What is Real?

Reality, at first glance, seems like a simple thing. The mobile phone on which you are reading these lines is real. Your fingers, holding this device that has long fused with your body like a new organ, are real. The clock in the corner of the screen, ticking away the time left until your death, is real. Time, space, and the myriad details of the physical world surrounding us exist. They can be measured with a ruler, scales, a Geiger counter, or other tools. Everything has its own unit of measurement.

And yet, there is consciousness—the very thing hiding behind your eyes, perceiving these words. This delicate knot of memory, reason, and emotion that you call yourself also exists, though not within the measurable world that science can describe.

Consciousness cannot be quantified. It is a glitch in the system, a ghost in the machine, something not considered real at all—though, in some sense, the shimmering mosaic of our consciousness is the only true reality we can ever know.

But the shallowness of modernity, rushing at the speed of advertisements with its "here and now" principle, demands our attention elsewhere, causing us to reject our inner world of ideas in favor of the physical and material world—even though much of the physical reality we engage with originated directly from our consciousness.

The mobile phone, the clock, the internet, and the entire civilization that created us—all these were, not so long ago, mere seeds of ideas in a primate’s skull. Our entire material existence is fully based on the ephemeral realm of the mind, the nature and geography of which remain largely unexplored.

Before the so-called "Age of Reason," humanity refined strategies for interacting with the world of ideas. These were intricate, magical systems of imagination, encompassing pantheons of gods and spirits, images, and names that represented our inner capacities, helping us understand them better.

Intellect, emotions, and subconscious thoughts were depicted as gods and demons so that we, like Faust, could comprehend, learn from, and ultimately surpass them.

This isn’t about worship. Ancient cultures didn’t worship idols—fanaticism is a problem born of monotheism. The statues of gods represented material manifestations of mental states, to which one could return through meditation for inspiration. Idols were milestones, and grimoires were maps of the intellect and imagination’s potential.

And while science proves that fire-breathing dragons and mermaids never existed in physical reality, nor Krishna or the virgin birth, this does not diminish the real legacy of these phenomena. If Aphrodite were merely a myth and love an abstract concept, would that nullify the crimes, kindnesses, and songs born in the name of love? If Christ were only a literary idea, would that make his legacy any less monumental? Or would it somehow render the Holy Wars less horrific, or Gothic cathedrals and the hymns sung within them less inspiring?

This boundless world of ideas and concepts is far more significant and even sturdier than physical reality.

The mobile phone in your hand is less solid than the very idea of a phone’s existence. An object, a person, or even a civilization can be broken and destroyed, but ideas are incorporeal, and thus immortal and omnipresent... like all that is sacred. Ideas are a golden, untamed landscape through which we wander to map our place in infinity.

And be cautious, for reality may turn out to be exactly as we imagine it to be.