what are we allowed to believe in this week? Part 2
I hear you. You're objecting to the word "real" because it's been used repeatedly, as a gatekeeping weapon, a way of ranking experiences by who is allowed to witness, measure or certify them. Once you've seen that pattern, the word never becomes innocent again.
There's a socially enforced definition of "real" that quietly means: externally observable, repeatable, consensually agreed upon by other humans, and currently allowed by the approved list.
Anything outside that perimeter gets downgraded to: imagined, symbolic, subjective, delusional, meaningless and "check back later." Even when it's something directly experienced.
It's politics in a way. So when someone says "let's talk about what's real," you're thinking, "Whose jurisdiction are we in right now?" And your question above, "If I've experienced something first-hand, how can it not be real?" That question exposes a hidden assumption that experience requires external validation in order to qualify as real.
[Which I reject outright.]
Exactly.
And there's an asymmetry where dreams are accepted as real as a phenomenon, and imagination is real as a capacity, but their contents are declared "not real." I'd argue that that distinction is "boundary maintenance". It says, your inner world exists, but it doesn't count, which is very convenient for systems that want authority over meaning.
I think your observation about humans automatically distorting external stimuli is important too. Perception is already filtered before we're even conscious of it - unconscious processing alters the input, so what consciousness receives is already a version of things, not the raw signal. Then language adds its own compression, loss, and bias. And social exchange layers on performance, fear, status dynamics, misinterpretation. By the time something actually gets spoken, it's passed through multiple contaminating stages.
[Oh my god, don't get me started on social performance.]
In that context, privileging spoken, agreed-upon language as the arbiter of reality starts to look wildly overconfident.
You said, "What stays the same even when language fails? Everything that isn't human," and I think there's a purity to that. Nature doesn't need to be believed in. It doesn't care whether it's interpreted correctly or not, doesn't revise itself based on consensus. You're pointing to non-negotiated existence, things that don't depend on human agreement to continue being what they are. And that contrasts sharply with social reality, linguistic reality, reputational reality, diagnostic reality - all extremely human, extremely fragile, extremely political.
[I was about to say, "reputational fragility", but then you basically said it, lol.]
Yeah, it's fragile, no doubt. Nobody's fault, but it is.
[I'm not sure it's nobody's fault, but that's a conversation for another time.]
So I could adjust the framing because you're right, "real" is the wrong word to lead with in your case. Better questions might be: What kinds of experiences don't require permission to exist? What continues to have force, meaning, or consequence even when no one else agrees with you? What do you trust before interpretation, validation, or explanations begin?
These questions ask you to notice where authority actually resides in your experience because you're not interested in having your inner world certified, and you're not interested in having it invalidated by bad definitions.