Are you living in the REAL world?

There is a recurring theme in my beliefs and in my writings. In many ways, whether attempting to ascertain this from the spiritual side (coming from a religious background myself), or if I use logic, or some other scientific principles, the question always comes down to:

Why are we here?

This questions takes many forms. One very important form is this: What is the meaning of life? What are we supposed to do with this thing given us called life? If a higher being has given us this, why? What does that being expect from us? If we're just a chance arrangement of atoms, why where those atoms arranged that way? Are we the universe, made manifest, attempting to explain itself?

I wonder these questions, as I wonder about the reasons behind decisions occurring around me. Whether one of those decisions is what I am going to have for dinner (and why is my wife always asking me what I want for dinner, when we've already made a menu for the next two weeks -- but that's a subject for a different post), or who to vote for in the upcoming US election.

Let us instead, direct our thinking to what effect our decisions have on today and the near future. I think the future is very malleable, constantly changing, depending on individual decisions on the here and now in order to be formed.

There was a time when people chose to create a thing called democracy. This experiment began about 2,500 years ago in Athens, Hellas on the southern tip of the Balkan Peninsula. It took another 2,300 years for the experiment to be repeated. In order for the experiment to be successful, a number of things are of importance.

1. The people, no matter what their religious affiliation, MUST put aside those beliefs, and work together for the common good.
2. Reason, is more important in this experiment than let's say deciding what color to paint the side of my house. I'll explain this in more detail later.
Finally,
3. The good of the many, sometimes, HAS (by definition) to outweigh the good of the few.

I sometimes like to express these principles using the Heisenberg uncertainty principle which proposes that you can not measure the position and momentum of a particle simultaneously. Extremely smart scientists have made the effort to connect this principle of Quantum Mechanics with the metaphysical questions I posed earlier. In short, their position is that it is impossible for us to tell whether what we're observing around is real at any given point in time. This is important in another respect also. In quantum mechanics, you can affect the position or momentum of a particle by observing one or the other. It is possible that if enough people believe one way, then what exists, what reality becomes, what we experience is what that original belief was.

This then also brings into questions whether there exist certain individuals that can transcend this observation limitation and "suggest" reality to the rest of us. This, in more that one way is really relevant to the world today. It has been suggested that the monster called Hitler for example, was one such individual, who was able to collectively alter reality for millions of Germans in the 1930s and in effect the actions they collectively took, forced WWII on the rest of us.

Similarly, the question arises. Can we alter the world around us. As we're caught in it, as we move through it, as we decide whether to have beans or rice (or both), as we make career decisions.

It has been pointed out to me that in the past 3 years, I have wasted three good job opportunities. I therefore, should not blame anyone else for my predicament. And yet, did I alter my perception of reality to such a degree that this fact escaped me? Or, did I fall prey to those others altering perception around me, and in this way, the decisions today are affecting my perceptions of what is real? In other words, am I leaving in the real world, or in the virtual world of the Matrix? Am I living in the real world, or am I dreaming?