WILL THE REAL REALITY PLEASE STAND UP?
So here we are, lots of little beings in many guises, living in a world of changing space. We are spiritual beings dwelling in physical bodies. I look at you, you look at me, we both look at a chair. It’s for sure that when you look at me, it’s different from when I look at me. Because I’m a conscious being trying to look at my own being, and you’re a conscious being looking at my body. Unless you are a very wise person, you can’t see my thoughts and feelings, and you certainly can’t experience them in the way I do. We just can’t ignore this obvious fact if we want to get to the bottom of who we are, where we are, and what we are doing here.
We would appear to be on safer ground when we both look at the same thing. I look at a chair, you look at a chair. What’s the problem? The problem is that we have no way of comparing our two experiences to see if they tally. Perception is subjective.
And not only that – what we perceive is our reality. Look at a dolphin. Under water, it uses echo location to get about. Its world is one of 3-D sonar. It perceives a world of sound that is every bit as detailed as what it sees with its eyes when above water. Or think of a bat, whose world is largely one of ultrasound, and with which it can chase and capture a fast-flying moth. Or what about a dog, and many other species, whose sense of smell (said in some cases to be over a 1000 times more sensitive than ours) provides them with a world of 3-D fragrance? And how about sharks whose world includes an awareness of the electrical nervous impulses of other creatures? Or migrating birds, to whom the stars and the earth’s magnetic field are maps to help them navigate the world? Or insects, with their various exotic sensory organs, giving them a perception of electromagnetic and ultrasonic frequencies and modulations way beyond our human ken? Or bacteria, whose world includes a perception of chemicals and chemical gradients? Or a host of (to us) weird and wonderful ways in which creatures view this world?
It makes you realize that there is no such thing as a single objective material reality. We can’t say that the world is the way we human beings perceive and understand it, and that other creatures perceive various bits of our human world. So what is material reality? Will the real reality please stand up!
What if there were no human beings here at all, which – so the evolutionists maintain – was the case for several billion years? And what about the time – so they also maintain – when there were no beings at all on planet earth?
If you and I inhabit worlds of our own, which we find difficult to compare, and if every other creature has a different take on material reality, can we even maintain that there is such a thing as a single objective reality?
There’s another angle to this. We human beings perceive the world as a primarily visual phenomenon. But by the time light has entered the eye, been focused by the lens, has formed an inverted image on the retina, has been turned into electrical impulses in the optic nerve, and has been interpreted by the optical cortex of the brain – where is the ‘original’ reality? We perceive only what our brain presents to us. And since every other sense organ in ourselves and other creatures functions in a similar manner, is there any such thing as ‘objective reality’? Is there any actual material reality at all?
And there’s even more intriguing stuff. Look at the many experiments which show that the brain responds to events before they happen in the external world. They call it the presentiment or pre-stimulus response. For instance, the brain takes account of pictures presented at random on a computer screen, a split second before the picture has been presented. Before!
It’s mind-blowing! Which way round is reality? The brain appears to have responded to an event which at that point in time had neither happened, nor had it even been decided upon by the computer. It seems to demonstrate that the event had already happened in the mind, and that our sense of it as material reality caught up a fraction of a second later. It also puts something of a dent in our notions of free will – but that’s another story.
I’d say that these experiments also suggest that the mind is a separate and more subtle entity than both the brain and physical reality. That is the mystical perception of things. But most scientists don’t like the idea of a ‘ghost in the machine’, holy or otherwise. Well, why should they always have the last word on everything? Things are the way they are, and our beliefs and opinions are not going to change anything.
The fact is that by analysing the brain in order to find the consciousness that is doing that analysis, we will be forever endlessly chasing our tails. Only when we begin to understand that the common factor in all creatures is mind and being, and that the fundamental reality of all things is being or consciousness, not material substance, will it all start to make any sense.
The One Being’s primary ‘unit’ of creation is not made of matter. His fundamental unit is a little being, the soul, made of His own ‘substance’, in His own image – being or consciousness.
Every living creature is a being, a drop, so to speak, of the Ocean of Being. And every creature also has a mind ‘attached’ – itself a drop of the greater or universal mind – which acts as a sort of dynamic, ever-changing screen through which ‘reality’ is perceived. And the mind is formative. It is the mind that creates the multiplicity of changing forms. The mind consists of subtle, shifting patterns – limitations or constraints upon the essential being or consciousness within. And it is the mind that is projected outwardly or crystallized, so to speak, as a body.
This is what makes one species different from another – the character of the mental envelope around the soul, the mental pattern from which the physical form is manifested. And a part of that mental envelope is what we call instinct – the unconscious and mysterious mental functioning that constrains each creature to behave in the way it does. Every creature is a being, encapsulated by mind, which has taken material form as a body.
That’s how beings reincarnate and transmigrate from one body to another. What a being does in one life leaves lasting impressions on its mind, which then precipitates or manifests as the body and destiny to which that being is bound in subsequent lives. Reincarnation is the result of subtle, hidden processes of the formative mind. The mind is the means by which the requirements of the karmic law are worked out. The law of karma is actually the law of the mind – of duality, of cause and effect, of events happening in time.
So the primary reality is one of being, not of material substance. And beings go wherever their minds take them. If you watch a dog or a cat, it always has some idea in mind when it acts. The same is true of human beings. And also of creatures such as birds, fishes, insects, and so on, which we human beings have such difficulty empathizing with, and understanding.
Whatever the creature, all action originates in the mind. We only find it difficult to understand because we do not know what it is like to be a bird or a fly or a whale. And if we find it so difficult to understand them, imagine how difficult they must find it, trying to understand us.
Mostly, animals seem to assume that human beings have the same sensory perception of reality that they have. A tiger, for example, which has a keen sense of smell, will always approach a prey from downwind because it presumes that the animal can smell it. In most instances, this is a fair assumption, but maneaters approach a human prey in the same manner, unaware that human beings can’t smell them. Of course, the mind of a dog, or a bird, or an insect – heavily hemmed about by instinctive impulses, and without human language – is very different from our own, but it is present nonetheless.
Through His Word, the One Being has manifested Himself as a multitude of little beings, encased in minds and bodies. Yet He remains as the unseen Reality within every being. He is the primal Source pervading everything. An understanding of the ubiquitous presence of this one universal, all-pervading Being makes it possible to comprehend many things about our otherwise confusing existence.
As human beings, we may not be able to gain a full and complete understanding of everything because the human mind is limited in its sphere of activity. But we can certainly understand something of our situation and our limitations. And so many things fall into place and are illuminated by this one central understanding of the One Being. It leads us, for example, to some interesting insights when it comes to understanding the evolutionary processes of life on earth.
