Reality

The news media, like the rest of us, tries to get the pulse of what people are doing, how they are thinking, what they are dreaming, while simultaneously reinforcing those patterns. It's not completely true that we are living in a dystopia, and that everything we experience is fake: just that our notions of reality become necessarily distorted by our mental formations, our tendency to see reality in terms of a separation between I, the experiencer, and the world experienced (and then between the different "objects" of our seeing). It is not as if, were we to suffer sensory deprivation for an extended period, we would wake up to find the world beautiful beyond all imagination. It isn't as if our rediscovered appreciation for beauty would lead to any new awakening. That's just aspirational. Our minds would immediately enforce the same old patterns.

The way to breaking free of limitations does not depend upon gaining new experiences or on turning away from experience. It depends upon breaking down our mental conditioning, challenging our conceptions, widening our understanding by joining and rejoining the dots of our experiential reality, conducting self-inquiry into the nature of the experiencer, and discovery of the essential, universal being behind all the appearances, inside, outside, above and below, whose existence is affirmed by the matrix of relationships, like the spider by the web. That reality should be the only object of our devotion and research.Hearing again the distant rumble of missiles and bombs.