Reality Mine: Photographs and Memories

I've started a new blog dedicated completely to showing my perception of reality through the photographs I take. By definition (and by the title of this blog), I cannot post those pictures here albeit they would be an integral part of some of the thoughts that float through my mind from time to time. Due to such, I have created this blog: Magically Beautiful (<-- click on the name to check it out).

Do visit it some time when you feel like it.

Reality Mine: First Chapter

I asked my brother about this picture just a few moments ago. Yes, I have a brother. For that matter, I have 3 brothers: one older brother and two younger brothers. But, enough about that. As I was saying, I asked my younger brother about this picture some time ago. 

The conversation went this way:

me: This is a picture of what?

brother: Sunrise.

me: From where?

brother: Eh... I dunno. Africa?

Interesting thought. You see, I did not rip this picture off the web. This is not a picture of a sunrise at Africa. After all, I was the one who took this picture and I've never been to Africa. Although, I do plan to go there some time in the future; mostly likely as a member of an NGO like Red Cross. 

I took this picture last October 24, 2010 from my parents' bedroom window. It was not taken in Africa. It was not taken in some exotic jungle or whatnot. No. It was a picture I took from my home in the Philippines. Early that morning as the sun began to rise, I decided I would go get my mother's CANON Power Shot A480 and take a picture of the sunrise. What came out was this beautiful picture you now see here. And I find it to be one of the most fascinating pictures I've taken yet. 

However, this is not just a picture. This is a part of my reality. My reality of the world can be summed up into three categories: magically beautiful, unavoidably violent, and extremely confounding.

This is the first chapter, and here I wish to bring to your eyes the part of my reality that I perceive to be magically beautiful. It may not be as wonderful or enchanting to you as it is to me. After all, how we perceive reality differs. However, I will not allow that to stop me from trying to show you just how beautiful reality, life, existence can be.

I Cannot Know Your Reality

Often I have found myself thinking, contemplating about reality. Or, at the least, what it is that I perceive as reality. Am I really here? Is this real? Is what I'm touching now real? What is this that I am seeing, hearing, tasting, sensing now? What is the real? Is what I am perceiving real? Do people sense and process the world around them the same way as I do? Is what I perceive as reality also the same reality that other people sense?

More than once I try to answer these questions. More than once, I find myself at a dead end. After all, I am myself. I can never be anyone else other than myself. And, in that sense, I can never truly know how other people perceive the world. I cannot feel what they feel when they touch something. I cannot sense what they sense when they smell something. I cannot see what they see when they are looking at something. Even when I ask them how something feels or tastes or seems, my brain still has to process their answers. What they want to say through the words they speak may not be interpreted correctly, in accordance to them, by my brain. Additionally, what I am getting is secondhand information. When my brain has to interpret an answer, I have to imagine what that answer means drawing clues from my own bank of experiences and knowledge. My imagination could easily be 100% off tangent.

Evidently, the reality that the other perceives can never truly be known to me. I will never know if the reality I perceive is the reality that others perceive. People may say that it should be the same because one can read it in a book the same way. But how one processes the information in the book may be different from how another will process it. I say "may" because I cannot truly know. There is a similarity in how we may think, see, taste, hear, and feel. Just as how you are able to read this log right now. Or how you are able to watch the shows aired on cable just as a billion other people can. However, there is a fundamental difference in the realities we perceive. And that fundamental difference is that we are not one all-encompassing, omnipotent, omnipresent being. WE are separate in body, thought and deed. Our own language speaks of such separation between the "I" and the "you" and the "s/he". We acknowledge our separation by calling the self the "I" and the other as "you" or "s/he". A separation which, I believe, can never truly be bridged unless the human race starts working as a hive mind.

In the end, all that I can truly know is the reality I perceive, touch, feel, sense. Beyond that is no more than a void to me; a blackness I cannot penetrate not because I have no desire to, but because I simply cannot. I cannot because I am myself. I cannot because I am not you. I cannot because I am not the other. I cannot know your reality just as you cannot know mine.