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Kathryn, I'm wondering if you're coming up with too concrete of examples...altho you may look good in pink, yes your hair is brown.
Now something less concrete: I see the car as, say, driving slowly making me late.
While your perception is "The car is saving us from an accident up ahead I know it."
Which is true? It seems that it is in the eye of the beholder.
Which one makes us less tense...your perspective.
I choose perspectives that allow me to feel more peace of mind...they may even be
false...but my perspective of,say, losing a job is that it opened the window for something better.
Which is real? If I believe a better job will happen...it does, I find.
If I think what is real is my life is going down the tubes with this job loss, it will.
You know the old Tom Edison saying, If you say you can, you're right.
If you say you can't, you're right......something like that.
Kathryn, I'm wondering if you're coming up with too concrete of examples...altho you may look good in pink, yes your hair is brown.
Now something less concrete: I see the car as, say, driving slowly making me late.
While your perception is "The car is saving us from an accident up ahead I know it."
Which is true? It seems that it is in the eye of the beholder.
Which one makes us less tense...your perspective.
I choose perspectives that allow me to feel more peace of mind...they may even be
false...but my perspective of,say, losing a job is that it opened the window for something better.
Which is real? If I believe a better job will happen...it does, I find.
If I think what is real is my life is going down the tubes with this job loss, it will.
You know the old Tom Edison saying, If you say you can, you're right.
If you say you can't, you're right......something like that.
I see what you're saying, and I agree with a lot of it, but my question isn't about perspective, it's about reality. Regardless of our perspective, or perception, of some things, there is PLENTY of reality out there that exists in spite of our beliefs, or our limited perspective, or our perceptions.
Of course, more than one thing can be true about reality. To use your example - it's possible for both scenarios about the slow car to be true - and many others as well. But the car is a certain color - not whatever color a person thinks it is just because they are color blind, or drunk, or whatever.
About the job - yes, you can put any sort of spin on it you want, and you can find all sorts of positives, negatives, whatever, about it, but the reality is that you don't still have the job. The reality is that you are not going to continue to get a paycheck from that job, and that your insurance coverage is no longer in effect. This is reality whether a person accepts it or not, or whether a person gets a BETTER job with BETTER insurance coverage - whatever, it doesn't matter. Their perspective and belief system has no bearing on the reality of the fact that they no longer are employed by that employer.
That's my point. That's why it drives me a little crazy when people say, "Perception is reality." I always want to say, "It is what it is!" when someone says that! I mean, I get it - I worked in marketing for twenty years, so believe me, I get it that in a sense "perception IS reality." But that stance is so LIMITED - when it parodies the concept of being LESS limiting. Reality doesn't limit us, and denial of reality doesn't free us. As an objective, logical person, I want to understand reality - I want to gather facts, question, seek understanding, etc - of REALITY. I am not afraid of reality - I am more concerned when people deny reality than when they embrace it.
But if the dog has a terminal illness, then no matter how much your friend
BELIEVES the dog only ate something that disagrees with him,
that doesn't change the reality of the terminal illness.
I'm not so sure....depends on many things.
As a Christian, you know most anything's possible.
I was sent to sit with a dying person last year, bec no one was "sitting" with her. I was told her heart
was being pumped, a machine was breathing her,
she was in a coma and dying.
I sat for 3 hrs taking care of her drool, etc., in ICU. I got 2 phones calls, "Did u do a healing?"
"Ah, no, I was told she was dying." Sigh...
So as one arm was in the sleeve of my coat I knew I couldn't leave now without 'doing a healing'.
Next morning at 10:35, the call came, "It's a miracle, Lisa's sitting up, smiling, talking and off all the machines!!!"
My first thought was, "Well, yeah....that's what a healing IS.**.." I just said my usual, "Cool".
(Not my first rodeo.)
So reality? Bending reality? Changing reality? Walking on water? Calming storms?
Well, we know Physical Laws aren't the only rules in this Game.( I mean, I know that, I should say.)
That's my point. That's why it drives me a little crazy when people say, "Perception is reality." I always want to say, "It is what it is!" when someone says that! I mean, I get it - I worked in marketing for twenty years, so believe me, I get it that in a sense "perception IS reality." But that stance is so LIMITED - when it parodies the concept of being LESS limiting. Reality doesn't limit us, and denial of reality doesn't free us. As an objective, logical person, I want to understand reality - I want to gather facts, question, seek understanding, etc - of REALITY. I am not afraid of reality - I am more concerned when people deny reality than when they embrace it.
I'm not so sure....depends on many things.
As a Christian, you know most anything's possible.
I was sent to sit with a dying person last year, bec no one was "sitting" with her. I was told her heart
was being pumped, a machine was breathing her,
she was in a coma and dying.
I sat for 3 hrs taking care of her drool, etc., in ICU. I got 2 phones calls, "Did u do a healing?"
"Ah, no, I was told she was dying." Sigh...
So as one arm was in the sleeve of my coat I knew I couldn't leave now without 'doing a healing'.
