The Healthy Management of Reality - Stanford University

These ideas are designed to be tested before being accepted. If you find thatthey work at the personal level, perhaps you and your partner can try them as ateam. You can test whether this reality management approach has a substantialpositive impact on your relationship, on your shared reality. See whether thisperspective is helpful in raising your children. Does it give them more of a senseof responsibility for what they become? Eventually, if communities of individualsput these ideas into practice, the resulting group reality could be evaluated todecide whether the ideas in this book are worth using on an ongoing basis.Testing these ideas involves more than evaluating whether they have impacton those who practice them. Of course, the healthy management of reality ought tohave a positive effect upon the individuals who are implementing these ideas. Butit should also improve the lot of those around them. A practice that causes betterphysical and emotional health in oneself but the diminishment of physical andemotional health in those around one lacks a basic element of that which is trulyhealthy.We will now turn to describing what is meant by some of the key terms inthis book, such as reality, internal reality, and external reality.RealityI begin with the assumption that there is one reality. Different individualsmay think about it differently, or may interpret parts of it in varied, evencontradictory ways. But, if we were infinite and eternal, we would see only onereality, one way in which "things are."HMOR.July2005.Muñoz.doc 16