Edward’s Diary Entry 126: More on Reality?

Continuing from the last entry, let’s look at “Reality” in different states of Awareness.

In S-A 0, or deep sleep, we have no knowledge or impression of Mind. We do not know what happens in that state.

In S-A 1, or REM sleep, we see spurious “realities” in the Mind, and our bodies react to them, but objectively they do not exist. It is mere fantasy. This is what is meant by “psychological”, i.e. taking place in the psyche or mind only. There is no existence to these experiences; they are all self-created and only dimly reflect some kind of previously-experienced “reality”.

In S-A 2, or the “normal civilised waking state”, social conditioning tells us we are actually seeing “reality”, but this is questionable, as what we see, hear, smell, taste and touch all happens within the Mind, in piecemeal format, as we stated previously, due to the discriminatory and divisive nature of the Intellect. This is where “my reality” vs. “your reality” cause all the normal conflicts and ensuing arguments and even violence in human life. All experience in this state is subjective and depends on the state of Mind of the beholder. And no two minds will agree fully on anything immaterial. Only physical or material evidence is susceptible of being accepted by various parties, if they are willing! So Reality, here, can only be considered partial and it basically involves only the physical world. The rest is all psychological, fictional and therefore unreal.

In S-A 3, or a Self-Aware state, which may come and go, there is more Reality but it is still mixed with fiction from our own psyches. The trick is that the Intellect now doubts the “fictional realities” put forward and sees the mind as a tool only, not as a definite solution to any problem. The solution must be to perceive Reality through dimensions above the physical, or at least to test out the theory – in one’s own experience – that other dimensions of perception actually exist.

In S-A 4, which we might call Cosmic or Solar Awareness, i.e., beyond mere existence or survival on our planet, it would seem that Reality can be grasped from a space beyond the sense impressions of the physical body, through newly-developed “organs” of perception, if this theory is True, which yogic science purports it to be, and all true spiritual teachings try to point to.

Now the interesting thing here is that modern-day science has come to this in its own way. What we take to be the physical world, or matter – because of our sense impressions – starts disappearing at high magnifications… Look at these images. 

Here we can see a view of the nucleus of a single leaf cell at a magnification of 10⁴ (1 micometer). It is still a comprehensible shape, something we can grasp with our minds, although it is too small to see with the naked eye. So we can say it exists, in a way, but we only see what the microscope gives us to see via our sense impressions. What it really does is also interpreted by our sense impressions and mind and may or may not correspond to Reality.

But when, in successive magnifications, the chromatin, the individual DNA strands, the DNA nucleotide building blocks, and the outer electron cloud of a carbon atom are enlarged step by step, we get the empty space between the inner shell and nucleus, shown here, enlarged to 10^-12, or 1 picometer, where we can see that “matter” has all but disappeared, and there is just a dot hanging in a lot of “empty space”.

In fact, this "empty space", at a ficitonal 10 minus the 12th power (virtually reduced), looks a lot like our Sun if we could look at it from a distance of 10+15, or 1 trillion kilometres away out in space! So at the far poles of imagination – infinitely small and infintely big – there is very little “matter”, and just a lot of big “empty space”. So where or what is Reality?

Well, it looks like whatever Reality may be “out there” and being fed into our sense organs to give us impressions and tell us about the world is actually QUITE UNKNOWN, as it is always surrounded by a lot of "empty space".

In other words, we must find this "empty space" inside our own bodies and Minds, which will possibly correspond to some kind of Reality and see if we have the faculty of knowing or perceiving what that empty space really is. And the 5 yogic bodies seem to indicate this, as we have already stated that the yogies say the food body is Earth and water, 72% water and 12% earth; the mental body, or Air, is 6% of us: the energy body, or Fire, is about 4% of us; and the etheric body, or Akash, or space, is 6% of us. That must be where Understanding of Ultimate Reality will occur. And Self-Awareness is the path along which we must travel to test out the theory.

Shown above is The Death of Socrates (La Mort de Socrate), oil on canvas by French painter Jacques-Louis David in 1787, housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The virtual magnifications used here are from articles published by http://education.jlab.org/