How do we become REAL?

 Humans live in a world of unreality. A good example of this is money: we all need it, but what IS it actually? A unit of measure for human necessity and desire. There is no reality behind it other than you and I and everyone roughly agreeing that X is roughly worth a dollar, or however many dollars, in value. Bernanke, the former Fed chairman, essentially let the cat out of the bag in 2009 I think it was, when he said that the Fed just changes numbers in their accounts with banks whenever it is deemed desirable. Inventing money out of thin air. Nor does our taxes have any real relationship with spending. When necessary, they just add zeroes.

This is by no means the most relevant or pernicious example. When a prairie is bulldozed to make a strip mall, a real thing - a prairie full of life and living creatures - is destroyed to make room for a fake thing - a human economic construct. We are continually in the process of destroying life to make way for death, destroying reality for the sake of unreality.

And hundreds of millions of us are employed in things that are either not necessary or conducive to life or should not be. Just one egregious example: the cosmetics industry. What is the worldwide cosmetics industry worth, how many billions? How many animals are tortured for the sake of it? So that people can pretend to be what they are not. The real is sacrificed on the altar of the unreal.

How many of you get come-on advertisements in the mail which try to deceive you into buying something that you don't need? The people, and more relevantly to our topic the institutions, that send you that stuff want to trade your actuality, the truthful mind of a living being, for the unreality they value most: money.

How many people spend their lives inside office walls and cubicles, imagining they are doing something with their lives? And then they spend two hours a day in a commute, all the while imagining they are free, when they are in a cage. A cage of human constructs and structures and rules and imagined realities. A prison, for their souls.

The Torah is a relatively small set of books, and lots of stuff was left implied because it was not that relevant to the time. Had the Israelites followed everything that G-d said to them, this would be a different future, and so the Torah is focused on instruction to them, then. One of those instructions is not to create graven images or worship them. Now today we think of this as an instruction to people who were prone to pagan idolatry and isn't relevant now (as if modern people didn't practice as much idolatry!) But if you unpack this instruction a bit, it is an instruction about not substituting human constructs for reality. What is a graven image? What is an idol? It is a human construct, pretending to be a divine reality. What typifies G-d's creations? They are alive, they are living. Even the angelic beings depicted in Ezekiel with their wheels within wheels and so on, it is said that they are living creatures. Human constructs are not alive: no human can create life. If you had to pick one great brainchild of human genius as representing humanity's power of creation, you might pick the computer. And computers are capable of many sophisticated things, indeed things that humans would find difficult if not impossible to do. Crunch tremendous numbers quickly.

And all computers have one thing in common: they are all as dead as a brick. Even if in future we could create computer simulations of human minds, they would still be dead as a brick. The people, futurists, who want to escape death by becoming cyberized: they just aspire to become dead in a different way. Still way dead, but with a simulacra to keep your place occupied on the Earth.

So getting back to the title of this: how do WE become real? If we assume, which I absolutely do, that human society and human social and economic intercourse is a place of unreality (indeed this blog itself is in a sense unreal because I am not talking to YOU, I am just printing words,) okay: how do we break the spell?

The average person, indeed almost everyone outside of some primitive tribes, is absolutely dependent on the human system. That means, they do what the system tells them, or at least they do what the system rewards them for doing. The person who is still trapped in the human system but not participating is what we call a street person, and nobody wants that kind of life. And that human system absolutely reeks of unreality, of fakeness. Of the death of reality for the sake of unreality.

I would be lying to you if I told you I had a simple answer. However, the answer starts with rejecting the whole fake human machine and all its values, and substituting values that are relevant to real living beings. What are those values? Here's some of them:

Truthfulness: a lie does violence to life.
Valuing life: living beings are more important than money or human constructs when that money or construct is not necessary to your life.
Simplicity and self-restraint, because desire leads us to do violence to the world not from need but greed.