SUSPENDING OUR DISBELIEF

When we go to see a play or a movie, we are no sooner in our seats and the show underway than we "buy in."  The story and the characters grab us, to the extent that we accept them as reality.  Not the reality but a reality. 

This is called in psychology "voluntarily suspending one's disbelief."  We know what we are seeing is not reality, but we accept it as real just for the sake of experiencing it. 

We voluntarily suspend our disbelief elsewhere in our lives.  There are many examples.  We don't really believe, for instance, that we are sitting in a machine going 500 miles an hour at 35,000 feet.  It is not possible.  We would never put ourselves in such a situation, anymore than we would sit behind the wheel of another machine and speed 65 miles an hour down a trail of concrete.  Yet we do it.

We voluntarily suspend our disbelief when it come to war, as well.  The world wars of the last century, for instance, how could they be possible?  Slaughter of this kind, how could it happen?  Yet we are tricked by wars, to the degree that we believe they are not really real, only sort of real, and so we accept them.

And, finally, we voluntarily suspend our disbelief when it comes to ourselves.  We do not truly believe that we live on a rock flying around in space, out in the middle of nowhere, and that we, like the dinosaurs, will perish when the next asteroid of sufficient size slams into us.

The alternative to voluntarily suspending our disbelief is to not suspend it, thus seeing things as they actually are.  This is what Buddhists do.