Get Real

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense. 

-Buddha.

If you want a clue as to how the power structures on this planet operate then it is helpful to make a couple of important distinctions. The first is the distinction between feelings and emotions. The second is the difference between ideas and reality. These concepts are important in this discussion because feelings are the response to reality and emotions are the response to ideas.

These distinctions are not meant to be definitive. I do not even claim that they are right. I have simply found them useful in my attempts to maintain stability in a world in which so many "ideas" are competing for my attention. Although he neither needs nor wants my endorsement I do agree with the words of Buddha "believe nothing..." in the quote above,  but would add to it "...and unless it corresponds with your direct experience".

Feelings and emotions are generally considered to be different words for the same thing, but in my view a feeling is a response to reality and an emotion is a response to a thought.

A feeling arises independent of thought, stimulated by a direct experience of reality. It is an authentic response in present time to the environment or situation you find yourself in. The direct present time experience you are having is your reality.

An emotion, on the other hand, is a response to a thought. That can be a thought about your current environment or situation, but is just as commonly a response to asome imagined reality, ordinarily an imagined reality outside of the present moment. This imagined reality is actually just an idea.

These distinctions are important because our behaviours and choices are largely dictated by our feelings and emotions. Whilst it may be impossible to control how somebody feels about a given situation, environment or person in the moment, it is quite easy to influence what somebody thinks about that same situation, environment or person. If you can control what somebody thinks then you have access to their emotional response and through their emotional response you have a good chance of controlling their behaviour.

To determine what somebody thinks you must first control the information they can access. Immerse people with the same information for a long enough time and they start to identify with the idea rather than their reality.

In a world so full of distraction most people pay very little attention to the present moment or in other words give very little attention to reality. The world becomes a construct of ideas of how things should or shouldn't be, and lives are directed by emotional response to thoughts which are on the whole not even their own.

This is why those seeking power are so determined to control what information is available to people, whether it is through education or the media. There are as many different versions of history as there are nations. The intrusion on reality is perpetual. Why do I need to hear the news on a music station every half an hour?

The recent furor over "fake" news demonstrates how important it is to control the narrative. But even more important to those in power is that people are kept distracted from reality because reality is far less frightening than the version of reality presented by the media.

The world would be a very different place if people reconnected to feeling and reality rather than live in emotion and (somebody else's) projected reality. 

In short its time for everybody to get real.

Love

Bill