That’s a great poem. One of my favorites:
Credo
by Robinson Jeffers
My friend from Asia has powers and magic, he plucks a blue leaf from the young blue-gum
And gazing upon it, gathering and quieting
The God in his mind, creates an ocean more real than the ocean, the salt, the actual
Appalling presence, the power of the waters.
He believes that nothing is real except as we make it. I humbler have found in my blood
Bred west of Caucasus a harder mysticism.
Multitude stands in my mind but I think that the ocean in the bone vault is only
The bone vault’s ocean: out there is the ocean’s;
The water is the water, the cliff is the rock, come shocks and flashes of reality. The mind
Passes, the eye closes, the spirit is a passage;
The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heartbreaking beauty
Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.
I don’t think it’s an either/or world.
There are some realities that are external to us, that exist independent of our mind. A bullet hitting you from behind without you knowing it is an example of such a reality. or if you walk into a real ocean you’ll get wet, an imaginary one you won’t.
There are also “realities” that we create. Things like generalization, classifications, concepts, dreams, daydreams, delusions, etc.
Both are important in our survival and success. Whether our “created” realities are useful or dangerous or neutral depend on whether, when they interact with external realities, they respect the actual nature and quality of that external reality.
That is fire will indeed burn you and water will indeed wet you, regardless of what opposing notions you might have created in your head. That’s an example of a dangerous created reality.
But there are useful created “realities” as well, such as concepts or classifications. For example “carnivores”. It’s something we created in our head and we put a bunch of animals in it with a specific quality - they eat meat. So if you encounter an animal in the wild that you know is a carnivore, you’ll give it a wide berth.
(just some stream of consciousness noodling...)