Perception

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Someone asked me this question in my younger days and it ran circles in my mind. You can superimpose it on anything. If there was an accident on the road but nobody saw it, did it really happen? If there was too much sugar in this tea but nobody drank it, is it really too sweet? If you made an illegal u-turn and no policemen were around to see it, did you break the law?

From it I got to appreciate an aspect of perception. Many kids don't cry if there was no one around to see them cry. Few of us will bother wearing nice clothes if no one was around to see us strut in them. There are many things we won't do if we had no audience.

I'm no philosopher but of late, the things that are happening around me brought back memories of this question. The online news and blogs, they bring frightening news. They are the forest trees in the original analogy. They fall with a loud boom - IF you are reading them. If you don't read them, do they really make a sound?

Yes I know. Just stick your head out of the window and witness these things happening with your own eyes. But what if you don't have a window in the first place? Is anything happening out there? Did you know that such and such an atrocity is happening right now in such and such an African village? Its not reported. No one heard the tree fall. So did it happen?

From this, I learnt the thing responsible for creating our reality. Our senses. We see, hear, and feel our reality. If we lose our eyesight and our hearing tomorrow, our reality changes drastically. Well, maybe that's too radical to imagine. How about something simpler. There are fun bloggers who write only about fun. What they eat, what movie they watch, where they went for a holiday. That's all they see. That is their reality. Then there are political bloggers. They see betrayal, upheavel, pain, sorrow. That's all they see. That is their reality.

But wait a minute. Can paradise and hell exist in the same place? One filled with fun and the one filled with sorrow? Apparently yes. In fact using the falling tree analogy, countless realities can exist in one spot if there are countless people there. So, which reality is the right one?

Here is an experiment you can do to determine the answer. Spend the next one week reading nothing but fun blogs. Shut your eyes and ears to political news of any kind. Just enjoy the laughter and wonders of discovery. Then write down your description of the world on a piece of paper. The following week, turn last week's memories off and read nothing but political blogs. Shut your eyes and ears to fun news of any kind. Get angry, indignant, cynical. Write down your description of the world on a piece of paper. Then compare the difference with what you wrote last week.

The word 'avoiding reality' comes to my mind when we think of just reading fun blogs and ignoring the more 'down-to-earth' ones. But we only say this because we have decided to pay attention only to the trees that fall in the political forest. It is a conscious decision cast by some random mental process. From that perspective, it is no more real than the decision to make model airplanes and art passion be the tree that falls. The person that I met yesterday knew nothing about politics but he knows everything about woodworking. You might even say he lives in a world of his own. But I have a feeling he might think I live in a world of my own too.

My conclusion from this is, be careful of what we pay attention to, because what we pay attention to is what creates our reality. The reality is created inside our minds, not by something external. Its hard to imagine but just maybe, we have more control over our own personal peace and happiness than we think, simply by being careful with what we pay attention to.