- Reality itself is a kind of fantasy: like the story that you tell yourself about the world.
- When people say things like “you can never trust anyone” or “things always happen for a reason” or “it’s the journey, not the destination” and they mean it, it’s a glimpse into their reality.
- Not the same as The Real, which is inaccessible. We interact with The Real, but as soon as we start to “understand” it, we’re actually getting farther away from it, because we’re passing it through our own minds, filtering and adding things, until it makes sense according to our reality.
- Detached people don’t really have a stable reality at all, because they’re always Splitting. What seems true one moment or one day or one year might seem completely false another one. The story changes, and it’s not voluntary.
- e.g. from true crime, a Detachedwoman was just calmly sitting there while the police were explaining to her that her boyfriend had killed a woman. She was showing no emotion. At some point the police were like “we’re telling you your boyfriend just killed someone. Doesn’t that upset you at all?” and she got this horrified look on her face and burst into tears.
- People think things like this are fake/acting, but it actually looked like she was living in one reality, with her crazy abusive boyfriend, that she felt was totally normal, then the police asking that question kind of brought her into a new reality, where the things he did were horrible and not normal, and she started displaying the emotions that were appropriate to that one.
- “Detached people don’t have reality or fantasy” is not accurate. Rather, it’s not stable across time; it’s very heavily influenced by outside factors and circumstance.
- When someone gets to Psychotic, it’s much more stable. Not that it can never change, but it’s experienced as a shock, like a mind-blowing event that’s experienced consciously.
- When someone gets to Neurotic, reality gets further developed into two distinct modes of experiencing, Reality and Fantasy.
- For a Psychotic, they’re kind of the same thing, which is why they’re into The Secret and the power of belief, etc. There’s not a meaningful difference between experiencing something and believing something.
- A Neurotic can not only know that something they’re thinking or feeling is untrue, they can actually enjoy and play with that (or be annoyed with it, like “why am I having these irrational thoughts and feelings?”)
- Anyone can understand the above on some level, but only in a given structure can you truly understand it on a perspectival level.