“Every kind of ignorance in the world all results from not realizing that our perceptions are gambles. We believe what we see and then we believe our interpretation of it, we don’t even know we are making an interpretation most of the time. We think this is reality.”
~ Robert Anton Wilson
“We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.”
~ Anaïs Nin
Timothy Leary coined the term “Reality Tunnel,” which Wilson helped popularize. The basic concept is that truth is in the eye of the beholder. It’s not to presume that there is no objective reality, but that all reality is being reinterpreted through things like our senses, conditioning, belief systems and I would add, personality types.
Later, Bub Tribble coined the phrase “Reality Distortion Field” to describe Steve Jobs’s charisma and its effect on the people who worked for him on his projects. He pulled it from a Star Trek episode that described how a certain alien species created their own new world through mental force.
I’ve been asking lately: How often is our personal reality tunnel – the belief structures and conditioning that form our experience of reality – the product of other people’s reality distortion fields? How many belief systems are a cult of personality, and are we essentially assigning these people god status by accepting their reality tunnels as our own? If “history is written by the victors,” how much are our minds’ programming essentially products of past victors, people of which we may not even know the names? (If this were a Wilson book he would make an asterisk with a footnote that would say, “Dear Reader: I’m referring to everyone but you, of course.”)
Ultimately, those are rhetorical. My favorite questions don’t have answers, but still manage to shake something loose inside of me.
-Antonia
To reevaluate your reality tunnel, Wilson recommends taking a step back and using Alfred Korzybski’s exercise of General Semantics. If you can get past the older videography and music, I recommend watching this compilation of Wilson’s (in which he calls both himself and others “cosmic schmucks.”)
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7 comments
“Cosmic schmucks” resonated with me the most. When we introduce philosophy (i.e. General Semantics-based logic and other forms of navel gazing) into factual discussions (i.e. the “actual” color of the green grass is “green”, the unobstructed illuminated sky is blue, 2 + 2 = 4, H20 = water, 16 oz = one pound, etc.) we create an untethered social environment where there are no absolutes. Thanks for sharing, Antonia. It made me cringe, but thanks for sharing. And yes, I’m an INTJ.
That was so cool. Mind blowing! If I may be honest, I’ve come to view life and “reality” this way already, as a result of personal development that is. Homosexuality is valid from my point of view. I love who I love and like things I like. It doesn’t actually matter if it makes sense or is verified by others. That way of thinking really reduces anxiety for me about a lot of things. I also realize that this will likely not resonate to many and that is just a valid from their point of view.
I really love remembering and sharing with others that, ‘we must stop viewing others through our own eyes, and instead begin to SEE them through their own eyes.’ But perhaps that is never empirically true, so if that is the case, then why not hold space for them, have grace, or patience (whatever word works for you) for them. That’s a beautiful piece of reasoning.