self-constructed reality is unhealthy, or is it?

Inception consists of a brilliant concept that seems totally out of this world but at the same time it reveals a part of life that is so true that we are not consciously aware of it. Have you ever read a book then watched a movie made based on the story line of the book but always finding the book better than the movie? When we read the book, we can construct in our minds exactly how we want things to be, the story is like the outline, but we can fill in the details according to our preferences. Whereas in the movie, everything is being laid out plain and bare, there is not much room for our own imagination let alone personal preferences. Therefore, we always walk away from the movie feeling disappointed, because it didn’t display what we hope to see. In a sense, we prefer the story that we can fill in the gaps with our own creativity, making that our self constructed reality. Lets take it to another scenario of knowing someone, you might have certain preconceptions about someone constructing an image of how we think that person is but after getting to know that person in reality, we might not like what we see and become disappointed. But why is there the disappontment, its because we have injected our own self preferences into the persona of this person making him/her what we want them to be in “our minds”. So the character of the person created in “our minds” is our reality and continues to be real to us until the real reality strikes. So what happens if the real reality doesn’t confront us face to face, we’ll still be living in “our minds”, our self constructed reality and in the ”Inception” sense, a dream. So what is reality? Should it be something that is universal that everyone can testify to its realness or that which is real to a single person, even if it means its a self construct delusion?

Then comes the bigger question of what makes us who we are. To me, the things that make us who we are are our preferences, our choices, our behaviour, our emotions, our 5 senses that let us experience the world, the events that happened in our lives and the memory of all these things. Ultimately, we have to have memory of some form to be able to make a judgement of how meaningful or meaningless our lives have been. So then if its the memory that’s important to having a sense of self, does it matter how these memories are created? Does it matter if someone likes to lie in bed and weave together a story for his life the way he wants it to be and making it his memory as though it has really happened and thus in his mind, he is living a meaningful life? Or should memory be formed only by going through what we define as the real life only and not by any other means?  Have you forgotten the times when someone you liked smiled at you and suddenly the world seems to revolve around you, and of course you know that the world didn’t, but admit it, you did derive some pleasure from that and did it matter to you that it was “self- constructed”?  Afterall, as discussed above, what we thought of as reality so many a times in our everyday life could very well be self constructed and there might be much more in our lives that is “self-constructed” reality but we just didn’t realise it because we haven’t faced the real reality.

Confused yet?

So then going by the above arguement, things don’t really need to happen. It just needs to happen “in your mind” and it can still give the sense as if it has really happened.Even better, we can make it happen the way we want it to be! Because at the end of the day whether it really happened or it did not, whatever that is left of it is our momory of the event.  hehe, this sounds insane isn’t it? Now lets look at it from the flipside, if an event happened but you have lost all memory of it, then to you, it is as though it has never happened at all. So then can we say that having the memory of things that happened is more important than the thing happening in itself? So then we try to answer the question of “is it really that bad a thing to self construct reality”?

Think of a crazy (just think about crazy as what the general population will define it, i don’t even want to go into defining craziness at this point) person talking to a doll as if she would to her own child. We might think “this poor lady”. But stop! and think again, we might sympathize with her that she doesn’t have a real relationship with a living thing but in her mind everythings is real! She is talking to a child and its talking back to her and she finds that life is meaningful to be a mother. Is it then right of us to insists that she seeks treatment for her delusions so that she knows how meaningless her life had been conversing to a doll. Can we as humans really judge which is better? To live a meaningful life via crazy self constructed reality or a meaningless life through sanity? Who then are we to point fingers at others who live in self delusions, esp if it makes them happy?

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