there is a lot more to the past, and to the present, than I had previously understood. This series was the first time that I had come across the idea that we are living in a simulation (not sure yet what to make of that but it’ll be discussed in a post soon!); that humanity is on a cycle and our history of civilisations goes back way further than we have been told; that there’re out of place artefacts that don’t fit with the timeline of our current civilisation; that our hearts have neurons in them just like our brains. Watching that series was a mind-opening experience.
I had already started to wonder about the nature of reality being different for everyone just from the things I had witnessed in my own life and travels, and when I started to think about memory and it’s role in creating our realities. I had suppressed memories that resurfaced after a long time; I had different memories of the same occasions to my husband and friends; I had no memory at all of things my husband tells me I definitely did with him, and vice versa. So I realised there is no one definitive reality.
I found this very freeing for my writing and it cut my stories loose from the “real” world. I have several in development that play with lots of the ideas I have discovered on my journey of discovery. Where the laws of Newtonian physics don’t apply. Where characters can directly influence the world they are in through the power of their mind. Where there aren’t always the arcs and structure of stories that we have been writing to for so long.
In one of the online courses I teach, Experiments in Flash, I use a Thai film as a great example of a narrative that doesn’t do what we necessarily expect them to do in the West. There’s no hero’s journey, no transformational arc, no clear plot. It’s called Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. In this film, a man is reaching the end of life in his current body and we spend time with him as he prepares for this. There are a lot of characters that come in and out of the narrative showing that all times are happening all at once, which is known as Eternalism. A definition of this from a scientific paper published in 2020 - Eternalism and Perspectival Realism About the ‘Now’ by Matias Slavov (a dense, mind-bending but illuminating read!) - is:
Eternalism is the view that all times are equally real.
So the past, the present, and the future are the same thing. This is a concept that Ted Chiang plays with in The Story of Your Life and it’s one I plan to explore in my writing too - I just haven’t found the right story for it yet. I’ll be posting a writing exercise related to this soon for paid subscribers to my Substack, as well as a deeper look at some of the ideas here and stories that are exploring them.
What I’d like to leave you with though as we think about the nebulous nature of reality, is that everything is happening right now and everything is different for everyone. I love this idea and when I remind myself of this when I find myself getting caught up in things, it helps me to return to mindfulness.
Thank you for being a paid subscriber to my writing. Do let me know what you think of these ideas and share any discoveries you have made about the nature of reality. Please also share my post with anyone you think would enjoy it.
Thoughtful article. I too have only recently come to the realisation that we experience the world through our senses and that our senses are not identical, but each one calibrated differently for each individual. It makes our perceptions different. Which plays havoc with our sense of what is real!
One of the benefits of getting older is realising there is so much you don't know; which is liberating and expansive, just like the universe. Thanks for a provoking read.