Thursday, April 28, 2016

The Illusion of Reality Atlantic article by Amanda Gefter

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/

My response to the article.  

There are two levels: the metaphysical foundation of what are we, i.e. the machine question and what is reality.  I have written a lot on this subjects, but I wrote this once,

“What we choose is what we perceive in confluence with all beings.  The choices made by what is perceived to be volition in the forms of a higher cognitive function mind deliberately choosing, a lower cognitive function animal operating on what we call instinct, a bacterium replicated, a virus attacking a cell or a photon taking both particle and wave, these are iterations of what possibility is.  This is the universe.  Reality is the subsection of this confluence our perception is limited to digest in this current form.” 

The what are we question…

I think the ego wants to be touched the way a mother touches child in all the iterated physical, emotional, and mental forms to correlate with evolutionary instructions of survival, but reality is not touch.  True reality is an absolute interconnectedness that our human form hinders.  The pinnacles of the human experiences are when we are shedding this restriction when we express love, presence, deep personal conversations and acts of sublimating our ego for this greater idea of what we are, we feel most alive when we are letting go of our ego.  The ego to me is the evolutionary pilot of the machine of our brain that spiritual reality needs to be a person, but does not need the ego to be what we really are.  We meaning the collective entire universe we. 

The ego and sensory perceptions of the body coddling the ego perceive a biased image of reality based on evolution through the filters we employ inside the human paradigm.  A dog does not see a piece of fruit the way a human sees a piece of fruit.  A human does not smell that piece of fruit the way a deer smells.  Reality is a function of the observer.  This is the evolutionary advantage Hoffman describes that it is advantageous for an evolved organism to perceive reality in a distorted form. 

What the universe is: human, plant, mineral, plasma, etc. is of a common thread beyond the atomic.  Once you take atoms and time out of the paradigm of existence and you contemplate the metaphysical what are we, what is this, the big crayon type questions, I tend to get back to this idea that tangible reality perceived inside this human form is yes like the article alludes, subjective to the observer.  Reality is like a film strip where each member of the audience has a different camera angle and lens pointed at the same universe.

The kindness and hurt that our volition elects to engage is not consequence-based beyond space-time.  True reality is not evolving, saving, or damning the self in a paradigm outside the now.  The ego wants perpetuation in death, not annihilation so it creates tethers of consequence.  The ego is an illusion of the brain and to me has nothing to do with that metaphysical spiritual equation.  The ego wants the “you did a good job, bad job” thing.  The ego wants a personal purpose and to make a difference, to participate in the great big jello to see it giggling reverberating the good we did in the world and take some kind of solace in the wave’s vibration. 

The waves and the good we do or do not create are not about us or just us creating them.  The true basis of reality is interconnected, all of it.  So to think on the platform of time and claim “I did good or I did bad” is to segregate self and other, living and non-living, environmental setting from actors, it is to postulate a stage exists.  There is no stage.  There is only stimuli to our sensorial intake-devices interpreting physical reality in a manner comfortable to the ego in our brain. 

The quantum level of reality informs us that a particle will take two forms at once.  This quote from my book might help to explain, what I think that means

“Why did an atom go where it went?  Not because it chose to go left instead of right or to operate as a particle rather than a wave.  The atom went where it went because it simultaneously went and is all ways.  It went all possibilities.  Our brains may struggle to conceptualize this, because we perceive it went left.  The atom participated in forming this organized thing we call a star because we perceived it.  We perceive the light created from the star.  We perceive the energy moving into our skin supplying us with vitamins to survive.  However our observation in the platform of the now only truncated all the other possibilities of what it is also doing in the rest of that jar of space time called possibility (the realm of might).   

All that potential exists so that the definition of what is the barrier that separates one being from another, one nation, one planet, one galaxy, one nebula to the entire boundless or bound universe to a yactometer on a quark operating on a quantum scale, the largest is comprised of the smallest.  These rules of mathematics active in a particular universe as part of a multiverse serve to expose the flow of the whole shifting inside itself. 

In this we see that what we are is not a self, we are not a summation of particles, but we are possibility itself.  We are potential.  Volition is the paint brush of the potential that we perceive; it is not the determination of what we are, will be, or were.  We are always all things.  The past and future are only illusions.  We are always the is, as all possibility itself.”

This idea of we are possibility, we are the is, I am not me metaphysical popcorn gets back to this if it is all an illusion then what is the point, why are we here sort of deal.  Does being good or bad matter?  The short answer in my interpretation of reality is that first we are not the identities we perceive, so take of the I or the we mask and with it the human mask, or the Earth mask or the evolved organism mask.  We are not limited to any of those parameters.  Then for me I take off the god illusion that there is theistic master puppeteer or genesis engine or voyeur.  To me we are it, all of it.  We perceive ourselves as spliced, but that segmentation is an illusion.  These ideas of conversing to another, the idea of other and self are illusions in a paradigm of individuality beholden to the ego. 

