Category: reality

You create your own reality: that idea is a hard sell

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn reality, writing2 Comments

Some people say we–as individuals and groups–create our own reality. And by this, I mean the literal reality we experience rather than the more limited (but true) idea that we control how we view and react to reality.

The belief that we create the future we’re stepping into is a hard sell because, in part, nobody wants to take responsibility for fabricating a “bad things happen to good people” world for themselves. My response to that is usually, then create a reality in which bad things don’t happen.

This subject has been on my mind for a lifetime and, quite likely, many lifetimes. Since it’s a belief and not an avocation, I don’t have (or want) the kinds of credentials or resume that leading proponents of this belief such as Robert Lanza can bring to a debate. I don’t even remember when I first stumbled across the concept, though I think it was in high school. But it’s always made sense to me even though it’s never good to tell others that such things make sense to me.

I don’t want to go through life fielding questions like: “So Malcolm, what you’re saying is that if a person is killed in a terrible car accident, they created that accident?”

Yes, I am.

The idea that something like that could be true is senseless if one believes life is what it appears to be: you’re born,  you do various things, you die, and that’s all she wrote. This belief seems so flawed to me, I don’t know where to begin. But it’s the consensus, I think, even for those who devoutly believe in an afterlife.

But I think life is more complex than the idea that we only have one life so we best make the most of it.

Yes, we should make the most of it, though I think we’ll be back. And part of making the most of it is learning how to cope with the realities we create. I have no need to convince you of this, though I do think it’s worth pondering.

—Malcolm

Everyone wants to know the ‘future’ unless it’s ‘bad’

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn reality, writing6 Comments

When I used to read Tarot cards and the I Ching, people were simultaneously curious about the future and nervous about hearing what it might be. A person’s feelings about the results of fortune telling were based to a great extent on what exactly they thought the future was/is.

Some people believe in fate, a concrete future stemming from the workings of the cosmos while others believe in destiny stemming from an individual’s probable decisions leading toward a specific or general situation or set of circumstances. I don’t believe in either or that the future is engraved in stone in any way.

The best point of view I heard about a psychic reading is an old one, one that proposes that a reader is standing on the roof of a tall building viewing multiple city streets that are, of course, not totally visible to people or cars on those streets. S/he sees two cars approaching an intersection without traffic signals. They’re moving a the same speed. One prediction might be that there will be a collision. Yet that prediction is not fixed because either car may change its speed, pull into a parking garage, or stop at a store. The prediction, then, is merely a possibility based on current conditions.

Some say that the future is part of (or all of) God’s plan and that He/She moves in mysterious ways. The Presbyterians used to believe in predestination about not only the future in this world but whether or not we’d end up in heaven or hell in the world to come. The outcome was considered fixed. I was a Presbyterian in my K-12 years and thought that belief was silly. Later, Kabalistic studies convinced me there was nothing mysterious about the workings of the Creator.

Some say all time is now. Everything thing that will happen is happening at this moment in one venue or another. We just can’t observe all the venues with our physical senses. Lena, the cat in my Florida Folk Magic Series, has this view.

Some quantum physicists say that everything that can happen, will happen in one universe or another. This tends to be my view because I believe we create our own reality. That is to say, the future is what we are creating unconsciously (usually). A lot of people subscribe to this idea in a speculative sense but deny it when it’s applied to real conditions. They don’t want to believe that if they’re in one of the two cars the psychic sees from the roof of the tall building, they have chosen to be in the collision if there is one.

That notion is counter-intuitive and/or horrifying when you get down to specifics and so people think it’s easier to say that God, fate, destiny, luck, or randomness determines the future rather than to say one has any responsibility for it. Personally, I want the responsibility and find that much more palatable than disagreeing with Einstein and believing that God does play dice with the universe. You won’t be surprised to hear that I never express this belief in public after a tragedy because that would shake up the belief system of another person who is suffering a loss.

In fact, most of the time, it’s just better for me to keep my mouth shut except in “what-if?” posts like this one where many readers will just assume I got into the locoweed again.

—Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of the Florida Folk Magic Series, including the novel “Lena.”

Captain Kirk Did a Brave Thing Today

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn reality, writing

Captain Kirk, aka William Shatner, was absolutely fearless when he flew aboard a Blue Origin mission nearly 350,000 feet above the Earth’s surface. The risk wasn’t his age–the oldest guy to ride a rocket into space–but all the villains waiting for him to let his guard down.

