Excerpted and adapted from last week’s e-mail correspondence:
The problem of long term happiness has been an obsession of mine for years. The self-help gurus all say that happiness is not something that happens to you, but rather something that happens in you. In other words, being happy isn’t dependent on anything outside yourself. I have a hard time believing this though. It seems tantamount to denying the reality of the world around us.
Phil once pondered out loud what it would be like if we went through all our typical behaviors but with the sole exception that we weren’t conscious at all. I told him it reminded me of Monday. ;)
conscious – Saturday
unconscious – Sunday
subconscious – MondayThe whole “reality is in the mind of the observer” idea implies that the world ceases to exist when you sleep, and is recreated when you awake. The other theory I like is that all creation gets its size from invisible “size rays” which emanate from your toes and fingers, and this is why things which are farther away from you look smaller. It’s another wacky slant on the philosophy of solipsism, in which nothing is real except you. Logically unassailable but somehow unrewarding.
So yes, I do believe in an external reality. I don’t think I’m imaginative enough to have come up with the whole world all by myself.