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Where is the old line dividing reality from illusion?

The recent hoax perpetrated in Colorado by a couple who decided to deceive the local sheriff office, the media, and the public telling their 6-year old son was inside a helium balloon highlights the great difficulties many people have to distinguish between reality and fantasy, and the need many have to find or build a new solid ground for their lives, their beliefs, and their future.

Obviously, the lack of a definitive answer about the limits between reality and fantasy is nothing new, neither in our time nor during history. In fact, countless philosophers and religious preachers of all times and at different places told us reality is not what it seems to be and the “true” reality is not what is around us and we are used to see and touch.

However, in our post-modern times the limit between reality and illusion seems to be dissipating, to the point that a television program, that by definition is a work of fiction, is now called “reality,” and for many people that “reality TV” becomes even more desirable that their own everyday lives.

The debate about reality and illusion affects not only couples obsessed with a dubious status as TV celebrities, but also to all of us, because there is an increasing number of indications that the scientific materialism that until recently was the almost exclusive point of view in the Western Hemisphere is yielding its place to a new way of thinking, still in the development stages.

So the reader would not think this observations are just my musings, last week at two different radio programs (each of them with its own host), two American intellectuals, a quantum physicist and a best-selling author, spoke about the paradigm change that, according to them, is leading us to a new understanding of reality, because the current paradigm is losing consensus.

On Wednesday, October 21, Dr. Amit Goswani, professor emeritus of physics at the University of Oregon’s Institute of Theoretical Science, said the only way to understand the “inexplicable findings” of quantum physics is to appeal to a “quantum consciousness,” that Goswani also calls “spirituality.”

Three days later, writer Richard Bach, author of “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” and “Illusions,” said that due to a constant process of hypnosis and suggestions we are unable to recognize the “true” reality and, therefore, we acritically accept the suggestion that the illusion we live in is the only reality.

I must emphasize I do not agree with everything Goswani or Bach say and I do not share many of their beliefs. However, I do agree there is a need for rethinking what we understand by “reality” and what is the future of such understanding.

I also need to emphasize this analysis of the difference between reality and illusion is much more than a mere theoretical exercise. For us, Latinos, it is almost an obligation, because according to census projections, Latinos (that is, our children) will have an important and unavoidable role in a future fill with unimaginable challenges.

 

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