What is real?
It is well-known that during hypnosis people may perceive things which apparently are not present in reality. Subjects can see giraffes in the audience and experience sensations for which there are no stimuli available, among a myriad of other phenomena.
This is commonly said to be separate from reality; an hallucination. Who or what actuallyd ecides what is 'real' and what is 'hallucination'? The most prominent factor i determining the answer to this is usually the majority. 29 people sitting in the audience see no giraffe, one does, and thus there is no giraffe. Another criterion is is to simply go for the most plausible explanation. Both of tehse are fundamentally flawed. A few hundred years ago it seemed very 'plausible' that the earth is flat, and this perception having been in the majority, it was accepted 'fact'. I'm not proposing that the giraffe in the audience is a self-aware cosncious being, yet it is more real than it might appear to be the case. The perception of the giraffe on the stage is just as real as that of the chairs on the stage
Looking from another angle, what if one man in the audience heard a dog bark, yet no one else present did? This could easily be the case if the person has exceptionally sharp hearing and the sound emanated from quite a distance. Is this sound an 'hallucination' now?
Clairvoyant people talk of seeing things which most others apparently do not perceive. This is along the lines of the member of the audience who hears what others don't notice. it's a broader perception of the electromagnetic spectrum, that of the cosmos which the human eye perceives. It's not an hallucination; they just have a more acute sense of sight. Using different terminology, you might say that they are hallucinating, but so is everyone else! It's a prerequisite for perceiving this world.
We have the ability to form totally convincing worlds in our heads; worlds which are transitory and ephemeral, rather than solid and real.
By believing this not to be the case, we are literally hypnotizing each other into seeing an 'objective' world. You can liken it to a society constantly telling people from the earliest age on that football is the only sport in existence. Children go to school being taught that, parents enforce it, friends accept it, and Tv channls speak of nothing else. If someone now says 'Hey, we can play games with an orange ball, and only ten people', that person might be labeled 'strange', because everyone 'knows' that football is the only sport in existence. If that sounds like an exaggeration, ask yourself when you last used your non-dominant hand to open doors or write. It's perfectly possible, but an armada of conditioning edits out the possibility frequently.
The importance of interconnectedness goes so far as that I would suggest people look into psychology when talking of science. Beliefs give people a sense of identity, so when they are challenged, at a subconscious level this may trigger a fear of dying. The subconscious doesn't reason or judge, and thus if the sense of self is derived from being a believer in a certain world view, as soon as that perception of reality is under fire, it is seen as a threat to existence itself. Understandably, the person now might try to vehemently contest this new model, or just ignore it.
The trick is to not identify with a perception of reality. This, paired with not attempting to control the outcome of investigation, such as wanting to make it fit into an existing paradigm, as well as going with the evidence no matter where it leads, brings forward real understanding.
This article was written by me some years ago, and was published in the magazine of the college I attended at the time. It has been amended only slightly from its initially published form.
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