What is reality?

 Bear with me, this is a long one but I will try to make it as short as I can. 

Most of us, have some kind of idea about what we think is real and what we think is false. Most people would feel that if we can feel, see or hear something it is real. Is it? You feel, here and see things in your dream is it real? Well I don't want to get into this quite complicated subject, I will cut the chase. In Advaita (one of system of philosophy of Hinduism) we consider something as real if it exists always. Now this is a good test. But why should one be concerned about reality at all. Who cares, right? Well there is a good reason to care. Reality gives us a sense of stability, after all it is not going to change. The unreal will always create apprehension, it is going to change, and to what we don't know, it may be according to our expectations or may be not. In any case there is the sense of uncertainty that most of us know is not a good state. In fact the entire insurance industry is based on this uncertainty, as we humans don't like bad surprises. So having some reason to care about reality, now we can proceed to find out what is real out there.

Sadly we realize that there is nothing out there that does not change or is there ? Well people usually cite the sun, moon, earth etc as real unchanging things but we know according to science this is not the case. But then we can argue at least for practical purposes it is real. But there is a problem with this too. Every night as we go to sleep all these change - we experience daylight in our dreams, we sometimes dream of strange places may be not on earth, and so on. The point being that what we experience in one state changes in another state of mind like in waking or dreaming. This naturally makes us wonder about the things we think are real or permanent. Our dream and sleep states seem to be able to turn our solid real world upside down in a matter of minutes. But a dream is only a dream we need not worry about it, right? But in a dream we worry nevertheless. If you had a tiger chase us in our dream we know how much we run and perspire when we wake up. So our dream seems to be real atleast during the duration of the dream. 


An astute reader may say well the experiencer of the dream as well as waking world is real since he does not change.  How do we know we don't change after a dream? Do we? Deep within each of us we know our experiences change but we as the experiencer do not? This we know is true. I am always the same person. I don't change at my core even though my body or my experiences change. 


So we have come to a point that everything is pretty much unreal except our core as an individual. Well what is this core? If I find it may be I will be happier since now some of my anxiety of change can be allayed. So reality is that which does not change and the only thing that does not change seems to be our core. In the next blog we will try to go into this core.