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You and I live in the real world – don’t we?

Posted on 15 July 2015, 9:04

If we want to think straight about this question, we need to remind ourselves of several things, and I shall be exploring the question further in the next few blogs. This time I am considering the world as we know it through our physical senses. Present to my senses is the computer in front of me resting on a table. This table appears to have colour, hardness, to be opaque with nothing passing through it. But a study of optics will show that there is no colour as such in the object we perceive, but rather the wavelength or frequency of the light reflected from an object is translated by the mind and the brain into the experience of the colour. Similarly with sound: vibrations of certain wavelengths are transmitted through the air, interpreted by the ear, the brain and consciousness as sound.

We understand that table to be solid, but physicists tell us that the atoms of which it is composed consist of 99.99% empty space. This is true also of the wall of the house, and of our bodies. If we live in a city, radiation from a number of TV stations and many radio stations is passing through the walls of the building that we inhabit, through the table, and through our bodies. We are only aware of this when we switch on our radio or TV sets.

Our conscious mind interprets what we receive through our sense organs as colours, shapes or as sounds, and responds only to a limited part of the light and sound spectrum. We don’t sense radio waves - if we did, whatever would our world look like, if we could see them “shining” from various directions through the walls of our room. What if we could see x-rays and see each other’s internal organs? We don’t sense ultraviolet light, neither do we see infrared light and heat. How differently things would look if we could! It is just as well that most of us are not conscious of paranormal information at all times, otherwise what a “blooming, buzzing, confusion” would surround us!

How different are the starry heavens when photographed using filters that leave out the visible spectrum, but represent the universe in terms of radio, x-ray, or infrared!

So do our senses provide us with an objective representation of reality? Hardly. Our senses provide us with the illusion of a solid, and real world. We sense a world that appears real and solid to us. But when we consider the emptiness of the atoms from which our bodies are composed, we are in fact but shadows of nothingness!

Consider in addition how much our perceptions have been shaped by our experiences as human beings, in the societies and sub-groups of class, creed, and family, to which we belong, how much by the language we speak, the things we have learnt in school, by the religious or philosophical beliefs that we may have, and by our psychological and emotional dispositions. When we have thought deeply about this, we may see how much what we see as reality is very personal and that other people will understand that reality differently. Just try and get meaningful dialogue between a died-in-the-wool pseudosceptic and a fundamentalist Christian.

To understand so-called objective reality, we may use the tools of impersonal science: tools that are nevertheless developed by the human mind. Science can be a wonderful way for people of varying philosophies and beliefs to arrive at approximations of objective truth that command general assent. Even so, science is always a work-in-progress,  subject to revision as fresh data, fresh theories about the data arrive.

Science most of the time seems to confirm the illusion of a real solid world. Yet it does also provide the information that also lets us know how illusory the solid world is.

Scientific endeavour has enabled a little space vehicle to be landed on a comet. Shortly the world hopes to have a picture of little Pluto and its moons, four and a half light hours away. A miracle of calculation, a resounding justification for accepting a science that is materialistic. These wonders blaze like the sun confirming materialism, while the feeble candle of a Near-Death Experience, or a strange synchronicity is hard to see. At first sight, Materialists are not stupid.

But all of science does not blaze so brightly. In the June issue of The Ground of Faith there is a link to an article from the April issue of The Lancet called “What is Medicine’s 5-Sigma?” We can read it and weep. Because most academic science departments are dependent on commercial funding, the temptation to produce results, even if phoney, is almost irresistible. Because an academic scientist cannot get tenure without publishing, the temptation to publish obscure but ultimately nonsensical research is huge. The article in The Lancet estimates that perhaps half of published scientific material is just plain untruth. Humanity desperately needs open-minded and honest science. There is of course much good science, but we should not worship at its feet.

Another thing to be remembered is that so much of science is based on statistical evaluation of observed phenomena. If a phenomenon has a 1 in 20 chance of being explained in a particular way, then that result is regarded as having significance. “5-Sigma” implies that the odds against chance are really huge, therefore it is a near certainty. Science gets to be its most accurate in the field of astronomy, but in the field of medicine for example, especially in evaluating drugs in the treatment of disease, the odds against chance that a drug is of value are usually quite modest. And there is the added problem, that even when a new drug obtains high statistical significance in early trials, often these results are not found to be replicable when a later re-evaluation is attempted.

Yes of course, science and medicine both are making ever increasing strides, and many of us are living longer and more happily as a result.

But it is only in certain fields that we encounter amazing accuracy.. in other fields things are much less certain.

Those of you who are familiar with Lawrence LeShan’s Alternate Realities, will agree that I am writing here in what he calls the Sensory-Physical mode, the mode in which our every day affairs are conducted. There is nothing odd about my manner of writing, my words seem straightforward and logical, and people strongly disagreeing with me, like the Materialists, will follow my arguments, and understand what I am saying.

But there are other (I believe) equally valid modes of describing and investigating reality, for which I am preparing the ground for their discussion in my next blog.

What we notice then is that the reality that is perceived by our bodily senses simply tells us about what our bodily senses perceive. But if we take into consideration how reality would be perceived if we had other senses, and remember how much of nothingness that we are composed (remember the empty atom), and when we remember the unreliability and likely untruth of much so-called science, then we have grounds for being less trusting that our bodily senses give us the full picture.

But in addition to the physical senses, there are the non-physical, such as telepathy, distance viewing, seeing into the future, psychokinesis, and all the ways the discarnate make themselves known. These phenomena don’t appear to behave in the predictable cause and effect way characteristic of physical phenomena.

It seems that while we are in the physical body, we are so to speak tethered to space and time, cause and effect, whereas in the spiritual body, we are not so tethered. Physical cause and effect applies when we are tethered, and not, when we are in the spiritual body.

Prominent quantum physicists, David Bohm, F. David Peat, Wolfgang Pauli, and several others, suggest a physics that talks about of the physical cause and effect, and the untethered spiritual. Dr James Beichler has his doctorate in what he calls, “paraphysics” and is author of To Die For: the Physical Reality of Conscious Survival. Michael Tymn interviews him here. If you have time, this article is well worth reading.

In this blog we have been thinking about the sensory-physical mode of viewing reality, and also its limitations.

It prepares the way for discussion of the next topic, which will be what Lawrence LeShan calls the Mythic Mode of viewing reality.

Note: In my last blog I raised the question of helping people in theological colleges, and also in secondary schools to become aware of issues raised in consciousness studies including the paranormal, so important in getting a better understanding of multifaceted reality. I have been in touch with Dr Howard Jones, a lifelong educator who is very focused on this issue. I recommend his Evolution of Consciousness, Progressing Toward Universal Holism.

Michael Cocks edits the journal, The Ground of Faith.
Afterlife Teaching From Stephen the Martyr by Michael Cocks is published by White Crow Books and available from Amazon and other bookstores.
His latest book, Into the Wider Dream: Synchronicity in the Witness Box is published by White Crow Books.


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“Life After Death – The Communicator” by Paul Beard – If the telephone rings, naturally the caller is expected to identify himself. In post-mortem communication, necessitating something far more complex than a telephone, it is not enough to seek the speakers identity. One needs to estimate also as far as is possible his present status and stature. This involves a number of factors, overlapping and hard to keep separate, each bringing its own kind of difficulty. Four such factors can readily be named. Read here
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