The world we live in is hardly, hardly clueless.
It’s not that we know everything, but that doesn’t mean we don’t know anything either. We find ourselves somewhere in between these boundaries, but just like the position of an orbiting electron in an electron cloud, we cannot at any given moment say, “this - is where we are” and pinpoint it.
Over millennia past, our thinkers and philosophers have agonised over this “knowing” - and their verdict, far from being clear and doubtless, is fractured and splintered into thousands of views, very like the uniqueness of snowflakes. Some claim we can “know” but cannot “describe”. Some say it’s better to describe, but that we should never think that whatever we describe may be literal or even real. Some just flatly say we cannot even “know”, let alone describe. Some espouse relative, subjective realities and say that these subjective parts can never make a whole. Some claim there is no unifying idea, but from what we know and see, we can at best only say that reality is a disconnected jumble of discrete episodes - that it cannot, even NEED NOT, make any sense. Some say there is a unifying factor, even rather a Person, called God. The whole range of views like agnosticism, empiricism, naturalism, theism, experientialism, and so on contain the sum total of what we human beings have come up with to deal with the reality of our world.
Regardless of what view we take, believe or espouse, each of us explains or interprets reality based on some sort of clues that it furnishes. Reality is hardly clueless for anyone, including the most hardened agnostic. Yes, the clues it gives may strike each of us in a different way and point in some divergent directions, but that there are clues that present themselves - this is universal and beyond doubt. To deny this, we’d have to deny reality itself. Saying that the clues are ‘subjective’ does not nullify them as clues. It’s impossible for us as human beings to kind of stand over and above everything, or totally outside ‘the whole show’ we call ‘reality’ and make ‘objective’ pronouncements. To do any such thing we’d have to deny reality - and this would cut the integrity from under our prognostications.
From the clues we get, what can we say? Is ‘reality’ just what we happen to see? Or are there layers? Is there anything beyond what we happen to see? For most of us, this question can be described using a range of words and phrases - irrelevant, an impossible pursuit, a waste of time, a set with zero elements, not worth the effort and so on. Many of us claim agnosticism to be the only reasonable, tenable view, consciously or otherwise. “I don’t know” is a perfect, effectively pragmatic explanation, and together with “I don’t care”, it becomes a formidable fortress that very rarely comes under siege. In the cover of this explanation, we live our lives and think we have kept this question at bay.
But the fact remains that reality just doesn’t let up - it keeps us in the ‘I-know-it’s-useless-to-try-but-I-want-to-know-at-least-something’ frame of mind. All of us give ourselves (or want to give ourselves) SOME sort of explanation, and many of us admit at least one (or more than one) layer behind reality. So we do the work and give ourselves some plausible explanation. Now these explanations might not all be consciously believed, but as long as we can tell ourselves we have them, they do put us at rest about reality as we know it and help us go on with our lives from day to day.
***********************************************
From the clues I’ve gotten, however, in my life, I can definitely attest to layers behind reality as my eyes and my heart see it. It looks to me like our world is not just a single, three dimensional entity. It’s not just space, time and matter that make up reality. There is plenty of evidence for intangible stuff that we cannot account for using just space, time and matter, or any possible combination of these. To me it looks like reality is just a front, a blind, a cover for something I cannot see, but which definitely exists. Now my big problem is that I cannot by myself peel my reality off like the layer it is and see what lies behind it. The crunch here is also that herein, I believe, lies the key to get at the roots of things as I see them.
It also seems to me like there are at least two kinds of realities that have perfectly intersected to create this ‘front’, this ‘blind’ that I see from where I am. In crystallography, we are told of the phenomenon of “twinning” - when two identical crystals are kind of conjoined inseparable. Only, in the case of the reality I see, the two realities that make up the ‘front’ are not even distinguishable or similar, not to speak of identical - but they are twinned nevertheless. An invisible world is inseparably conjoined with ours - but this may have left very few clues to us for us to suspect anything. What’s more, this invisible conjoined twin is always in the process of being manipulated to delete all traces of its existence, when in ‘reality’ it not only exists, but also ghost-writes our scripts sometimes, and alters the front of the picture from behind it, under cover of darkness.
