I respect your perspective. Obviously you arrived at this conclusion based on observation in your own experiences. As you wrote, and I wrote, and many others have written, we perceive our reality not as it is, but through the filter of our beliefs and assumptions.
The mind is a tool, a survival mechanism. The fact that we have confused the self-mind with who we are, or allowed it to enslave us, is a choice we have made, and we are the only ones responsible for making this choice.
What you, me, and every other human being perceives is not "what is" but instead "what appears to be."
"What appears to be" is how we interpret whatever information that our limited sensors collect from "what is."
Since we, as observers, are unaware of what does not make it through the filters of our limited perceptions, we make an erroneous assumption that "what appears to be" is actually All That Is.
And, even though we may call what we believe and assume, opinions and theories, in reality, and as a rule we think of them as facts. There are exceptions of course, but they are rare.
If you observe your thinking from the side, you will see that your opinion of what you wrote above is on the level of a serious conviction, and when you are not thinking about it, you actually perceive these beliefs as simply how it is (facts).
Maybe, I'm mistaken, of course, I can't get in your mind and contemplate what you perceive and how you interpret it, only you can. But, taking into account that our self-mind is a survival tool, it takes our beliefs and assumptions to be facts of life.
We see our reality through our beliefs and assumptions, and this makes it very difficult to actually look at them from the side.
But, if this is done, we can observe that we are all living in a fantasy and delusion, a story where we are the main character that has a past, and a projected future, and our main objective is that this "self" not only persists, but survives at almost any cost.
In this type of experience, in survival, love does seem funny.
It's interpreted and used as a way to manipulate those around you in order to accomplish the primary objective of self-survival.
But, from my perspective, we are NOT surviving, this is a confusion that comes from the culture where we grew up. We are actually evolving in a simulated digital reality, where we are like kids in a kindergarden, that were put there so that we can learn, and take our first step toward adulthood.
This first step is going to elementary school, into 1st grade.
Obviously kids in kindergarden live in fantasies and delusions, and this is an exact reflection of our behavior.
We age, but our biggest problem as a species, is that we don't want to take that first step, we want to remain in kindergarden forever, and we do everything to accomplish this.
This is what you are observing in the larger reality....imvho
a bunch of kindergarden kids, that simply look like adults, but in reality, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, they are still on the level of 5 year olds.
