What is Reality?

What is Reality? This is a basic Zen question. Is it what I see, hear, taste, feel and smell? Is what I think is real? How do I know what is real? How does anyone know what is real?

Well, the answer depends on who is asking and from what perspective.

Bats “see” the world through echolocation, that is, the returning echoes of sounds they emit.  Many migratory birds navigate the world through feeling the earth’s magnetic field. The honeybee’s vision is based on blue, green and ultraviolet light. Because they do not have a receptor for red, they cannot see that color. For most humans, color vision is based on red, green and blue, with red being one of the most vivid. Thus, whereas we may be drawn to a red tulip, bees buzz over to the purple lavender flowers.

Those different perspectives give us ways to consider an alternative reality, a different reality that is not based on what we humans perceive.

Even from a human viewpoint, though, we have already lived with, and accept as natural, other versions of reality. In addition to perceived reality, there is also reality by agreement and imagined reality.

For example, we agree that when we drive up to a red light, we stop; and at a green light, we go. We agree that special green and white paper with “1-0-0” on it is worth more than similar paper with just a “5” or a single “1” on it.

Imagined reality that comes into play when we watch an intense movie or read an engrossing novel that asks us as viewers and readers to suspend disbelief. Superman and Darth Vader do not exist in any real form, but we accept that for the sake of the movie, they are real.

In Zen, we are challenged to see the world in a very different way. We learn that nothing has self-substance because they are constantly changing, and nothing has self-identity because they are interconnected with everything else across time and space. This counters the commonly held view of reality that we have learned from parents, teachers and others and that we have accepted all these years as “real.”

In Zen, we work to transcend perceived, agreed upon and imagined reality.  Instead, we are concerned with capital “R” Reality, which cannot be perceived with our five senses or intellect. In this realm of Reality, we know what cannot be known, and we perceive that which transcends perception. That is, Reality exists in a realm that is beyond all conceptualization and all words.

One need not be a Zen master to grasp this. Singer/songwriter George Harrison, usually characterized as the most “spiritual” member of the Beatles, describes the background of his final song with the group, “I Me Mine”:

Suddenly I looked around and everything I could see was relative to my ego, like ‘that’s my piece of paper’ and ‘that’s my flannel’ or ‘give it to me’ or ‘I am.’ . . .It drove me crackers, I hated everything about my ego, it was a flash of everything false and impermanent, which I disliked. . . .The truth within us has to be realized. When you realize that, everything else that you see and do and touch and smell isn’t real, then you may know what reality is, and can answer the question ‘Who am I?’

In Zen training, we always return to this basic question: Who am I? From here, then we can begin to train in a deeper way, and we realize that capital “R” Reality is not imagined, agreed upon or perceived. There are no words to describe it adequately.

That realization describes the initial stages in the process of awakening to Reality, to our True Nature, and it can lead us to the essential fundamental question of our existence. So, what is real? It depends on who is asking.