What is reality?
Reality is a concept that has plagued the human race since the beginning of history. Philosophy is all about reality. It is the eternal search of religions to provide the answer to that one question. The search for reality is the same as the three fundamental questions. Who am I? How did I get here? Why am I here?
The millions upon millions of words that philosophers have written are all related to those three questions. Reality is the combinations of the three questions, who am I, how did I get here and why am I here into one word.
Someone on a spiritual path is on a search for the answer to that basic reality question. The Wall Street trader is searching in a different way, but it is the same search. Power and greed have the same base. We need some reality to tell us who we are.
We are all searching, but in different ways. The difference between a CEO 'earning' M$10 a year and a Buddhist monk is very little. They are both searching in their own way. Both need a reason for existing. The small difference is that the CEO may not realize it is all a search for reality whilst the Buddhist monk might.
Reality exists on many levels. At what we perceive as the physical level if we can bump into it, it is real. This level of reality has no meaning. It simply is. We can manipulate it to make physical live more comfortable (or less so for others, as in war), but it has no intrinsic meaning.
We have preferences. We might prefer to be warm rather than cold. We might prefer not to be hungry. But these are only physical preferences. Physicality is real and not real at the same time. It is real in the sense that it exists, but is not real in that it does not answer the reality question.
So where does reality exist? It exists within. It is simply our being that still exists when we can get rid of all the garbage. I am who I am. All three reality questions are answered when the 'I am" statement is understood. That is why the inner journey is getting rid of the garbage so we can see what we already know.
You cannot be told what you already know. You can only see it for yourself. Then you will know reality.
The ultimate challenge is to bring the 'I am' into the physical world. To create a physical world that reflects the inner world. Then we will know reality because we will have created it in our own image.
What is reality for the human race? We shall never know until we create it.
David Young.