What is Reality?
In one form or another, the question 'What is Reality' has been asked by thinking people throughout history. Scientists do not have privileged access to reality. They make observations, create theories...and form an idea.... Those [ideas] can change. The reality now coming to light in science moves ever further beyond the world we can see, hear, and touch. The latest theories do not describe pebbles and planets.... The new reality is not based on matter.... The new reality perceives embracing interconnection among all things in the universe. Ervin Laszlo: What is Reality?
What Came First?
Is our reality the result of the gradual unfolding of the physical universe following the big bang which millions or billions of years later randomly coalesced into the physical universe, our planetary system, and life in all its fullness? Is consciousness the outcome of biological evolution culminating in a self awareness made possible by the human brain? Is consciousness, in fact, "in" the brain? Are we aware of reality? Or do we create reality? What comes first? The physical body or the awareness? Reality or consciousness?
These are baffling, unanswerable questions that humanity has grappled with for millennia. Science tries to break down physical reality into the minutest particles seeking the answers. We continue to look for the "building blocks" of life. Our language of reality is material, mechanistic, physical, objective. We build giant particle accelerators in an effort to crack the shell of the egg to find answers, to see where we come from. Science has struggled to let go of a mechanistic understanding of our reality, but still seeks answers only in what can be observed.
Though not cracking open the egg, some scientists have made strides over the last several decades toward perhaps accepting the existence of an "invisible" universe from which our physical reality is born. A universe in which consciousness does not arise from material matter. It actually is the other way around. The physical universe arises from consciousness! Thought creates matter! The mysteries of quantum physics continue to bring us to this mystifying conclusion.
Rupert Spira (philosopher and author)
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The discovery of the quantum nature of our universe changed the course of human history.... As Max Plank has commented, 'I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness... Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.'
Thoughts become things. This is manifestly true. I am sitting on a chair...It began as a thought in someone's mind,... the frame, the fabric, the curves, the color.
Thoughts become things. This is manifestly untrue. I will never be a quarterback for the National Football League, no matter how earnestly I think about it.
Between the ways in which thoughts become things and the ways in which thoughts can never become things there is a wide middle ground.
[Among the many scientific interpretations of physical reality one in particular posits that] consciousness is the fundamental ground state, more primary than matter or energy....Many physicists are suspicious of this...because it resembles ideas originating from Eastern philosophy and [mysticism].... But prominent physicists, including Nobel laureates strongly promote this view.
The belief that we were born, that we change, evolve, grow old and die is simply a belief to which the vast majority of humanity subscribes without realizing that they are doing so. It is the religion of our culture.
What is Life?
Body or Soul
Are we eternal souls living a physical reality or are we simply distant self-aware relatives of the first single-celled organism? Science can tell us a lot about the material nature of a living organism of any size or cellular structure, but the origin of life is as yet unknown.
Spiritual being or biological matter aside, we'd still like to know just how life comes about? How did we get here? How did I get here? Is life random or intentional. Even now, most scientists perpetuate the idea of a random universe. But religion gives us a soul with free will, which presumes intention.
Most of us believe in an afterlife, somewhere that we go, for good or ill, after death. But most of us do not believe in life before birth. Or maybe it s that the reality in which we now reside doesn't seem too concerned about the pre-life question. Maybe we have to believe in reincarnation to have a good answer to where we come from. Yet, if the general belief is that we go somewhere after death, an inevitable event that we live in dread of, then where do we come from at birth. It seems that the two must logically be connected.
Most of us believe that we have a soul. Religion tells us this is so. The belief is that our soul comes to us (somehow) at some point in the birthing process. But do we have a soul or are we a soul? And if we factor in the soul as fundamental state and the body as a three-dimensional experience emerging from that state, then perhaps the idea of a random universe might not fit.
If life is not random but intentional then is the choice ours? Do we "choose" to incarnate into earthly reality at a particular time and place? There is much scientific literature that would seem to imply: "Yes." If so, then do we create that reality or are we born into a pre-existing material reality?
The questions are endless.
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It is not understood that before life an individual [soul, conscious personality] decides to live. A self is not simply the accidental personification of the body's biological mechanism. Each person born, desires to be born.
There's one relationship in your life...that has been kept a secret. You don't know when it began, and yet you depend upon it for everything.... This is your relationship with reality.... [It] is the most important one you have or will ever have. You are the creator of reality, and yet you have no idea how you do it --the process is effortless.
What exists physically exists first in thought and feeling. There is no other rule.
Macro and Micro Realities
The Cell and the Universe
Humanity's reality is vast and seemingly endless whether we look inward at a microscopic world of cells and atoms and subatomic particles or outward to the stars and solar systems and galaxies of our universe. Within those grand and minuscule realities, there also exists vast expanses of empty space.
Up until the mid-to-late twentieth century, science perpetuated a long-held argument that reality progresses in a predictable and orderly way. In effect, "God does not play dice with the universe." This mechanistic viewpoint was advanced by classical physics. The assumption in this model is that the physical world is objectively real and it exists independently of human observation. Also, time points only in one direction, and cause-effect events are absolutely fixed.
New scientific paradigms are replacing this view of reality as it confronts the unexplainable paradoxes that have plagued classical, mechanistic, Newtonian physics for more than a century. The new paradigms, based on decades of experiment and study, now describe reality in strange and unthinkable ways. They use terms like: superposition (all events--past, present, future--happen simultaneously, in the eternal "now); non-locality (physical objects are not separate, even at great distances they are connected instantaneously through space and time); parallel universes (reality is multidimensional with undetectable universes alongside our own).
These new models of reality presuppose the existence of occurrences we have written off as impossibilities, labeling them as fantasy or science fiction. Things like telepathy, astral travel, past-life memories, near-death experiences, probable lives, clairvoyance, precognition, psychic phenomena, distance healing and much more. The new Quantum Reality brings us to a transformative understanding of our universe as holistic, unified, holographic.
We now must await society's willingness to adopt and adapt to the new realities that will hopefully connect us once again to our earthly home, to one another, and to universal consciousness.
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The universe is --and you can pick your terms-- a spiritual or mental or psychological manifestation, and not...an objective manifestation. There is presently no science, religion, or psychology that comes close to even approaching a conceptual framework that could explain, or even indirectly describe, the dimensions of that kind of universe.
Life is coterminous with consciousness, and everything in biology and evolution are defined by that cognitive cellular endowment. Crucially, that conscious life is embodied in the cellular form and has remained so for at least 3.8 billion years.
[C]onsciousness everywhere pervades the universe.... The balance of nature upon your planet is no chance occurrence, but the result of constant, instant computations on the part of each most minute consciousness whether it forms part of a rock, a person, an animal, or a plant. Each invisibly 'holds space together.' This is a cooperative venture.
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Quantum theory...tell us that something unaccounted for is connecting otherwise isolated objects. And this is what psi (paranormal) experiences and experiments are telling us. The parallels are so striking that it suggests that psi is --literally-- the human experience of quantum interconnectedness.