Part 2: What is Reality?

"For a man to conquer himself is the first and most noblest of all victories."
-Plato

What is reality? Good question. Perhaps the most important question there is. We endorse the reality that our eyes give us. Most people think reality is what our senses project to us. And, of course, science has gone along with that view for 400 years: If it is not perceivable by our five senses (or their extensions), it's not real. If I asked you to prove to me that the computer monitor you are looking at exists, more than likely, your response would be " It exists because I'm sitting here looking at it." Again, most people define reality as what is observable.

But even this "reality" appears one way when we look at it with our eyes, and another if we look more deeply into it with a microscope or an atom smasher. Then it becomes totally different, unrecognizable. Have you ever seen a galaxy? When you look at it, it looks like a swirl of light, but obviously you know that the galaxy really doesn't look like that, its billions upon billions of stars close together tightly packed. The swirls are simply composed of dots which are so bright that they give off the fleeting suggestion that the galaxy is actually a swirl. In actuality, we know that the galaxy is actually mostly made of space, with the stars here and there being the exception.

Consider this now, when you look at your own arm for instance, you obviously think it's solid, correct? But what else do you know about your arm? We know that the arm is actually made up of billions upon billions of atoms. We also know that between the protons, electrons, and neutrons that there is mostly space, and we know that there is a great amount of space between atoms. In reality, the arm isn't so solid, is it? Again, tell me how you know your computer monitor exist, and really, what are you looking at? This shall be touched on later.

And what about our thoughts? Are they part of "reality"? Take a look around right now. There are windows and chairs and lights and the ominous computer monitor. You probably think they are real. All of them preceded by an "idea" of windows and chairs. Someone imagined those windows and chairs and created them. So if the latter is real, is the idea real as well? And what about emotions, are they, real?

Having not come up with the answer to "what is reality?" humanity seemingly turned to the lab and tackled a simpler aspect. We abandoned Philosophy and Metaphysics and focused on Science and the Physical world, the world around us, and sought to learn what it was made up of instead of what reality was.

It was the Greek philosopher Democritus who first had the idea of an atom, "Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion." And that was a great place to start. So out came the electron microscopes and atom smashers and cloud chambers, and we big people peered into the world of the little things.

Now when you went to school, you probably were shown a model of an atom, with its solid nucleus and orbiting electrons, and you were probably told "Atoms are the building blocks of nature." Unfortunately, due to quantum mechanics, it just isn't so.

It turned out that those solid little atoms, in their neat little orbits, were really just energy packets. Then it was discovered they're not really energy packets either, but momentary condensations of a field of energy. Of course, every atom consists almost entirely of empty space, so much so that it seems a miracle that we don't hit the floor every time we try to sit down on a chair. And since the floor is also mostly empty, where would we find something "solid" enough to hold us? The kicker here is that our bodies are made up of atoms too!

And now currently, quantum physics tells us that the so called "empty space" within and between atoms is not empty at all. In fact, it's so lively with energy that one cubic centimeter, contains more energy than all the solid matter in the entire known universe... So what did you say Reality was?

Long before the early Greek philosophers the sages of India knew that there was something important going on beyond the realm of the senses. Hindu teachers thought that the world of appearances, the world we see with our senses, is maya, or illusion, and that something underlies this material realm, something that is more powerful and more fundamental, more "real" even though it's completely intangible. Christianity speaks of heaven being more real than our current existence. He spoke of this life as fleeting, as mist dissipating from our mouths. The higher reality of heaven seems more fundamental that the material universe is according to most religious accounts.

Interestingly enough, this is precisely what quantum physics is revealing. It suggests that at the core of the physical world there is a completely non-physical realm. There is a debate split up into three separate but seemingly equal camps about what this realm is. Some say its simply information, others probability waves and the third camp say its actually the same makeup of consciousness. And just as we commonly say that atoms are what things are "really" made of, if this view is correct, we would have to say that this underlying view field of intelligence is, deep down, what the universe "really" is.

So then again the question stands, What is Reality? In our day to day lives, in our moment by moment decision about reality, is it simply democratic? Or to put it another way, at what point in agreement from those around us does something become real? If there are ten people in a room, and eight see a chair and two see a Martian, who is delusional? If twelve people see a lake as a body of water, and one person sees it as solid enough to walk on, who is delusional? So the kicker is this, does consciousness create reality? Is that why no one has ever come up with a good answer, because reality IS the answer?