Nov 01, 2015

Ponderings

 

Life is an illusion

Life is an illusion! I have made this statement in the past, and will do so in the future. Almost always when I mention this phrase to a gathering it is ignored and when I ask what people think, it is tossed off as being impossible. Very few accept the concept, and even fewer yet accept that the statement is the basis of the life we think we live. We see all the trials and troubles and joys and blessings of life and think that those details define life in it’s totality.

How can I state that all the horrors in life are an illusion, things like the holocaust, the workings of ISIS, the earthquakes in Afghanistan, even the struggles of the poor, our own struggles in life, etc., etc. are illusions, when we see the devastation and pain so plainly?

Good questions.

We are a spiritual being having a Physical Experience

Teilhard de Chardin said many years ago : “We are not physical beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a physical experience.” If we are, in essence, a spiritual being, not a physical being, and all the things that we see around us are physical, including all the pain and all the beauty, how does all this compute? Perhaps it is because we see things not in their intended mode but only in the physical mode then translated into a spiritual mode. What do I mean? Looking at beauty first, for that is easier to see, we see that all beauty is, as the saying goes, “in the eyes of the beholder”. Art is as especially prone to that: what one person sees as junk and a waste of time ready for the trash, another sees as stunning, moving and worthy of the highest acclaim. Our perception, based on our personal past history, rules our judgement.

All physicality is an illusion.

What we see in the physical world is a combination of the object before us and our understanding of the object, based upon our past experiences with similar objects. Everything you see, touch, hear, taste, or smell is an illusion. There is no such thing as color, there is only light with different wavelengths, receptors in the eye that are responsive to three different combinations of wavelengths which are only a tiny fraction of the total wavelengths available; there is no such thing as sound, but, like the eye, receptors in the ear which are tuned to a different set of combinations of the wavelengths available; and so forth with all senses, including taste, feel, and smell.

Why is this important?

Our perceived reality is ours alone

Everything I see or perceive in the universe and accept as my reality is mine alone, and is not the same as anybody else’s reality in the world. That, of course, is not how most think, Almost always, we make the general assumption that everyone sees things exactly the way we do, each of us, and are amazed that others draw different conclusions than ourselves. “How could they; it is as plain as the nose on your face” crosses our mind when others disagree with us. But the truth is, I have had many different experiences that have unconsciously adjusted my reality to fit my experiences, and no two people in the world have had the same experiences, thus each person’s world or reality is their unique perspective that creates an internal reality that is unique to that person. We find others that agree with us on many topics, but even there where we seem to agree, each person has an outlook or perspective that is at least slightly different from all others. We use the same words to describe ourselves, but words are only symbols attempting to express internal sensations that cannot be fully described in words, and the same words have a different meaning to each person, often changing meaning to ourselves depending on the situation. Sometimes the difference is subtle, but sometimes when probed the seeming agreement are as different as night and day. “But I thought you meant” is a common expression, where we misunderstood what somebody said, when it seemed as clear as a bell to the person saying it that it meant just the opposite of what we thought we heard.

Only by fully accepting that we are all different and view things from our own personal perspective, can we begin to understand the common reality that we all share. Our common reality is the trinity that makes up who we really are.

We are body, mind, and soul

We are body, mind and soul, now and for eternity. I do not mean this particular body; this body is just a specific arrangement of the physical potential that is a part of our very being. When I say that body is part of our very being, I mean we have the potential at any time in our eternal life, to take that potential and form it into a physical body for the experience of discovering and understanding Who We Really Are. We did form our present body for this experience, but that energy field that became our body is always present, now and ever more. I use the term ‘energy field’, for that is what everything we call matter is in its very essence. Quantum physics has shown and experimentally proven that all matter is nothing but energy bonds that form according to rules, that, since our physical senses are very coarse, act like solid material. The true reality is different: our body is only energy fields that have bonded in a manner that creates the seemingly solid mass that we appear, to our limited sight, as you and me.

Our mind (different from our brain), on the other hand, is the means by which our body and soul communicate. It is the mind that sets our limits; it uses the brain of the body, but is itself not the brain, but a field that partakes of the other two parts of the body at various levels. The mind is the filter of the soul into the physical realm; in Jesus the mind filter limits were gone so that Jesus understood the fullness of the soul and could express himself at that level. You and I, on the other hand, come into this level of existence with a level of filter that our mind had brought with it; the task of this lifetime is to reduce the filter and let more of the soul filter into our physical life. The ultimate goal is to remove the filter like Jesus did, and reach our seeking goal, the Kingdom of God (“Seek first the Kingdom of God..).

