Welcome to The Unreal Department!  I'm Paul, your guide in the Land of Insanity.  Here I'll explore the issues, ideas, actions and trends that strike me as unreal - in every sense of the word:  Ideas so cool they're unreal.  Beliefs that don't correspond to reality.  Pseudo issues.  Craziness.  Illusions.  And practices that only seem to distance us from reality until we've looked at them closely.
     Let's get started with a question I ask myself daily:  Am I out of touch, or is everyone else?
     When you just know something is true, yet everyone you meet holds contrary beliefs, that question arises.   Twenty years ago the question fell on me repeatedly like trees hitting a bare forest floor.  The trees hit me, but I wasn't around.  Did the impacts make sounds?  Yes and no.
     Over the course of several years, I had degenerated into deep psychosis due to severe schizoaffective disorder.  Friends and family tried to get me help, but I refused - the problem was "out there."  No one else could see the truth.  Paranoia, voices, mood swings, and illusory beliefs fired through the neuronal networks between my ears like electric current through a shorted computer chip ... the chip started bursting into flames.
     The voices of other people didn't feel as real as the never-never land born of genetically deviant brain structures.  The voice-pines felled by other people thumped against my skull both loudly and silently.  They annoyed me one moment, and in the next they dropped into the wild, overgrown forest of my mind without a trace.  I did a lot of things I'm not proud of.
     Eventually "they" - the shadowy figures behind the falling conifers - forced me to swallow medication.
     My first med regime only added to my troubles the sensation of cockroaches crawling just under my skin, as well as anxiety and a perpetually dry mouth.  With the doctor's second attempt, however, I sobered up.  I've still had to work hard every day since to sort out fact from fantasy, but in the last twenty years I've seen cognitive and spiritual growth I couldn't have imagined possible.  Night and day is an inadequate metaphor for my life before and after my involuntary encounter with modern medicine.
     After the blessing of partial sanity let some light into the asylum, I slowly began to realize that most people don't know the difference.
     Circumstances never force most people to examine more than a few of the mechanisms involved in faulty thinking.  Never having experienced the extremes, they view insanity the way a comfortable pensioner might view a homeless person:  Thank God that's not me.  Don't want to get involved in that fellow's world.
     Remember when the burst housing bubble wiped out all those retirement funds?  I'm here to tell you your mental security is in the hands of greedy, corrupt investment bankers too busy following the latest trend to see the inevitable end.
     I'm making heavy claims on your bank account right now.  Why spend your precious cognitive currency listening to me?  I don't know.  Let me outline my product, then give you my pitch.
     Here's they are:  Nothing you think, nothing you believe, nothing you feel is fully real.  You experience something alright.  That part is real.  It really happens.  But no matter how you try, you'll never understand the true nature of what you experience.  You'll only ever experience very limited perspectives on phenomena.  And you can't avoid this.  Your experience comes through your body and mind.  You see with your own eyes.  You hear with your own ears.  We don't have a God's eye view of the world.  We don't have a complete view.  We can consider other perspectives, but we can't take into account all perspectives simultaneously.
     Who cares?  Doesn't one perspective take priority, because it's the Truth?  It's not even really a perspective if it's the Truth - it's just true.  It's the way things really are.  Right?
     That may be, but you don't have access to that one true outlook on life.  Neither do I.  The brain doesn't allow it.
     Bear with me.
     When you look at this article, a tiny fraction of the light coming from it reaches your retina.  You don't see what's here, your eye takes a sample - a very small sample.  But the kicker is, when those photons are converted into firing neurons, they are processed into an even smaller sample.  By the time they reach your "mind's eye," whatever that is, you get a fraction of one percent of the available information.
     Guess what?  Everything in your mind involves firing neurons, and this narrowing down, this processing, happens to all your thoughts and feelings.
     You aren't aware of one percent of your own mental activity.
     Almost all of this activity goes on under the surface.  In darkness.  Beyond your ability to critically examine.
     You get a "sanitized" version of reality (pun intended).  You see, hear, think, feel, sense what your brain allows you to.  You have massive blind spots.  That's "sanity."
     The agglomeration of billions of neurons connected to each other in trillions of ways works amazingly well in spite of this.  But it's not a truth detector.  It's a perception machine.  It's been designed - by natural selection or by God, it doesn't matter which - to preserve our lives, not to establish the ultimate nature of reality.  Our brains are far more interested in avoiding danger than in seeking wisdom.  I'm not saying you don't seek wisdom with cognitive telescopes, microscopes, and every other available tool. I'm saying the lenses on those instruments bend light - that's what they're designed to do.  Everyone's outlook is distorted.
     You do have some recourse.  You can seek out alternative perspectives.  And as thoughts and feelings - perceptions - arise, you can look at them in the full light of conscious awareness.  You can reprocess them according to rules you've examined carefully beforehand, such as the laws of logic and scientific methods, or rules of thumb gleaned from experience.  You can also bring a higher fraction of your mental processes into view by simply paying attention, focusing your mind.  You'll still see only a slightly larger fraction of what's in there.  But at least you'll have gone one more step under the surface.  Doing all this, you can reprogram your brain to a certain degree.  When you do that, your perceptions change.
     In the same vein, in this blog I plan to look at "stuff" in the world as I notice it.  I'll do this in the same way I try to answer every day whether I'm out of touch or other people are, by asking:  Which perceptions don't hold up to scientific inquiry?  None of my own conclusions - perceptions - will be the last word.  Part of the virtue of the scientific method is its open-ended nature.
     But maybe when the word-lumber I fashion from trees that have fallen in my life hovers in front of you a while, you'll put some of it to use in your own ongoing construction of a kinder, gentler asylum.