Reality and the Llama from Porlock.

Another Halloween. Another one of those annual markers which remind you that you’ve used up another year of your life and make you wonder whether you did anything worthwhile with it. In my case, I can’t think of anything.

What I did think of this afternoon was the oft pondered question: ‘Is any of this stuff we call “reality” actually real?’ Well, reality is a surprisingly difficult thing to tie down once you get beyond of course it’s real. I just hit my thumb with a hammer and it hurt.

You see? Already we’re into the combination of the material and the perceptual. The solid and the abstract. Cause and effect insisting that they belong together when maybe they don’t.

And then it made a strange kind of sense that, since perception is the whole of the life experience, and since everything that is meaningful ultimately distils to the abstract, maybe the material reality which we see as the bedrock of being is actually a construct of our collective consciousness. Only we’re not conditioned to that view and so it never occurs to us. And it’s an odd irony that the brain, which is what we use to think (or think we do), is part of that construct and therefore an illusion in itself.

But my train of thought was interrupted by a knock on the door. I opened it and my old friend the llama was standing there again.

‘Trick or treat,’ he said.

This put me on the back foot a little. ‘Trick or treat’ is not the sort of expression one normally associates with llamas.

‘Did you say “trick or treat”?’ I asked him.

‘Did it sound like “trick or treat”?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then it probably was.’

‘But why did you say it?’

‘Why shouldn’t I say it?’

‘Well, I don’t really know. It isn’t the sort of thing I’d expect you to say. And I wouldn’t know what sort of thing a llama regards as a treat, so I wouldn’t know what to give you.’

‘Why would you feel constrained to give me something?’

‘Because that’s what “trick or treat” means.’

‘What?’

‘It means “give me a treat or I’ll play a trick on you.” It’s a Halloween tradition, and treats are usually in the form of something like a Mars Bar. You don’t strike me as the Mars Bar type.’

‘Ah, that explains it. Interesting.’

‘Sorry, but it doesn’t explain why you said it.’

‘I heard two little humans say it to a man in one of the houses at the bottom of the lane, so I thought I’d say it to you and see what your reaction would be. And do you realise that this is the first time in our long association that I’ve learned something from you. That in itself is interesting. Goodbye.’

And then off he trotted without another word. And I never did get back to my musing on whether reality is really real.