While I was on the ferry I had a thought…what if the way I see and describe reality were just my way of seeing it. My struggles, my personal sufferance, sense of loss, frustrations and the injustices that I see around myself. What if they were just the lenses I were using to filter reality, like a polarized film which filters everything else and selects among a virtually infinite number of possibilities, just the bad stuff. Is that possible? Do I choose the way I colour reality according to the polarization I apply on my filters, because yes we do filter reality, that’s a fact…but there is something objective out there, isn’t there?
When people wake up in the morning to go to work, if they happen to do something they love, then great, but the reality is that a high percentage of people are not doing something they enjoy but simply something that “pays the bills” and there are people in the current society who have to fulfil roles that objectively are not fun. Truly creative people are a tiny minority among workers. So it seems to me that this ideology of “you choose the way you see reality” might be true for those who have some degree of freedom in their daily lives, but not for the majority.
Clearly, whoever belongs to that elite part of population, talks with others belonging to that social group and goes around saying that reality is a matter of interpretation, yes…because their polarization gives them that colour of reality in front of them. Their creative and free soil allows to have that kind of filter. So they are right in seeing things in a certain way, as well as others, are true when expressing opposite view, because their lenses filter other rays of reality. The point is, how do you change polarization of your filter…or better, would changing what you perceive of this reality affect your conditions? I don’t think it would directly, however, you’d be able to talk with these other social group who see reality in a much more pleasant way and would create better bondings with those and that as a consequence would eventually change your conditions.
Do the lenses have the power to change reality? I think reality remains an open set of possibilities…we just affect the way we perceive it, but we don’t affect what’s out there, which is probably a white canvas, neither good or bad. Perhaps it’s like an artistic drawing, neither beautiful or ugly, but just open to interpretations according to the filters available.