Reality tunnel

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Reality tunnel is a

representative realism, and was coined by Timothy Leary (1920–1996). It was further expanded on by Robert Anton Wilson (1932-2007), who wrote about the idea extensively in his 1983 book Prometheus Rising
.

Wilson and Leary co-wrote a chapter in Leary's 1988 book Neuropolitique (a revised edition of the 1977 book Neuropolitics), in which they explained further:

"The gene-pool politics which monitor power struggles among terrestrial humanity are transcended in this info-world, i.e. seen as static, artificial charades. One is neither coercively manipulated into another's territorial reality nor forced to struggle against it with reciprocal game-playing (the usual soap opera dramatics). One simply elects, consciously, whether or not to share the other's reality tunnel."[1]

Considerations

"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[2][3]

The idea does not necessarily imply that there is no

fundamentalist Christian reality tunnel or the ontological naturalist
reality tunnel.

A parallel can be seen in the psychological concept of confirmation bias—the human tendency to notice and assign significance to observations that confirm existing beliefs, while filtering out or rationalizing away observations that do not fit with prior beliefs and expectations. This helps to explain why reality tunnels are usually transparent to their inhabitants. While it seems most people take their beliefs to correspond to the "one true objective reality", Robert Anton Wilson emphasizes that each person's reality tunnel is their own artistic creation, whether they realize it or not.

Wilson — like

hallucinogens, and forcibly acting out other reality tunnels. Thus, it is believed one's reality tunnel can be widened to take full advantage of human potential and experience reality on more positive levels. Robert Anton Wilson's Prometheus Rising[4]
is (among other things) a guidebook to the exploration of various reality tunnels.

Similar ideas

"We don't see things as they are; we see them as we are." – Anaïs Nin

Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons used the word gloss to describe how the mind perceives reality.[5] We are taught, he theorised, how to "put the world together" by others who subscribe to a consensus reality. "The curious world of Talcott Parsons was where society was a system, comprised of interactive subsystems adhering to a certain set of unwritten rules."[6][7]

The meme is another source of gloss; it is "transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena."[citation needed] Because we're social creatures, there are reasons for us to adopt some social currencies.[citation needed]

In line with

world view, the stock market
), momentary needs, pathology, etc.

An everyday example of such filtering is our ability to follow a conversation, or read, without being distracted by surrounding conversations, once called the cocktail party effect.[10][21]

In his 1986 book Waking Up,

G. I. Gurdjieff
).

Some disciplines—

epoche (suspension of judgment) through skeptical
arguments.

Constructivism is a modern psychological response to reality-tunneling.[25]

"For Wilson, a fully functioning human ought to be aware of their reality tunnel, and be able to keep it flexible enough to accommodate, and to some degree empathize with, different reality tunnels, different "game rules", different cultures.... Constructivist thinking is the exercise of metacognition to become aware of our reality tunnels or labyrinths and the elements that "program" them. Constructivist thinking should, ideally, decrease the chance that we will confuse our map of the world with the actual world.... [This philosophy] is currently expressed in many Eastern consciousness-exploration techniques."[26]

Another example is Lacan's distinction between "The Real" and the "Symbolic". Lacan argued that the Real is the imminent unified reality which is mediated through symbols that allow it to be parsed into intelligible and differentiated segments. The symbolic, which is primarily subconscious, is further abstracted into the Imaginary (our actual beliefs and understandings of reality). These two orders ultimately shape the way we come to perceive reality.

See also

References

  1. ^ Neuropolitique, New Falcon Publications, 2006, p. 93
  2. ^ Wilson, Robert. "Real Reality". YouTube. Archived from the original on 2021-12-21. Retrieved 23 July 2011.
  3. ^ Wilson, Robert Anton (2003). "Maybe Logic: The Lives And Ideas Of Robert Anton Wilson -- Illustrated Interview". American Buddha. Retrieved 23 July 2011.
  4. ISBN 1-56184-056-4
  5. ^ Sam Keen, Castaneda interview, Psychology Today, Dec. 1972
  6. ^ Roger A. Salerno, Beyond the enlightenment: lives and thoughts of social theorists. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004, p.179.
  7. ^ Talcott Parsons, The Social System. New York: The Free Press, 1951
  8. ^ Matthew Alper, The "God" Part of the Brain: A Scientific Interpretation of Human Spirituality and God. Sourcebooks, Inc., 2008, p.50f.
    "The human mind, Kant contended, must be born, not as a clean slate, but with built-in 'modes of perception' that work to organize the multitude of information our sense organs are constantly imparting to us. Without such built-in processing mechanisms, we would experience reality as an unintelligible jumble of sense experiences."
  9. ^ Seed, How do brains filter data?
  10. ^ a b New Scientist: 'Party chat' brain filter discovered
  11. ^ BBC, Brain 'irrelevance filter' found, 10 Dec 2007. Retrieved 10-11-09.
  12. autism
    . Autistics are unable "to understand the social communication of neurotypicals", and "Three- to five-year-old autistic children are less likely to exhibit social understanding, approach others spontaneously, imitate and respond to emotions...."
  13. ^ Bryn Mawr: Serendip, Through Different Eyes: How People with Autism Experience the World
  14. ^ See Synesthesia, Apophenia
  15. ^ Thom Hartmann, How We Experience The World Differently
  16. ^ See Representational systems (NLP), Linguistic relativity
  17. Constructivism (learning theory)
  18. ^ See Solipsism
  19. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1003-09.2009
  20. ^ See Qualia
  21. ^ Cherry, E. C. (1953) Some experiments on the recognition of speech, with one and with two ears. Journal of Acoustical Society of America 25(5), 975-979.
  22. ISBN 0-595-19664-0
  23. ^ [1] Review by Howard Rheingold
  24. ISBN 0-8006-3270-2
    .
    "Awakening from the consensus trances in which we are stuck as a result of living in a violent society is rare."
  25. ISBN 0-89789-795-1
  26. ^ R. Elliott Ingersoll and Cecile Brennan, in Eriksen, McAuliffe 2001, p.336.

Further reading

External links
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