Interestingly, one of the most peculiar things about this conjoined reality is that even though it invades our seen reality and takes absolute control many times, we human beings cannot cross over to it fully except when we die. We live all our lives in the ‘front’, the ‘blind’, the ‘veil’, never able to pull back the curtains to see that invisible reality.
Space plus matter plus time - it doesn’t add up. In fact, the sum of these makes only a diminutive part of that whole show we call reality. So much happens in our world that should alert us to this possibility being true. I here offer just one case in point - the exponential increased interest in the occult. It’s very ironic that many people keep telling us religion is a failed experiment, but from the vantage point of ground realities, almost no computer game or special effects film these days can get by without appeal to the occult and to altered realities or even altered perceptions of reality. Isn’t the occult the realm of religion - of metaphysical and transcendent entities and existences? If so, then how can religion be a failed experiment? It has at least taught us there is (or at least, ‘might be’) a world behind the one we see, and our interest in the occult is resounding evidence that we want to touch that reality that lies ‘beyond’. This might be a simple point, but it is overlooked because many people tell us that religion only has to do with ‘God’ (who they discount) and not with occult forces (which they certainly do not discount). Who’s to say that that invisible conjoined reality cannot have to do with both God and occult forces?
Another case in point is the huge interest in ‘spirituality’ over the last few decades. So many people preach to us to ‘get in touch with the inner you’. Who, what, and where is this ‘inner us’ if space, time and matter made everything we know? Ironically, even though spirituality and naturalism may contradict each other fatally in a logical sense, they can peacefully coexist as tenable arguments in the ‘front’ that we all call reality.
Two realities, then, are in constant friction - that is the ‘reality’ that we see. One reality is invisible, the other is visible. During our lifetimes, we live (or at least physically seem to live) largely in the visible reality, unable to fully cross over to the other reality. At the same time, we have some presence in the invisible reality (the ‘inner us’); and also, the invisible reality is always furtively altering and reconstructing the ‘front’ that we perceive as ‘reality’. It LOOKS to us like one reality, but there are actually two realities always jostling to produce the picture, the front, the blind, the ‘veil’ we see.
What do we know about this invisible reality? Not much - though, like all things, our nosy-parker minds have always pioneered fresh new vistas in it - regardless of whether or not such knowledge is actually to our advantage. We know this much - if we can ‘control’ that reality from our visible reality, we can alter almost everything in the visible reality and do exactly as we please. All of the things human beings have been known to do to ‘interact’ with this invisible reality have taught us this much. We also do know and admit there are beings in this invisible reality that might be very unlike us, but which we know have huge powers over our reality that they wield to devastating effect in many cases, and we try desperately to tap into this power and use it to our advantage in the visible reality.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m just describing things as I see them. I’m just taking into account everything I’ve seen human beings do, and every human behaviour. I might even try to compress things to this one simple point - if you really believe there is no such being as ‘God’, then maybe you shouldn’t believe in the occult or in spirituality (“the inner us”) either, because that would be a selective kind of belief fraught with fraudulent logic. If there is the one, there is no plausible reason why the other must not or cannot exist. If you think spirits exist, well - God is a spirit, why cannot he exist?
Reality, that which we call a single thing, that front of the picture, is hardly a single thing. It bears all the evidence of being a ghostwritten or paint-by-proxy thing in which at least two realities are jostling it out for elbow room.
What of ‘God’ then?
The most telltale giveaway that God exists is that we all admit the power the invisible reality has on the state of things in the visible reality. Why then does it sound so unbelievable, unthinkable to us that a ‘God’ could have created both the invisible and the visible reality, and is in supreme control over both? If we can conduct a seance to tap into the power of a lesser ‘spirit’, what is so absurd or outlandish to at least believe there is a God who is benevolent, transcendent, in supreme authority and who has created us? If we want the ‘bad’ so much in the occult, why do we deny the good that we can surely tap into in God?
Just throwing questions and thoughts into the air - think about them if you’d like.
