The way things seem and the way things are
person
Don't believe everything you thinkThe liminal space Veteran
We've all watched the sun set. It seems to us from our point of view that the a small circle of warm light, is lowering down below the horizon. The way things really are is a massive ball millions of times larger than our planet that radiates heat in the millions of degrees, is in a fixed spot 93 million miles away from us and we are spinning away from it at hundreds of MPH/KPH depending on your latitude.
I've recently taken to, while watching the sunset, trying to imagine the reality of the event and for brief moments I've been able to and it's pretty trippy.
Another type of thing that often seems one way but is in reality another way are extremely improbable events like someone winning the lottery, not once or twice or even three times, one person has won the lottery 7 times. The odds of winning two lotteries at 1 in 14,000,000 odds each time is 1 in 200 trillion (200,000,000,000,000). I don't know what the odds are for winning it many multiples of time but the odds are so astronomical that it happening to one person should be considered a miracle. And that is how it often seems to people, God had to have a hand or it was karma or some sort of magic involved. The way things really are though is different and has to do with the law of truly large numbers. We think of things in a small, isolated context. For example the odds of flipping a coin and it landing heads, I think, is 1 in 128 but if we flip a coin 100 times the odds of it coming up heads 7 times in a row is more like 1 in 13. Hit a golfball down the fairway and the odds of it landing on any one blade of grass is unlikely, but the odds of it landing on a blade of grass is pretty certain, but after the fact that blade of grass looks around and thinks, out of all these blades of grass what are the odds that the golfball landed on me, that is unbelievable! It must mean my good karma/god has blessed me. Whats more, over the entire earth people are interacting and things are happening billions of times every day, so the odds of something 1 in million happening to any one individual is unlikely but it will happen many times each day to many people. It seems like a miracle if something seemingly impossible happens to any particular person at any particular time, but the way it really is is that the odds of no particular seemingly impossible thing happening to no particular person at no particular time is more than certain, it would be a miracle if it never happened.
Whenever I encounter something that seems strange or unlikely I always make sure to ask myself if the way it seems is really the way it actually is, because believing things to be other than they actually are has real world implications in our individual and collective behavior and could effect the quality of our lives in negative ways.
Comments
Things appear to be beautiful and enjoyable or not. That is what the mind generally focussed on. These are 'signs' (nimitta) that the mind picks up.
The long blonde or dark hair looks good on the head but if they happen to fall on one's food or if left unkempt would evoke a different set of feelings.
Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.
Oh, love that. ^^ Am pinching it.... ^^
Misinterpretation is commonplace on a forum, when we read the typed words of another member, and fail to understand that the nuances are all missing, because verbal/visual contact is so much better.
We read and interpret, and assume too much.
We baulk, bristle and bridle, and take umbrage, when all the other person was trying to do, was communicate a point.
This is the one thing I can't control, and that makes forum perusal difficult for me, personally.
Yes, so much of communication has to do with tone and body language. Hopefully over time we'll all learn to get better communicating and hearing those subtleties over text. With things like better words or emojis, etc.
ETA: Also, I think the concept of engaging in good faith rather than bad faith is a vital attitude to have. In both our attempts to communicate and receive.
Excellent quote, I'm applying that to the idea of a sunset. We see it from our perspective.