CHANGING REALITY

Inspired by my readers

One of my readers asked me a fascinating and very thoughtful question on Goodreads. I loved it and, since it was sent anonymously, I posted it on my Facebook Author’s page (http://www.facebook.com/judith.wermuth.atkinson.author). Then another reader and a friend of mine asked me a question related to my answer to the first anonymous question. I replied to my friend too, but the two questions inspired me to write a short blog, and I am very grateful to the two readers. The original question was this:

“If you could travel to any fictional book world, where would you go and what would you do there?”

For an instant I thought that for someone like me it would be difficult to offer an answer, since I have taught world literature for many years, and I have loved every single literary work I taught. I might have wanted to do many different things in the different worlds of the novel I have loved. However, one particular literary work came to mind almost immediately after I read the reader’s question. It was Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote. This work, the work of a real genius, consists of so many pages, and is so complex, that today it may be read mostly by specialists or in literature classes. I believe that over the years, its popular meaning has been reduced to a simplistic caricature—something that is very far from its profound philosophy.

What did I think I would want to do, if I could travel to the world of this novel? I thought that I would try to do what I have always wanted to do—work, together with Quixote, on encouraging readers, friends, literary characters, and anyone else, in understanding that reality is the crossing point between the subjective and the objective, between awareness and vision, and that the way we see the world is what matters most. Why? Because to achieve any change we first need to have a vision.

The American philosopher Dr. Wayne Dyer said: “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” It is what Don Quixote wanted to do—change the world into the dreams he had. Don’t we all want to do precisely that, and doesn’t our world deserve to be seen in a better way and changed accordingly, I asked my reader.

But then my friend on Facebook said that she often becomes desperate when she realizes how much suffering there is in our world, and how many are trying to destroy what others have built. This was a serious argument against my view of the meaning of Quixotic visions. Was I wrong, I asked myself. Is there no point in having dreams and in trying to superimpose them on what we think may be reality?

My answer remains the same. Dreams and visions are the way we build the future. Often, a lifetime is not enough to see the fruit of our effort to make dream come true, to turn vision into reality. As many characters in Cervantes’ novel see Don Quixote as an empty dreamer, or an insane visionary, we believe that reality is the opposite of dream and that it makes no sense to “fight windmills.” But going back to Dr. Dyer’s idea—we have to realize that it all depends what we see – the windmills or the giants. And what I see is that the result is not what matters most. This may be a shocking statement in the eyes of Western civilization. But to me, what matters most is the effort itself—the effort we put into reaching out for our dreams, into developing. It is the effort that brings motion, development, progress. This is not an original idea on my part. It was pointed out to me by my Meditation teacher Swami Veda Bharati. If we think carefully, humanity has moved forward in so many respects, despite the fact that at any given stage, people may not have thought that they have achieved their goals. Little by little, with each human being’s effort, we bring reality one step closer to our fellow-men and –women’s noble visions—and this subtle, quiet, almost esoteric development, is what nothing and no one can destroy.