Next morning at 10:35, the call came, "It's a miracle, Lisa's sitting up, smiling, talking and off all the machines!!!"
My first thought was, "Well, yeah....that's what a healing IS.**.." I just said my usual, "Cool".
(Not my first rodeo.)
So reality? Bending reality? Changing reality? Walking on water? Calming storms?
Well, we know Physical Laws aren't the only rules in this Game.( I mean, I know that, I should say.)
** Naturally, it wasn't me that did any healing.
Miracles are reality too. I mean, they DO happen occasionally, and when they do, it's a reality. The reality in that situation is that the person was critically ill, and now she's not. The reality wasn't "she's going to die within 24 hours" - it was that she was critically ill and her life at that point was being sustained by machines. You came along and now she's off the machines - and that's reality too.
Sometimes, I think we mislabel reality with our beliefs or fears or whatever. That's not the "fault" of reality - that's OUR mis-reading of reality.
I knew I couldn't leave now without 'doing a healing'.
Next morning at 10:35, the call came, "It's a miracle, Lisa's sitting up, smiling, talking and off all the machines!!!"
You are making a classic correlation-causation error here. You are just assuming that what you did had anything at all to do with the events that followed. There is no reason to think so and more than there is reason to think that homeopathy works simply because there exists some people who took it and then got better.
It is also an error of observer bias. You were there, did this "healing" and saw a recovery so you think this is significant. Taking an external observer position instead however shows that there are "healings" been taken all over the world and the survival rate, and unexplained recoveries rate, between the "healing" group of patients and the group not receiving such woo administrations... is not statistically different.
Quote:
Originally Posted by KathrynAragon
Miracles are reality too. I mean, they DO happen occasionally, and when they do, it's a reality.
Indeed. The events are reality. "Miracle" is just a subjective label we attach to it to acknowledge a rarity or unexpected event though.
If I fall off the top of a tall building yet survive then I might subjectively wish to call this a "miracle" but I would be doing little more than acknowledging I am in the tiny percentile of very real cases where this occurs.
The problem is in reading too much into the term "Miracle" as if it implies more than it does, such as the intervention by a non-human intelligence which reached in from on high and tweaked the system.
Next morning at 10:35, the call came, "It's a miracle, Lisa's sitting up, smiling, talking and off all the machines!!!"
I used to volunteer at a hospice house. One of my favorite patients was a woman with dementia who was brought in from a nursing home as it was felt she was in her final days and deteriorating rapidly.
What happened next was a study in how much people underestimate the impact of environment and real caring even for someone with profound dementia.
1) Her husband as in an assisted care facility right across the street and was able to visit her daily instead of a couple times a week. She knew his touch and the sound of his voice. He would read to her, talk her up and humanize her with the staff, show old pictures, etc.
2) Unlike the warehouse she came out of, we made sure she had fresh cut flowers, and every hour we went into her room and put on a new music CD of her favorite songs. We spoon fed her three times a day and talked to her.
She got progressively better and stronger and even somewhat communicative and finally (and perversely) had to be sent back to the nursing home because we no longer saw her death as imminent. I moved out of that city shortly after but my guess is that she bounced back and forth between the "warehouse" and hospice after that.
Now if I were still a believer and had prayed with her every day fully expecting her to get better I might have associated her "recovery" with my prayers but the thing about me is that even in my days as a theist I never saw "answered prayer" as that impressive because there were always alternative explanations that did not require an interventionist god. Also, the outcomes were never extraordinary. An extraordinary outcome in this woman's case would have been the curing of her dementia and the return of her full faculties and joining her husband in assisted living across the street. That wouldn't be asking for that much, it would still allow her to be old and feeble and would not even demand a number of years be added to her life equal to those she had spend in dementia-land. All it would be would have been was the restoration of her basic human dignity and an age-appropriate level of self-determination.
You never see even this kind of result from prayer, nor certain other classes of very concrete and unambiguous miracles such as missing limbs regenerated. In other words the people who need the most miracles get very half baked ones, if that. And no miracle goes beyond what is merely unlikely or unusual as opposed to outright impossible. Or if they do, you hear about them third-hand, as the stuff of legend.
This is, I think, what Kathryn is getting at, if I'm not mistaken. Miss Hepburn's willingness to believe anything so long as it's pleasing to her, even if she knows it is false, stands in contrast to Kathryn's insistence that some things just ARE no matter what you choose to think about those things. Philosophically we can debate whether reality is externally given or internally generated, but even if you lean towards a Matrix-like solipsism, you can't change certain things -- replacing missing limbs, raising the dead, emptying children's cancer hospitals, making Justin Bieber less smarmy or Kim Kardashian less self-absorbed. Some things just aren't amenable to positive affirmations.
Here is another look at the issue. Just came to me.
If I kill a person, I killed the person, I am guilty. That is reality.
But....In a court of law, I am not guilty until I have been proven....or whatever the phrase is, you all know it.
The two "guilties" are separate and distinct. Sometimes they match and sometimes they do not.
Why?
Once again it is those pesky observers!
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