It’s not that we know everything, but that doesn’t mean we don’t know anything either. We find ourselves somewhere in between these boundaries, but just like the position of an orbiting electron in an electron cloud, we cannot at any given moment say, “this - is where we are” and pinpoint it.
Over millennia past, our thinkers and philosophers have agonised over this “knowing” - and their verdict, far from being clear and doubtless, is fractured and splintered into thousands of views, very like the uniqueness of snowflakes. Some claim we can “know” but cannot “describe”. Some say it’s better to describe, but that we should never think that whatever we describe may be literal or even real. Some just flatly say we cannot even “know”, let alone describe. Some espouse relative, subjective realities and say that these subjective parts can never make a whole. Some claim there is no unifying idea, but from what we know and see, we can at best only say that reality is a disconnected jumble of discrete episodes - that it cannot, even NEED NOT, make any sense. Some say there is a unifying factor, even rather a Person, called God. The whole range of views like agnosticism, empiricism, naturalism, theism, experientialism, and so on contain the sum total of what we human beings have come up with to deal with the reality of our world.
Regardless of what view we take, believe or espouse, each of us explains or interprets reality based on some sort of clues that it furnishes. Reality is hardly clueless for anyone, including the most hardened agnostic. Yes, the clues it gives may strike each of us in a different way and point in some divergent directions, but that there are clues that present themselves - this is universal and beyond doubt. To deny this, we’d have to deny reality itself. Saying that the clues are ‘subjective’ does not nullify them as clues. It’s impossible for us as human beings to kind of stand over and above everything, or totally outside ‘the whole show’ we call ‘reality’ and make ‘objective’ pronouncements. To do any such thing we’d have to deny reality - and this would cut the integrity from under our prognostications.
From the clues we get, what can we say? Is ‘reality’ just what we happen to see? Or are there layers? Is there anything beyond what we happen to see? For most of us, this question can be described using a range of words and phrases - irrelevant, an impossible pursuit, a waste of time, a set with zero elements, not worth the effort and so on. Many of us claim agnosticism to be the only reasonable, tenable view, consciously or otherwise. “I don’t know” is a perfect, effectively pragmatic explanation, and together with “I don’t care”, it becomes a formidable fortress that very rarely comes under siege. In the cover of this explanation, we live our lives and think we have kept this question at bay.
But the fact remains that reality just doesn’t let up - it keeps us in the ‘I-know-it’s-useless-to-try-but-I-want-to-know-at-least-something’ frame of mind. All of us give ourselves (or want to give ourselves) SOME sort of explanation, and many of us admit at least one (or more than one) layer behind reality. So we do the work and give ourselves some plausible explanation. Now these explanations might not all be consciously believed, but as long as we can tell ourselves we have them, they do put us at rest about reality as we know it and help us go on with our lives from day to day.
***********************************************
From the clues I’ve gotten, however, in my life, I can definitely attest to layers behind reality as my eyes and my heart see it. It looks to me like our world is not just a single, three dimensional entity. It’s not just space, time and matter that make up reality. There is plenty of evidence for intangible stuff that we cannot account for using just space, time and matter, or any possible combination of these. To me it looks like reality is just a front, a blind, a cover for something I cannot see, but which definitely exists. Now my big problem is that I cannot by myself peel my reality off like the layer it is and see what lies behind it. The crunch here is also that herein, I believe, lies the key to get at the roots of things as I see them.
It also seems to me like there are at least two kinds of realities that have perfectly intersected to create this ‘front’, this ‘blind’ that I see from where I am. In crystallography, we are told of the phenomenon of “twinning” - when two identical crystals are kind of conjoined inseparable. Only, in the case of the reality I see, the two realities that make up the ‘front’ are not even distinguishable or similar, not to speak of identical - but they are twinned nevertheless. An invisible world is inseparably conjoined with ours - but this may have left very few clues to us for us to suspect anything. What’s more, this invisible conjoined twin is always in the process of being manipulated to delete all traces of its existence, when in ‘reality’ it not only exists, but also ghost-writes our scripts sometimes, and alters the front of the picture from behind it, under cover of darkness.
