What is real? The velveteen rabbit would argue that only love is real, and I tend to agree. Most people would say that reality is what we see, hear, touch, smell and taste - basically the world experienced by our senses. However, as any person who owns a dog can attest to, the world smells a lot different to a dog than it does to a human! There are countless examples of animals that are able to experience the world in a different way than we do. Birds that can see UV light, bats using ultrasonic sound impulses to guide their flight, magnetoreception in fruit flies and fish. So who's reality is really real? The answer is that it's relative.
Do you believe in manifesting things? Because I sure didn't up until very recently. I studied the sciences, with hard sciences being my favorite. I loved knowing "the answer" because there is only one right answer according to science, or is there?
Science is funny that way. Because everything we know that is a fact according to science, is only a fact until it's proven incomplete. The world used to be flat. Atoms used to be the smallest element of matter, and the earth used to be the center of the Universe. So any person who treats any scientific "fact" as the "whole truth" is flawed in their way of thinking.
But what about manifesting? Isn't the premise basically that you wish for something and it comes to you? Ha. Magic isn't real. Or is it?
There are many counter arguments to manifesting. The confirmation bias is one of them (that I'll write about later), but if reality is relative, and no person is exactly the same as anyone else, then everyone on earth is experiencing reality in a slightly different way. For example, two people can both say that a particular tree is green. But there is no scientific way to determine if the color green that one person is experiencing is exactly the same as what the other person is experiencing. And it almost certainly isn't. Because, as I'll talk about in another blog post about perception, we don't see with our eyes, we perceive with our mind.
So then I ask the question, and so do many other scientists, that it is possible that our "reality" is a type of simulation and that the external world exists only in our experience. We are all dreamers experiencing our current dream as reality. Until we become lucid, of course.
In other words, we are all consciousness. Our body then would be a type of avatar, the thing you experience as being you in this current state of reality. In other words, we experience a reality that while in a dream feels completely real. Because most of the time, it is only when we "wake up" that we realize, oh hey, that was only a dream. Manifesting then, is part of the dream process. Consciously and unconsciously we are always calling things into our lives. I've experienced countless things come into my life, people, experiences, sometimes even inanimate objects. Some people say these are coincidences. But when coincidences add up they are pretty hard to ignore, and I start to call them synchronous events. I experienced a kundalini energy awakening last December (2015) in which I experienced everything that had happened in my life so far as a complex web, with everything coming together to create a beautiful masterpiece. Later on I had flashbacks to the experience but viewed it more as a complex tapestry with each thread having a unique role that nevertheless was necessary and contributed to the whole.
It is now my belief that the world I experience as reality is this tapestry. That people, places, events, objects, are all somehow connected, in ways we may not understand until much later. Even the current state of the world, which some may consider bleak. I believe that every person is here for a reason and has something unique to contribute to the overall whole, and that sometimes things get a little bit worse before they get better.
I also believe that every person has the right to live the life they choose, as long as they aren't causing anyone else harm. And I believe that by "awakening to this life being a dream" everyone will be able to control their life, just as a master lucid dreamer controls their dream. Are you completely satisfied with your life? I sure wasn't. But now I know that by deciding what I want my reality to be, there's a much higher chance of me being happy. But I will say that it sure wasn't easy learning to control my dream. And fears are the reason. But I'll go into more detail about how my fears became my reality a little bit later.
So, to summarize. It is possible that we are all consciousness expressed through avatars we associate as a "self" - this is the ego (which is not a bad thing). Manifesting can then occur through control of consciousness, like controlling a dream. As we get better at controlling our emotions, including stress and fear, we will notice more and more positive manifestations in our lives. And everyone will live happily ever after.