So this gets us to the second question, what is reality…

The true nature of reality is.  Reality just is, without form or atomic matter or time, it is not hot or cold, or feeling good or bad, reality is a constant balance and does not require joy or anger, or want, reality is.  The human in us wants some kind of mathematical conclusion to the play, to explain, to be earned, it wants to feel, we may crave this eternal peace, and consciousness of all atomic reality, being ubiquitous and present. 

The human in us contemplates this idea of being and may think, “The idea of just being would be boring or sad or not happy at all.  Life cannot be that drab or dark.”  We may contemplate the idea as darkness as if there is something to sense to be seen as if we are missing the living and forlorn we are not reunited with the dead.  However this would be ego-talk, we were never us.  Time does not exist.  Time is an illusion like space is inside the paradigm of the atomic.  Space-time is an illusion of perception we manifested to participate.  I think that is part of what Hoffman is getting at when talking about how quantum physicists can teach neurologists about the walls neurologist’s are running into in research. 

Our true spiritual nature simply exists.  Atomic reality is a paradigm of segmentation allowing consciousness in order for a paradigm of perception to exist.  Hoffman talks about how in brain surgery segmenting the right form the left hemisphere takes one consciousness and splits it into two.  I think this is an apt analogy for how the atomic universe works. 

To me humans operate on three levels: a base spiritual reality of what we are as a foundation, on top of that is a layer of consciousness where we occasionally are aware of aspects of our spiritual nature, and a perception of space-time reality which serves as both barrier and corridor to access the other two.

In the spiritual sense there is no way to perceive, no before or after or during, there is only now.  So there is no way to look or hear or think etc.  In atomic reality what we see is relative to the viewer, (i.e. the theory of relativity and viewing a star that no longer exists in the light trailing in from the night sky or the way a baseball batter will see the ball where her or his brain projects the ball to be based on the frame of reference of the pitcher’s release hand and not where the ball actually is at that point in time of perception.)  So if there is a basic question of why do we exist evolved in this form of reality that is not true reality the answer to me is because it is a paradigm in which perception is possible.

We are simultaneously in both states.  We are in that state of being connected as everything and we are also here segmented in this biological illusion of a human self.  The us that is in that state of being: one has no physical distance from our atomic self, because the spiritual component does not take up physical space and two does not contemplate the idea of us or consider we are us.  The spiritual component does not think.  It merely is.  The we “there” is not a piece of a finite whole.  There is no boundary or space-time.

I think the greatest misunderstanding of life is that it is a journey.  There is no journey to travel to reveal what we are and how we grow to see that best.  We thin the veil through art, kindness, interconnection, love, music, mercy, yoga, empathy.  This is why these acts are the truly pertinent endeavors of being human.  We thin that veil by removing or dampening the obstacle of ego and self we created.  Animals, plants, stars, operate in the same mathematics.  Only there is no mind or is a less biologically-evolved mind to even include the ego. 

One can see the beauty in a rock in this way.  Entire groups of atoms just are.  They are just being a rock, not fretting when will the universe end or when will this planet get hit by a meteor so I can quit being a rock.  There is none of that.  There was no beginning to the atomic universe.  It simply always has been, just like the spiritual component we participate always has been. 

The atoms in us transpose and have been and will be parts of other nonliving and living illusions of segmentation in the atomic universe.  This gets back to the quantum scale of thinking Hoffman discusses.  To attach a status of living to a human being is to ignore the ideas on a quantum level of: “Am I what I have always been and will be?  Am I a machine?  Does the idea of I am exist?  In biological death what changes and in what paradigms?”

To me I find the following two ideas complete the puzzle.  Perception is the point of atomic life.  Being simply is.  These are the balancing weights on the scale of existence. 

Maybe ideas like that are reasons we may look at the Dali Lama and think whatever he is doing he is on to something.  We look at someone being at a musical concert alive in that moment playing guitar or spouting poetry alive sharing, those people are on to something. 

There is also a seesaw of balance with work to keep the species afloat to meet the basic human needs of food, shelter, housing, healthcare, etc. to maintain the vehicle of our bodies and the societal environment our biological life requires to function.  This physical balance facilitates access to the spiritual reality of being.  There is love in acts of work.  There is empathy and presence.  Our species behaves like a grand nest in which we are twigs.

The grand mistake is to think there is some great prize of a lifetime attained with stacked decades of wisdom as if we are climbing a mountain and being young one cannot see or contemplate it.  The nature of true reality is always here.  Most of society is trying to thicken the veil, while a minority is trying to thin the veil.  It is in this consciousness the fate of our species balances extinction and presence.  If we fail or succeed for what length of time is not the point.  The point is how conscious we are in the present moment as we perceive the strip crossing the projector of our sensorial bodies in the illusionary platform of space-time we stand.  That is atomic life; that’s the deal.  The rest of atomic life is past, future, and illusion.  Atomic life balances with being.  The two together are the answer I go with, but what do I know.  I will never be done reading and thinking about these basics, but this is about where I am now as explained in a few pages.

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