(1) The Illusion of Reality - To what degree is reality an illusion? Can we ever know if it is illusion or what objective reality is (if there is such a thing)? If it is illusion how do we change how we live, how we see the world?
Recently I've come to notice how frequent this theme appears in popular entertainment. I'm having great fun looking around for movies that highlight this theme. If any of you can point me to other movies, books, etc. which examine this idea, let me know.
The Matrix - The "world" in the future as most of we humans know it, is an incredibly complex interactive computer simulation (as if we were all unknowingly living inside a SimCity type game).
Dark City - People going about their daily lives (in one of the most disgusting cities I've ever seen) are actually humans kidnapped and placed inside an artificial city floating in space. The memories, likes/dislikes, knowledge of these people are extracted from their brains and mixed and matched "like so much paint". It's reinjected into different people by the aliens in an experiment to discover the human "soul", what makes us unique individuals.
The Truman Show - The dude is raised from birth inside of a huge movie set and his life is broadcast live 24 hours a day on TV. The island town is poplulated completely by actors, including his parents, wife and best friend.
Jacob's Ladder - The entire movie is a hellish nightmare in which the main character doesn't know who to believe. One way or the other, it's an illusion within an illusion. The entire episode is actually being experienced within himself while he's on his deathbed. (I take the story to mean that he had to confront his demons before ascending to heaven.)
The Star Trek Holodeck - An incredibly advanced virtual reality system. For all you Star Trek fans, were not the Moriarty episodes the coolest? The (Enterprise) computer accidentally creates a sentient, self-aware hologram in the shape of Sherlock Holmes' character, Moriarty.
Anyway ... the astounding thing is that we might possibly be living right now in any one of these scenarios. In the more extreme case, we might be solid holograms or residents of a SimCity game. If this were true, we would not even have bodies to wake up to, to be unplugged from The Matrix, or to escape from some movie set. The objective reality would be that I am program code. In another hypothetical scenario, I might be a dream image of a sleeping, dreaming entity whose constitution I could not even fathom. The above examples are just a few from (American) mass entertainment. The concept of reality as illusion has been tossed about by "western philosophy", "eastern beliefs" (and I'm sure other strains of thought I'm ignorant of) for millenia. The idea has been and will probably always be part of the splinter in the mind.
(2) Fire or Ice - If you were able to choose, which would it be, fire or ice? Would you choose the whirlwind of human emotions - hate, love, pain, pleasure, or would you choose the cold peace and serenity of ice? Is it even a question of hot and cold? Is there an ideal state of mind which is a joining of the 2 opposites, which Robert Frost overlooks?For argument's sake, perhaps we can imagine the tempest of the hedonist as opposed to the stillness of the monk.