What is the difference between reality, belief, and thought?
My reality is that:
- I was born into a society (or social contract) in the United States of America.
- The United States of America is a nation, one of hundreds of nations on a planet a finite land and sea mass, that is in orbit around our nearest star that we call the Sun.
- I am of the human species, one of millions of sets of living beings on this planet we call Earth.
- I have the ability to read and write in English, one of hundreds of languages used in our world.
- I think, learn, and love. I have the ability to take action.
- I want to live a life that will make my grandchild proud.
- You share most, if not all of the above as your reality.
And there is much more to our shared reality. But what is reality and what isn’t? What is the difference between thought, belief, and reality?
Reality, for the sake of this conversation, is the collection of things we call facts, or knowledge. We know that seven times seven equals forty-nine (7×7=49), that Washington, D.C. is our nation’s capitol, that the nation of Canada is above our northern border, and that our fingers and toes get wrinkled up if we stay in the swimming pool or bathtub too long. Some of what we call reality, or knowledge, is taught to us, with rules, formulas, proofs, and other data. Some we learn through experience, like touching a hot stove s painful. Some real facts will not change: like (7×7=49), you and I are humans, and we have the ability to take action. But many real facts can change with the passage of time. Nations can change borders or names. People’s actions can change the facts on the ground, as can nature, moving rivers or creating drought lands. People’s actions, even yours or mine, can alter the paths of roads, change the congressmen in our districts, the number of people born, or the number of people killed in our cities.
Belief is the certainty of something independent of proof. It may be central to one’s being. Belief in God, Allah, Jesus, Heaven, Nirvana, Hell, prayer, miracles, Karma, etc., are all unable to be proved, demonstrated, or conclusively evidenced. We may hold these things in our hearts as true, but not proven factual. We may find them to be factual in a life after this one, if indeed there is one.
And thought is more ephemeral than belief. What goes through my mind or yours is thought. Some of it is totally random—“I wish I had some ice cream” or “Who would do that?” or “How do I get out of here?” But thoughts aren’t reality. They are just ideas flashing through our consciousness. They can be reminders about something real we need to remember, they can be judgments about a reality we see (or we believe we see), they can be emotion-driven responses, they can be creative ideas, they can become obsessions if we keep revisiting them. Again, thoughts are not reality.
To an anorexic teenage girl, her thoughts may be “I am so fat” while in fact she is dangerously thin. To a paranoid-schizophrenic, he may be certain there are people out to harm him, while in reality he has no enemies, haters, or threats.
While many of my thoughts and yours are helpful in facing daily life on this planet, many more are simply–thoughts. A thought planted in us by constant repetition is still just a thought, not a fact. “Tuesday is Red’s Tamale Day” is not a fact! “You’re in Good Hands with Allstate” is not a fact, it is a sales pitch. A statement in itself is not a fact; speaking it doesn’t make it real nor does writing it.
It is a reality that many companies, individuals, and organizations constantly feed us all sales pitches. It doesn’t necessarily mean the pitches are true and demonstrable. And many of them are intended to sell us on believing them to be fact or reality. Have you ever been conned into doing something, because you believed someone, without knowing all the facts? I have. Have you ever heard the phrase “too good to be true?” That adage was born out of painful experience. We live in a marketplace where something is always being sold to us.
Sometimes what is being fed to us is to manipulate us. This is called propaganda. Used by individuals and large entities, it is also called lies or “gaslighting.” And often these falsehoods are linked to things we already know or want to believe are factual.
Maybe I’ve just become conservative or a bit wary because of the traps I’ve fallen into in my 74 years, but I‘ve learned to trust facts and reality. I have belief (but not because of many religious proponents having pitched me many times). And I have many thoughts, but I rarely act on the ones about which I can’t find legitimate facts, or don’t have personal knowledge and experience. We must find a way to own our own thoughts and ideas and not let others define them.