Let’s look at what Kirk did not have:

  • Warp Drive
  • Shields
  • Phasers or photon torpedoes
  • Spock
  • Scotty who could recalibrate anything into something else
Bird of Prey

Who was out there?

  • Khan
  • The Borg
  • Dominion
  • Q
  • Xindi
  • Romulans
  • Klingons
  • Nero

Shatner would have been a sitting duck if a Klingon War Bird had suddenly de-cloaked over in the West Texas blue sky and beamed Shatner into another story. Jeff Bezos would have had a lot of explaining to do if the capsule and come down empty. Heaven help us if Congress had gotten involved.

In fact, had Shatner, Dr. Chris Boshuizen, Glen de Vries, and Audrey Powers been beamed aboard a Klingon ship, a wormhole would have opened up between the Star Trek reality and our consensus reality, allowing all kinds of stuff into our world.  The Borg Queen would have been running for Congress and Q would have been appointed Secretary of State. Needless to say, Boeing would be coming out with a new line of ships.

We were lucky today. Shatner’s presence in space could have changed everything. Perhaps it did.

—Malcolm

Did the past really happen?

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn reality2 Comments

If you read deeply into the libraries of esoteric books, sooner or later you’ll discover the theory that the past, present, and future are all happening at once. Being mischievous, I gave this belief to the cat (Lena) in my novel Conjure Woman’s Cat who believes this theory is true. I think Lena might be right.

If you watch enough episodes of Laurence Fishburne’s “Histories Greatest Mysteries” on the History Channel, it’s easy to start wondering if anything was what it seemed. Okay, so maybe John Wilkes Booth wasn’t shot in the barn when federal troops arrived. There’s a persistent amount of lore that he was sighted in numerous places in subsequent years.

For years, eyewitness testimony that the Titanic broke into two sections before it sank was discounted until 1985 when Robert Ballard found the wreck and proved that the eyewitness accounts were correct. I wonder if we will ever see the end of the various theories surrounding the Kennedy assassination. Heck, we can’t even be sure what’s true and what’s not true when it comes to the machinations of the federal government.

I’m thinking of all this because–with no fresh reading material in the house–I’m re-reading Holy Blood, Holy Grail, the nonfiction book from which Dan Brown drew information he used in The Da Vinci Code. One thing you notice in Holy Blood, Holy Grail is that a lot of important information has been suppressed or destroyed over the years by powerful people and institutions.

I’m not an aficionado of conspiracy theories. I tend to see them as misdirection away from the actual truth. On the other hand, over time, many of those theories were finally discounted by people who said they made it all up; it was a hoax from the beginning. When I see that, I tend to think the recantation is the real hoax.

Maybe yesterday is a computer simulation. Maybe the past is controlled by the powerful, similar to the idea that after a war the victors write the history. Maybe we’re all too busy earning a living and looking after our families to see the signs and portents that would help us tell the difference between what we think we know and what actually happened.

As an author, I love this chaos. It provides so many loopholes in reality that we can write alternative histories in which readers think, “Hmm, what if that’s what really happened?” If your intuition is above average, you might have a sense of what is real history vs. what is sanitized history.

Speculation about “the real story” seems to be a national pastime that’s bigger than baseball. We love hearing “the straight skinny” and the gossip behind the headlines. Everyone wants to be “in the know” even if they are, in reality, quite clueless. Ah, this situation is a trickster’s paradise.

—Malcolm

When writing novels, I believe the author’s first duty is to conceal rather than reveal. You’ll see how this plays out in such books as Fate’s Arrows and “Conjure Woman’s Cat.”

Survivor: Island of the Idols

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn reality

This is Survivor’s 39th season with two seasons per calendar year. I’ve watched every season except for the first two or three. My wife watched those and then somehow I got lured into watching the program.

Like other reality shows, we know that what we see on the screen isn’t exactly what happened. The same is true for shows like “Chopped” and “House Hunters.”

Even though we’re not watching reality, we’re still watching players acting and reacting in a fishbowl. Watching this is an interesting experience for a writer whose stock in trade is people watching.

One interesting facet of the show is the contestants’ views of truth vs. lying. If you have no deception in your game at all, you probably won’t last. Nonetheless, some players maintain they’ve never lied to anyone during the game in spite of the fact that viewers see that those players’ games haven’t been totally pure.

