Khatruman
I feel this is a good place to put this observation because this is a question I come across when dealing with the fae.
It is a reflection of the world that I deal with in general when I teach my Multicultural Folklore class. We deal with myth, legend, folklore, fable, parable, and also the fairy realm. One of the points I stress from day one is that we live in a very logical, actual world of science, where reality is something you can measure with your senses, and only with your senses. To my students, myth is a made up story. What I try to get them to see is the subjectiveness of reality. That our senses are bombarded every millisecond with tons of information. Our brains decide what is important to filter out, what to keep. I demonstrate this by pointing out an insignificant sound in the room, the heating system or air conditioning for instance. As soon as I point it out, they hear it clearly. Why didn't they hear it before? It wasn't important. I made it important to their brains and now the sound, which has not changed volume, has become important. So, in short, I point out that reality, the real, is what their brains determine. If you believe that Life sucks, then everything you experience will back that up.
So my point here is how people see the reality of the fae. I hear many who speak of them as one would speak of squirrels, or raccoons, or other creatures on the planet. Their reality is just the same. I take a different viewpoint, that their reality to me is from my mind accepting their reality, which is different from my creating them from my mind. These are beings who are a product of centuries, perhaps millenia, of humans accepting their reality, and there is great power in that. One of the primal debates on Christianity versus Darwinism is the reality of Adam and Eve. People calculate when they must have been born, and people polarize on the issue, saying, to be a Christian, you must confirm that Adam and Eve were real humans, the first humans, as well as that Jesus rose from the dead.
I see a problem in this. In saying that they are real in the form of the reality our senses take in becomes limiting. When I look at the fae, I see a reality in them, but I do not expect one to poke his head out from my desk, say hi, and smile at me. Yet I do see them as real. There is a reality between sensory reality and pure imagination. Our world is a product of individual and collective understanding. The fae understand this, and much lore is devoted to faery land, which exists around us, in the same space, but not in the same place. The limit I see in simply taking the fae as of a same reality as our own material world is that people who do so are averse to taking them apart and understanding them, that partially they come from us. I came to this epiphany after just writing my response to sagitarian's thread on the Soul Shrinker. She characterized him, crying at being misunderstood, and wanting to be accepted, and I didn't see him that way. I see him misunderstood, of course, but understanding and accepting his role in throwing the mirror before us. The mirror shrinks us and takes the perfect image we have of ourselves (imagine standing naked before the mirror, most of us shrink before it). But he smiles because he knows he does us a service. But, of course, that is my reality of him. Sagitarians is just as valid.
I think reality needs to be taken apart and re-evaluated from time to time. The only way I feel to do this is to accept that reality is in many ways a construction of ourselves, both the individual self and the collective self. I cannot take apart the fae if I see them as woodland creatures. I cannot understand a squirrel as a symbol and understand his meaning to me if he is that furry creature of the rodent genus who lives in my backyard and can be dissected. If he is a fae, he transforms now into something I can understand in my reality.
Ok, I am not sure if my point came out here. I think the crux of my insight is somewhere in the limbo. It isn't crystal sharp here, but I hope folks got something out of this. Debate me, transform me, send a fae my way!
Peace!
It is a reflection of the world that I deal with in general when I teach my Multicultural Folklore class. We deal with myth, legend, folklore, fable, parable, and also the fairy realm. One of the points I stress from day one is that we live in a very logical, actual world of science, where reality is something you can measure with your senses, and only with your senses. To my students, myth is a made up story. What I try to get them to see is the subjectiveness of reality. That our senses are bombarded every millisecond with tons of information. Our brains decide what is important to filter out, what to keep. I demonstrate this by pointing out an insignificant sound in the room, the heating system or air conditioning for instance. As soon as I point it out, they hear it clearly. Why didn't they hear it before? It wasn't important. I made it important to their brains and now the sound, which has not changed volume, has become important. So, in short, I point out that reality, the real, is what their brains determine. If you believe that Life sucks, then everything you experience will back that up.
So my point here is how people see the reality of the fae. I hear many who speak of them as one would speak of squirrels, or raccoons, or other creatures on the planet. Their reality is just the same. I take a different viewpoint, that their reality to me is from my mind accepting their reality, which is different from my creating them from my mind. These are beings who are a product of centuries, perhaps millenia, of humans accepting their reality, and there is great power in that. One of the primal debates on Christianity versus Darwinism is the reality of Adam and Eve. People calculate when they must have been born, and people polarize on the issue, saying, to be a Christian, you must confirm that Adam and Eve were real humans, the first humans, as well as that Jesus rose from the dead.
I see a problem in this. In saying that they are real in the form of the reality our senses take in becomes limiting. When I look at the fae, I see a reality in them, but I do not expect one to poke his head out from my desk, say hi, and smile at me. Yet I do see them as real. There is a reality between sensory reality and pure imagination. Our world is a product of individual and collective understanding. The fae understand this, and much lore is devoted to faery land, which exists around us, in the same space, but not in the same place. The limit I see in simply taking the fae as of a same reality as our own material world is that people who do so are averse to taking them apart and understanding them, that partially they come from us. I came to this epiphany after just writing my response to sagitarian's thread on the Soul Shrinker. She characterized him, crying at being misunderstood, and wanting to be accepted, and I didn't see him that way. I see him misunderstood, of course, but understanding and accepting his role in throwing the mirror before us. The mirror shrinks us and takes the perfect image we have of ourselves (imagine standing naked before the mirror, most of us shrink before it). But he smiles because he knows he does us a service. But, of course, that is my reality of him. Sagitarians is just as valid.
I think reality needs to be taken apart and re-evaluated from time to time. The only way I feel to do this is to accept that reality is in many ways a construction of ourselves, both the individual self and the collective self. I cannot take apart the fae if I see them as woodland creatures. I cannot understand a squirrel as a symbol and understand his meaning to me if he is that furry creature of the rodent genus who lives in my backyard and can be dissected. If he is a fae, he transforms now into something I can understand in my reality.
Ok, I am not sure if my point came out here. I think the crux of my insight is somewhere in the limbo. It isn't crystal sharp here, but I hope folks got something out of this. Debate me, transform me, send a fae my way!
Peace!
