Our ego loves battles. There’s nothing that our “poor little me” relishes more than an excuse to indulge in righteous indignation, a battle to wage against someone who disrespects us, a stupid, rule, even an object that doesn’t work.

It doesn’t matter how small, or unimportant, or unintentional the trigger. “You’ll do! Bring it on”

But often our assailant isn’t even aware of the fight to the death our ego believes it is involved in. They probably aren’t even aware of our existence. Objects aren’t even aware, full stop!

But none of that matters. It’s not them we are fighting with. It is ourselves. We are fighting with our made up idea of how the world should be.

It’s a losing battle.

I have just had a couple of lovely days meandering around Hampshire and Dorset in the van.

First overnight was in Ovington, which is a very pretty village near Winchester, and the second night was on the Isle of Purbeck.

The joy of the van is being able to take my time, stick to small roads, and enjoy wherever I end up.

I know we are late discovering The Sopranos but Mollie and I finished series three last night.

Such clever, clever writing. The complex interweaving of themes; morality, duty, misogyny, racism, violence, family, love, is so powerful and so thoughtfully played.

Tony Soprano’s trials and tribulations are such a good exploration of how malleable our stories are and how absolutes of right and wrong, truth and falsehood are naive pipe dreams.

On a walk yesterday Mollie and I were discussing how academics, particularly philosophers, can dance on the head of a pin arguing over theories that are entirely made up and how those theories, if taken seriously by those less skilled in spinning tales, can lead to huge ideological shifts in how we see the world.

And yet we cling to those stories as if our lives depend on them. As if without them we would be meaningless.

And we don’t want that do we…

If our only experience of the world is based on the stories we tell ourselves about the otherwise meaningless grey mush that surrounds us then why don’t we make up better, nicer stories?

What’s stopping us?

[I just realised that although I wrote a few posts in sequence you may not read them that way! This previous post gives context for my apparent solipsism]

Does consciousness emerge magically out of sufficiently complex matter, or does it pre-exist and encapsulate the real world?

I find it funny that the word magically is appropriate here because science has literally no idea about where consciousness, the basis of our entire experience of life, comes from.

Without our mind’s ability to take in stimuli through our sense organs, and then interpret that information in the context of previous experience, the “real world” doesn’t exist.

We have no idea of what is out there independent of our mind’s interpretation.

The real world as we experience it, which is the only real world that we will ever know, depends entirely on the stories our minds make up.

The real real world is meaningless without us… that’s if it exists at all.