Interestingly, one of the most peculiar things about this conjoined reality is that even though it invades our seen reality and takes absolute control many times, we human beings cannot cross over to it fully except when we die. We live all our lives in the ‘front’, the ‘blind’, the ‘veil’, never able to pull back the curtains to see that invisible reality.
Space plus matter plus time - it doesn’t add up. In fact, the sum of these makes only a diminutive part of that whole show we call reality. So much happens in our world that should alert us to this possibility being true. I here offer just one case in point - the exponential increased interest in the occult. It’s very ironic that many people keep telling us religion is a failed experiment, but from the vantage point of ground realities, almost no computer game or special effects film these days can get by without appeal to the occult and to altered realities or even altered perceptions of reality. Isn’t the occult the realm of religion - of metaphysical and transcendent entities and existences? If so, then how can religion be a failed experiment? It has at least taught us there is (or at least, ‘might be’) a world behind the one we see, and our interest in the occult is resounding evidence that we want to touch that reality that lies ‘beyond’. This might be a simple point, but it is overlooked because many people tell us that religion only has to do with ‘God’ (who they discount) and not with occult forces (which they certainly do not discount). Who’s to say that that invisible conjoined reality cannot have to do with both God and occult forces?
Another case in point is the huge interest in ‘spirituality’ over the last few decades. So many people preach to us to ‘get in touch with the inner you’. Who, what, and where is this ‘inner us’ if space, time and matter made everything we know? Ironically, even though spirituality and naturalism may contradict each other fatally in a logical sense, they can peacefully coexist as tenable arguments in the ‘front’ that we all call reality.
Two realities, then, are in constant friction - that is the ‘reality’ that we see. One reality is invisible, the other is visible. During our lifetimes, we live (or at least physically seem to live) largely in the visible reality, unable to fully cross over to the other reality. At the same time, we have some presence in the invisible reality (the ‘inner us’); and also, the invisible reality is always furtively altering and reconstructing the ‘front’ that we perceive as ‘reality’. It LOOKS to us like one reality, but there are actually two realities always jostling to produce the picture, the front, the blind, the ‘veil’ we see.
What do we know about this invisible reality? Not much - though, like all things, our nosy-parker minds have always pioneered fresh new vistas in it - regardless of whether or not such knowledge is actually to our advantage. We know this much - if we can ‘control’ that reality from our visible reality, we can alter almost everything in the visible reality and do exactly as we please. All of the things human beings have been known to do to ‘interact’ with this invisible reality have taught us this much. We also do know and admit there are beings in this invisible reality that might be very unlike us, but which we know have huge powers over our reality that they wield to devastating effect in many cases, and we try desperately to tap into this power and use it to our advantage in the visible reality.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m just describing things as I see them. I’m just taking into account everything I’ve seen human beings do, and every human behaviour. I might even try to compress things to this one simple point - if you really believe there is no such being as ‘God’, then maybe you shouldn’t believe in the occult or in spirituality (“the inner us”) either, because that would be a selective kind of belief fraught with fraudulent logic. If there is the one, there is no plausible reason why the other must not or cannot exist. If you think spirits exist, well - God is a spirit, why cannot he exist?
Reality, that which we call a single thing, that front of the picture, is hardly a single thing. It bears all the evidence of being a ghostwritten or paint-by-proxy thing in which at least two realities are jostling it out for elbow room.
What of ‘God’ then?
The most telltale giveaway that God exists is that we all admit the power the invisible reality has on the state of things in the visible reality. Why then does it sound so unbelievable, unthinkable to us that a ‘God’ could have created both the invisible and the visible reality, and is in supreme control over both? If we can conduct a seance to tap into the power of a lesser ‘spirit’, what is so absurd or outlandish to at least believe there is a God who is benevolent, transcendent, in supreme authority and who has created us? If we want the ‘bad’ so much in the occult, why do we deny the good that we can surely tap into in God?
Just throwing questions and thoughts into the air - think about them if you’d like.
