Quotes About Reality

Once you start seeing this place for the madhouse it is, you can't stop seeing it that way. It's everywhere, everyone. It doesn't make any sense. That's not life. It can't be. I don't know what it is, but it's not life.

The end of illusion is the end of you.   U.G. Krishnamurti

When we believe in the world outside of ourselves, gain is often perceived as good and loss as bad. When we stop believing in a world external to self. that reverses: gain becomes bad and loss becomes good. Nothing we can lose was ever ours in the first place. All we can ever lose is illusion.

Escape is no longer called for or even especially healthy. Escape from life is death.

This discovery led to an important question. How does the brain make predictions? One potential answer is that the brain has two types of neurons: neurons that fire when the brain is actually seeing something, and neurons that fire when the brain is predicting it will see something. To avoid hallucinating, the brain needs to keep its predictions separate from reality. Using two sets of neurons does this nicely. However, there are two problems with this idea.

Your brain has made a model of the world and is constantly checking that model against reality.

Our reality is similar to the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis; we live in a simulated world, but it is not in a computer—it is in our head.

If the universe came into and out of existence and there were no brains to know it, did the universe really exist? Who would know?

Cartesian theatre (Dan Dennett's term)

Truly random thoughts don't exist.

through the sensory nerves. The nerves only send spikes. And since we do not perceive spikes, everything we do perceive must be fabricated in the brain. Even the most basic feelings of light, sound, and touch are creations of the brain; they only exist in its model of the world.

Hope is for people who can't see the Truth.

Was insanity really easier to accept than unconsciousness?

As I've said, freedom is really an illusion. Anytime we think we have a real choice, it just means we haven't seen the shotgun aimed at our navel.

my conscience has the same hard reality as a unicorn.

There is a simple, logical explanation,' I said to myself. And because you never know who else is listening, I added, 'And there is nothing under the bed.' --Dexter

They like to tell us that it is important to speak the truth, but it has been my experience that real happiness lies in having people tell you what you want to believe, usually not the same thing at all, and if you have to stub your toe on the truth later, so be it.

Because no matter how far you may travel, you are what you are, and even when you are flying at thrilling new heights, circling the sun and thinking you belong in the halo of that perfect golden light, you do not. The wings always melt, and you always crash-land in your same old self.

the only light in this tiny-mooned night comes from the windows of the apartment building, a matching purple halo from each window, a dozen televisions all tuned to the pointless, empty, idiotic unreality o the same reality show, everyone watching in vacuous lockstep as true reality cruises slowly past outside licking its chops

This whole business of telling the truth just never seems to work without some kind of awkward unpleasantness.

But as I have noticed on more than one occasion, life itself is unfair, and there is no complaint department, so we might as well accept things the way they happen, clean up the mess, and move on.

But it is a truism of life that no matter how much we are suffering, nobody else cares—generally speaking, nobody even notices.

Weren't we all crazy in our sleep? What was sleep, after all, but the process by which we dumped our insanity into a dark subconscious pit and came out on the other side ready to eat cereal instead of the neighbor's children?

Whoever claimed honesty is the best policy, or even a good one, clearly had very limited experience with the real world.