Why the title? II (the first bit)

 It’s considered appropriate to tell someone to ‘Get Real’ when you think a proposed course of action is certain to end in disaster, or, alternatively, when you think what someone believes is preposterous. I suppose it is shorthand for ‘You’d better adjust your plans/beliefs to reflect the world as it is, not as you’d like it to be’. It’s normally said quite aggressively, as part of a campaign of treading heavily and proprietarily all over the garden of someone else’s dreams.

I, however, would like to convert into something a little humbler but, perhaps, a little deeper. In writing a blog in which I am encouraging myself (and hopefully, others) to Get Real I think I mean:

Firstly, through how I think, how I behave, and what I do, to become closer to the person I ‘ought’ to be to become, and be, as truly Me as possible. I realize this statement is fraught with questions. Is there a sort of ‘platonic me’ of which I am an imperfect copy? Where does the ‘ought’ come from? And how, and by what yardsticks, do I measure my progress in this ambition? I might try and tackle these questions a bit more in later posts. At the moment, though, all I can say are there times when I feel more genuine, more three dimensional as it were, and times when I feel more as though I am playing a part, being less me; diminishing myself into two dimensions, as it were. I imagine that other people sometimes feel the same.

Secondly, by trying to comprehend, to understand, to grasp, or, more realistically, to simply persist in wrestling with the fundamental mysteries that hover forever on the boundaries of the banal little worlds that we construct around ourselves. Sufi Islam frequently refers to the Divine as simply ‘The Real’, and for good reason. I do not discount the possibility that believers in the supernatural are mistaken: possibly the outcome of this journey will see me leaving belief for atheism or agnosticism, although I think this unlikely. However, it is crucial to note that a purely secular naturalistic worldview does not enable one to dispense with these questions of horrifying profundity: in some ways it makes them more acute. That I inhabit a universe which appeared (or has always existed) for no particular reason, other than that it simply is, and in which a tiny, momentary, flicker of conscious life briefly exists is, to me, an abyss as terrifying as that of a necessarily existent God.

It is pretty obvious that these two aspirations are linked: it might even be argued that the interplay of the two is what religion is all about (although this hadn’t occurred to me before writing this post!).