When all is said and done, at the close of any given day, reality is going to be what any one individual perceives it to be. In thoroughgoing layman’s terms: we process received information according to our own unique catalogue of collective and personal experiences. Through an automated, unconscious electrochemical mechanism, the experiences of our individual lives are gathered and sorted into the compartmentalized shelves, drawers, and filing cabinets of the brain.

Any particular bit of information will always remain where you have automatically put it. It may gather dust or get brittle with age and disuse, but it won’t go away, at least not fully.

The brain, then, is an electrochemical catalogue of our individual experiences, gathered and stored in a continuous process of organization. As we meet with fresh experiences we can call upon our stored information to help us relate to the new sensations and emotions and the brain disseminates our processed intelligence to help the mind in dealing with matters of the previously unknown.

At least that’s what it says in the manual.

On a good day, we humans in our current state of evolution use about one-tenth of the brain’s innate capacity. Intellectually, we have the gross potential to be Olympian gods but presently, we are pretty much couch potatoes. We sometimes exhibit an urgent burst of brilliance that seems to thrust us a bit further along the evolutionary scale, like a Michelangelo, a Mozart, or an Einstein, but these are rare anomalies in the common flow. Although we learn so much from their genius, it is not as if we can absorb their visionary acumen and harness it the way they did; we can merely acquaint ourselves with their energy, bask in their accomplishments, and hope that something special might rub off by association.

So we toddle along in our daily lives, doing what we do and hope for the best, based upon what we think or have been told is the best.

Then some contingency arises that we cannot account for based upon our electrochemical catalogues of previously gathered data.