Jesus saw the world in its glory: as the Kingdom of God living fully in the bliss of God. And Jesus saw the human race around him, having blinders in place that prevented most from seeing the Kingdom that was so visible to Jesus. Thus his task: to speak words and live those words to the fullest that would aid us in removing our blinders and see the reality of the Kingdom of God present here, in each of us, in its full glory.

Our soul, on the other hand, retains the full knowledge of itself: the Kingdom of God that lies within, as Jesus spoke about. “Nor will they say ‘Behold here’, or ‘there’. For behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” Luke 17:21. The soul, which “lies within” is your private Kingdom, the realm of God within you that is your very Being, the Image of God.

Yes, we are the Image of God. (Genesis 1:27)

Those of us who are Christians have heard that phrase from Genesis, but almost all of us have refused to believe it. It is our soul that is the Image of God, with God and our soul united as a single entity, Am I saying we are the whole of God? No, but like the drop of ocean water is part of the ocean, so we are part of “ocean” of God, but not even close to the whole of God, which is beyond all imagining. But that still means we are that portion of God, and since God is infinite and has infinite powers, even a tiny drop is still infinite, and that Kingdom that lies within can take us to infinity and beyond.

Science and illusion

Science has long said that the world we believe we live in is an illusion. I have mentioned the findings of quantum physics that only energy fields exist and creates the illusion of solid matter. These findings were first the result of the mathematics involved, but have been proven by the Large Hadron Collider and other experiments, where extreme energy collisions of particles have shattered previous boundaries, and produced proof of the Higgs particle, or ‘God’ particle, the essence of all energy levels, and the creator of all boundaries we know and love, thus the term ‘God’ particle.

The Universe is an illusion

The universe itself is a giant illusion. We look into the night sky and are dazzled by the sky above: stars, galaxies, sometimes comets and shooting stars, the great milky way…how beautiful and awesome it appears. But what we see is only the tip of what exists in the universe. What is visible to the eye is only about 4% of the matter and energy that lies in the universe. That gives us an idea how limited our eyesight really is. But it gets even weirder. Our instruments can detect another 24% that we can directly measure. When we had found that, most Scientists believed they had solved the universe; and based on all the known masses both visible and invisible, predicted that the universe should be crawling to halt soon, if not already reversing, and start the collapse that would result in the ‘big crunch’ in about 25 billion years.

But other scientist started to measure the shifting light patterns, and using the technique known as ‘Doppler Shift’, could actually measure what the universe is doing, much like when you hear a train whistle it appears higher when approaching (‘blue shift’) and then lower as it recedes (red shift). Each type of star, based on size and activity, and using our own sun as the anchor, exhibits a particular ‘color’ or energy output. As they began to measure the shifting light waves, the had expected to see some, perhaps most in some slight ‘red shift’, or moving away but close to still or neutral dependent of star type, and some ‘blue shift where they are actually approaching closer. But, much to their amazement, what they found was a massive ‘red shift’ in all stars, meaning that all stars are receding from all other stars, and more amazing as measurements became more precise, that the acceleration was gaining, and not receding, as previously expected. If you are wondering, they determined that by looking at the shift in similar stars that are closer when compared with similar stars that are further from us.

After much discussion, they realized that this increasing acceleration could only be accounted for by some massive force that only effects gravity, the smallest force in the universe, but the most prevalent force in the universe. They cosmologists have called this force ‘dark force’, since it appears unseen to all instruments, and it accounts for 76% of all mass and energy in our universe. Only now have they begun to find some hints about this force, again using the Hadron Collider and the latest measurements.

Thus we have so little information, but we insist that we humans know everything, and of course what we see is what there is.

As I started out by saying, Life is an Illusion.

Meditation

My Beloved Wisdom, I am left in awe at the understanding You are pouring into humanity, so that we may catch glimpses the ultimate expanse that we are immersed into in this realm of physicality. I see we are at a crossroads, where we can either move forward into unity with Your presence or knock ourselves back into the distant past to start over again. Your gifts of technology, combined with the pressure of the sheer number of human lives being lived, create a wall where we must choose to climb into Your presence or fall backwards. Thank you for this opportunity, and we know You will continue to encourage us with signs and gifts of wisdom to seek the higher path into Your Light. I pray that we may climb into the new evolutionary level at this time, and not have to wait for millennia to pass until we can try again.