What is Reality?

A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusions. By “thoughts” I mean specifically chatter in the skull: perpetual and compulsive repetition of words, of reckoning and calculating. I’m not saying that thinking is bad—like everything else, it’s useful in moderation: a good servant but a bad master. And all so-called civilized peoples have increasingly become crazy and self-destructive because, through excessive thinking, they have lost touch with reality. That’s to say: we confuse signs, words, numbers, symbols, and ideas with the real world. Most of us would have rather money than tangible wealth. And a great sourced from occasion is somehow spoiled for us unless photographed, and to read about it the next day in the newspaper is oddly more fun for us than the original event.

This is a disaster. For as a result of confusing the real world of nature with mere signs—such as bank balances and contracts—we are destroying nature. We are so tied up in our minds that we’ve lost our senses and don’t realize that the air stinks, water tastes of chlorine, the the human landscape looks like a trash heap, and much of our food tastes like plastic.

Time to wake up. What is reality? Obviously, no one can say, because it isn’t words. It isn’t material—that’s just an idea. It isn’t spiritual—that’s also an idea; a symbol. Reality is this: You see? We all know what reality is, but we can’t describe it. Just as we all know how to beat our hearts and shape our bones, but cannot say how it is done.

To get in touch with reality there is an art of meditation—of what is called yoga (or dhyāna) in India, chán in China, and Zen in Japan. It is the art of temporarily silencing the mind, of stopping the chatter in the skull. Of course, you can’t force your mind to be silent. That would be like trying to smooth ripples in water with a flat iron. Water becomes clear and calm only when left alone.