Surviving whole

It's easy enough these days to hold a belief that reality is something we have control over. It flatters us to think that way. Like the notion of "survival of the fittest" it is a convenient myth, which simplifies our understanding of what's out there and makes it seem less threatening, more susceptible to our personal control.

Yet, I wonder how far faith in this convenient principle (of mind over matter) can be taken, by most people. There has to come a point when the urge to flatter oneself by believing in the greatest possible range and depth of one's own mental power over matter gives way to realisation that there are things out there that menace with one, despite the immensity of one's personality and will.

"Survival of the fittest" along with the feeling that reality is a mental (rather than a material) construct, is a view that emerges out of modes of life that are incredibly easy, which make no contact with anything threatening that does not appear to come from one's own mind. Such a view of the world evolves from spending time in plush, air-conditioned supermarkets, from travelling around buffered from the world in shady limousines, from travelling in only the well-worn passages of the anthill of life. To hold fast onto such an ideology, one must never experience anything disruptively real -- not the bulldozer smashing down one's home, not the sunlight cutting through the synthetic breeze.

It is imperative to live as if the reality not created by one's mind does not exist. One must be the creator and originator of all things -- a veritable brain in a vat -- in order to believe in the most flattering ideas concerning oneself, and one's place within the universe.

But this view denourishes one, and deprives one of a more complex existence. The hardships of life thus beckon -- desiring to give one complexity and to replenish marrow. In order to encourage such hardships, one should simply relinquish, just a little, the fervid intensity of belief in oneself.