In this season, a female player complained that a male player was improperly touching her. What he did was on tape. These complaints led to the producers getting involved and talking with contestants individually and in groups. The issue was discussed at Tribal Council and there have been some recent comments by contestants now that the two episodes have aired. What surprised me was that the woman who made the complaint was voted off the show and, while the man received votes, he appears to have survived the uproar.

What’s true, what’s not? Some contestants say during conversations on the show that the show is a microcosm of what’s happening in society. Do they truly think so? How can we know? Yet, they may be right to some extent for the “touching controversy” brought out a variety of emotions and viewpoints just as the “Me, Too” movement has been volatile in our lives of late. Not that I see Survivor as a true forum for discussing major issues, but what the contestants say is interesting.

It’s been fun seeing how the producers have tinkered with the show over the years to keep it from getting boring and to constantly introduce new options/rules that surprise the contestants. Then, too, we’ve seen a variety of programs featuring former winners, some of whom–over time–have appeared on several seasons. I begin to wonder how many of them will one day say that their career was appearing on Survivor.

There’s probably no good excuse for watching this show more than any other. We tend to watch NCIS, Grey’s Anatomy, How to Get Away with Murder, and some other shows every week. It’s relaxing. It’s time away from writing and chores. We tape everything and then watch it later (minus the commercials). With Survivor, we’ve had to watch the show before the night it airs is over because people will be talking–either on the news or Facebook–about what happened. That’s less true today than it was during the show’s first years on the air.

Is this just another addiction, a sensible way to relax, or a legitimate way of learning more about people? I have no idea.

—Malcolm

 

 

Your perfect world

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn beliefs, illusion, reality2 Comments

“Our Fortunes and Lives seem Chaotic when they are looked at as facts. There is order and meaning only in the great truths believed by everybody in that older and wiser time of the world when things were less well known but better understood.” — Roderick MacLeish

The psychiatrist Eric Berne (“Games People Play”) wrote in one of his books that when confronted with a troubled patient, he would ask himself what one would have to do to a person while they were a child to make them turn out the way they did, needing the help of an analyst. Answering that question was often the beginning of treatment.

Berne’s statement had a great impact on me, especially while I was working at state facility for the developmentally disabled. We could see, in many of the residents’ histories, the effects of abusive, inept and often criminal events in their “upbringing.”

When we compared our residents’ current behaviors to their case histories, we knew the answer to Berne’s question.

Unfortunately, asking Berne’s question outside the world of psychology and mental health has led us all down some bad roads. They are roads of blame and excuses. Ask anyone why his dreams for his own perfect world never materialized, and more often than not, he will have a list of people and events from his past that “created” the world he is now experiencing.

He may have, filed away inside his mind, a mental dossier complete with facts, eye witnesses and the testimony of experts that proves he would be happy/rich today, if his parents hadn’t thrown his bike in the trash when he was 15…or if his former spouse had let him finish college…or if his boss hadn’t fired him at a financially precarious moment.

We take great comfort in such blame and in the fact we are using pure reason when we gather the facts that prove we are totally innocent when it comes to the slings and arrows that comprise our current lot in life. However, these facts seem to obscure the real truths, those we’re afraid to consider.

How odd that the very truth that presumably should empower us to fix everything that we claim is broken in what could have been our perfect worlds, is the one truth left off the table. If we could walk into a courtroom and sue everyone on our list of nasty people responsible for how we ended up, a wise judge might explain to us the meaning of such terms as contributory negligence, co-conspirator, and accessory.

Hearing such explanations might show us how to fix what we don’t like. Yet, ask anyone if he played a role in the way he’s ended up. Ask if he believes he created his present reality in any way, shape or form, and he will laugh off such ideas. It’s less personally devastating that way.

It’s far past time, I think, to stop asking Eric Berne’s question. While it’s a helpful question to ask, it’s skewed our thinking away from essential truths about why things are as they are. These days, I’m more inclined to ask questions based on James Allen (“As a Man Thinketh”) approach:

The aphorism, “As a man thinketh in his heart so is he,” not only embraces the whole of a man’s being, but is so comprehensive as to reach out to every condition and circumstance of his life. A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts.

That leads to a far different question: “What have I done with my life so far to end up in the place I am now?”

—Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of the Florida Folk Magic Series.