Reality? Happy Hunting!

It seems to me that there are people who -- because of their personality makeup, shall we say? -- perceive the everyday physical world of sound and color and form and movement around them and take it at face value, while others instinctively question the nature of reality and feel that there is some reality beyond what their five senses present to them. The first says, “This is reality and there’s nothing more”, while the others feel, “There’s an ultimate reality behind this,” and ask “What is reality?”

(In writing this piece I’ve avoided wordiness by calling the first group “Nothing More” and the latter group “Other Realities”.)

To look at what is in front of you and accept it as all there is: Is that a gift or a limitation?

The Other Realities group might ask a question asked in VALIS, by Philip K. Dick, “How many worlds do we exist in simultaneously?”, or “Do we exist simultaneously in more than one time?”, questions which would cause the Nothing More group to smirk.

The Nothing Mores see dreams as “just dreams”, while the other group senses that dreams may have a reality beyond mere imagination. In the morning experiences about which I wrote recently, the dream world definitely seemed more “real” than my everyday world. Which gives rise to the question, in passing, why would a “merely imaginary” world ever seem MORE real than the everyday world? One would think that if there is a single reality, an imagined reality would always seem inferior in quality, less convincing . . . that is, the brain could not manufacture a counterfeit reality which would seem superior to that “objective reality” which is presumably fed to the brain by our five human senses.

To the person who feels “there may be a reality behind this one” the concept of “maya” (“the sense-world of manifold phenomena held in Vedanta to conceal the unity of absolute being”) makes sense because it is seconded by his own feelings, while to the Nothing More the maya notion is a groundless way of unnecessarily complicating things.

The philosopher Bishop George Berkeley asserted that the only real existence of anything is the perception we have of that thing in our mind. When Dr. Johnson was asked how he would refute Bishop Berkeley, he kicked a heavy stone and said rather stupidly, “Thus, I refute him!”

I’ve lost the URL, but I was looking the other day at a website which discussed the concept of virtual reality: “Just what do we mean when we use the term virtual? It generally is applied to something that is not conceived of or perceived as real but yet acts like a real thing. Then what is reality?”

I’ve written in this blog that we might compare our state to a person who becomes so immersed in a virtual reality computer game that she forgets there is anything else. Her 3-D perceptions of the game, and herself as the seeing participant in the game, become reality to her. Without memory of sitting down and hooking up the game apparatus, without memory of herself as a person who is playing a game, she has no means of finding her game reality secondary to a “higher reality”. If someone in the game asks her about “other realities” she might say scornfully, pleased with her down-to-earth common sense, “This is obviously reality, and it’s all there is.” She’s going to be quite surprised when the game ends and the goggles come off.

What if we’re in a similar situation? What if, as Plato says in his “Allegory of the Cave”, we accept as reality what are merely shadows cast by the true reality? What if – as many have said – life is but a dream from which we will wake to reality.

I must quote Robin Williams, who exclaimed in one of his comedy routines, “Reality! What a concept!”

I feel like writing, “Reality is whatever seems real to us at the moment,” but that sounds like cheating. How about: “Reality is whatever seems real to us unless and until a superior reality is shown to exist?”

The fact that I would ask those questions puts me squarely in the Other Realities group and brings me back to the point of this little essay – that there seems to be one type of person who feels that the everyday world of the five sense is obviously the only reality, and another type of person who feels that there is a superior reality behind the one we perceive in the everyday world, and --- who knows? -- perhaps an even more superior reality beyond that one.

Because I like FLIGHTS OF PEGASUS to be personal and spontaneous rather than researched in advance, I don’t know what studies – psychological or epistemological – may have been written on the subject of the two kinds of personalities I’ve discussed . . . but I would like to find out.

The Unchanging Self

I often recall something my grandfather said to me when I was five years old. He was telling me that he “and the boys” had gone to a baseball game. I laughed. “You said ‘boys’! Why do you say ‘boys” when you’re as old as you are?” He was probably about 60. His response was, “You never get any older. Your body gets older, but you stay just the same as you always were. Inside, I’m no older now than I was when I was your age.”

As I see it, he was describing the eternal and never-aging spark of the Source (the spark of God, if you prefer) which gives consciousness to our physical form. What shall we call that spark? Atman? The soul? The higher Self?

Words are inadequate here, especially since the same words are used in different senses by various schools of thought, but the point is that there is a part of us, the most important part, which is independent of our physical form. It is the observer, sometimes called the “enjoyer”, the passenger in the chariot we sense as our body. It is what watches the show on the television screen created by our senses, but there is nothing watching the Watcher because there is nothing beyond the Observer.

That brings to mind the Zen statement that to go searching for God is like searching for an ox while riding on the ox.

I believe that this atman, this higher Self, not only remains forever young, but also never moves. You are always in the same place. No matter where your body moves about in the illusion, maya, you are always in the same place. The only location of the Source, atman, is Now, the eternal Present. That part of you, if you were suddenly to find yourself on the other side of the planet, would be exactly where it is now. That is an inexpressible concept, but I draw the very crude analogy of a virtual reality computer game which seems to real that the player of the game becomes lost in it and forgets that he is playing a game. He believes he is traveling all over the world in the game, but he actually remains in the same place.

The spark of the divine in the individual never sleeps, never gets drunk, never is hurt. I think that L. Ron Hubbard was correct when he wrote that something in us records everything that happens, even when we are unconscious. It is also this Something which looks down at the body on the hospital bed in near death experiences. It is what tells the New Year’s Eve reveler, who is too intoxicated even to stand up for long, to “pull himself together” and drive safely home, even though he may not remember how he got there. (I know, I know, “Don’t drink and drive”, but it’s a good example.) “It” is also what makes a person become calm and efficient in a fast-moving, life-threatening crisis in spite of all the previous fear. It is, I think, what directs and enables an ordinary person to summon superhuman strength to lift an automobile to save a life.

I also believe based on personal experience, that the higher Self helpfully watches out for us. Some people believe in guardian angels, some in protective spirit guides, and I don’t dispute their beliefs, but my feeling has been that something of my “Self” is helping me avoid accidents and other bad experiences with those inner messages to “Turn left here, and never mind why!”, or “Get out right now”.

Saving experiences like those are reported so widely by so many people that there’s no question that they are real. The only question is, “Where do they come from?” Whether they come from your Self or an angel or guide, you receive even more helpful messages if you recognize and truly accept in your moment-to-moment daily life that at least a part of you exists in a spiritual domain in which future events and distant events can be perceived . . . things which our physical eyes and ears cannot detect any more than they can detect radio waves or rays from outer space.

That higher component of ourselves which remains always young, always awake, and never exhausted can be realized in Now, no matter how distracted or worried or busy we are. Tolle’s excellent book, THE POWER OF NOW, describes “gateways to Now”. My personal way is to find something in the Present to focus on – the sound of a fountain, the light on a quivering leaf, the feel of a fabric, or to use the well-known method of paying attention entirely to one’s own breathing.

A sense of peace comes from remembering who you really are.