Einstein said it was an illusion. Nietzsche stated that there were no facts – only interpretations. Picasso was very far from it when he expounded that everything you can imagine is real.
Today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, a meditation on the nature of reality.
A few weeks ago, I sat down with my friend, Cesar Soos, a frequent contributor to this program, and we began a discussion about a subject I’ve pondered a lot since encountering Dr. Keppe’s work a few years ago.
Keppe’s first important discover was what he has called psychological Inversion, a process whereby human beings and humanity as a whole invert values and perceptions, seeing what’s good as bad or dangerous or weak, and what’s bad as advantageous in some way. As Dr. Pacheco said in our Podcast about the Pathology of Power, isn’t it true that we see humbleness as weak, and arrogant and prestigious people as strong? Don’t we have a common belief that we achieve development and peace through war? These are examples of an inverted view of life that all of us have to a greater or lesser degree.
When I first began to study this psychological phenomenon, I asked myself this: if we are inverted, which it appears we are, what are we inverted from? It stood to reason, I thought, that we must be inverted from something. That began my fascination with the nature of reality. What can we say definitively about reality? Keeping in mind what T. S. Eliot offered on the subject – “Humankind cannot bear much reality” – Cesar and I sat down to see if we could get reality in our sights and pin it down somewhat.