Polynomial

About a year ago I came across this essay, writen by Andrew Marshall. I would like re-post it here, for I feel it beautifully ties into what I have been speaking about illusion.

It is said by some that everything we see is real. That view is taken to an extreme point by those who say that we only exist while we are alive and that clinical death means an end to existence. This is the hard view, the view that everything is solid and that the only reality is that which can be seen or otherwise experienced through the senses. It is an understandable view. Another point of view is that everything we see is only an appearance, a view that is taken to its extreme by saying that nothing really exists at all and that everything is an illusion.

What we do know is that at the basic level of physical appearances or phenomena is the atom. Nothing can appear in our physical universe without atoms. For a long time, the understanding was that the atom was the building block of everything, atoms forming themselves into molecules to result in different qualities of matter. In exploring the nature of the atom, though, physicists made some extraordinary discoveries, the most extraordinary of which was, for the layman at least, that the atom or even its nucleus is not the solid little particle it was once thought to be. Deeper investigation found that the atom itself is made up of particles and that the nature of those particles is quite mysterious and elusive. From the layman’s point of view, there is no solid building block of life. Matter, at its most fundamental state, consists of rapidly moving subatomic-particles that are not solid at all and are in a constant state of change. That which appears to be solid is not. It consists of something that is indefinable, that cannot actually be grasped and which relies on movement and the space in which movement can take place.

If matter cannot be pinned down long enough to ascertain its true nature, what we can say is that matter is, or relies upon, energy. Movement cannot arise without energy and energy can be said to be movement or the potential for movement. But where does energy come from? What is the initial source of movement or potential for movement? It cannot actually be found. If it were said to be the sun, for example, where or what is the source of the sun? If the sun were said to be the result of some atomic reaction, we come back to the question of the source of atoms and their energy. At some point in our search we might be tempted to give up and rely on a creation theory but, as we looked at in the previous article, Engineering in the Cosmic Sense*, the idea of a Creator responsible for manufacturing the universe is seriously flawed. That the source of energy and the source of atoms cannot be found is frustrating for the intellect but has the potential to be extraordinarily liberating for the mind. It requires us, if we want to understand our own nature, to look at things in an entirely different way.

Something that we can say with confidence is that there is a world of appearance. We see objects and experience them through the senses. How they appear to us depends on the signals coming through the sense organs and the interpretation the mind puts on those signals. The determination of the quality of anything depends upon judgment, an act of the mind. Together, we might call this perception.

This fact has led to some schools of thought asserting that nothing exists except in the mind. To an extent that is true in that the appearance of anything can only arise in the mind. But the “mind only” view has one major limitation and that is that objects have something about them that can be perceived by others having sensory perception. In other words, any number of beings may detect the presence of object A, even though the quality and interpretation – the perception – may arise differently to them; and that detection relies on the presence of atoms. So the appearance of objects arises in the mind but the objects themselves are not in the mind. Some phenomena cannot be seen but can still be experienced, like the wind, for example. What do we mean by “the wind”? There is no such entity as the wind when we look at things more deeply because the wind is simply the movement of air – gas molecules moving in unison through space. It is a phenomenon, not a thing, and can only be experienced or described as a result of the moving air coming into contact with other objects. We cannot actually see wind, only its effects. The causes of wind arise from other phenomena: changes of air pressure, temperature and so on (which also arise from other causes in a beginningless chain of events). All phenomena depend ..ment and they also depend on the presence of atoms, which are not self-existing permanent entities in their own right. So the original source of atoms cannot be found and the causes of phenomena are simply effects produced by other phenomena, so their origin cannot be found either.

Do we come, then, to the conclusion that everything is an illusion? If that were so, we could say when we stub our toe on a door frame, “The door frame is an illusion, my toe is an illusion and so the excruciating pain I now feel is also an illusion.” That would be absolute nonsense, wouldn’t it? The pain is real enough. Yet our toe consists of more space than atoms and so does the door frame. To the extent that nothing is solid and everything that appears solid consists mainly of space (and the same applies to liquids and gases) everything does have an illusory nature. It appears to be something that it is not, just as the weatherman can appear to be in our living room giving tomorrow’s forecast but isn’t actually there. In other words, the appearance is there and to say that it isn’t is nonsensical but its reality is something else – and that brings us back to the atom.

If the atom, and everything made from atoms, doesn’t have an intrinsic, permanent nature that can be pinned down so that we can say, “This is it!” it means that the real nature of everything is something other than physical. To put it another way, there is no beall-and-end-all that we can call purely physical. There is no permanent “stuff” of the universe. The ultimate nature of our physical world is ungraspable.

So the man or woman who says that the end of life is the end of existence is ignoring something quite profound. Their belief is based on an idea of physical reality which depends on a permanent foundation called the atom. But there is no permanent structure of any sort anywhere in the universe and so the whole physical cosmos, and every atom which comprises it, has to be the play or manifestation of something deeper – a deeper reality that some call the “unified field” and others from a more metaphysical standpoint call the transcendent because it could be thought to be beyond the physical. A better view might be that it is not a case of transcendent one side and physical the other but that everything is all part of the same, or rather an appearance of the same, whatever that same may be.

Although the ultimate reality of everything is, so far at least, ungraspable – and sages have always said that it is and will always be so – intelligence is intrinsic in everything (see Engineering in the Cosmic Sense*). From that intelligence, consciousness must also arise or perhaps one is an aspect of the other. Either way, it must be that the atom is an expression of innate intelligence; and it follows that your consciousness and mine, experienced now by virtue of the atoms of the physical brain, must also be an expression or aspect of innate intelligence. So death can only be the end of the appearance of life, the end of the appearance of an identity. To arrive at that conclusion, we must thank the quantum physicists and others who, through their consciousness and intelligence, discovered the illusory nature of the atom. Gradually, science and the understanding of consciousness are coming ever closer together and one day each will inevitably embrace the other. That will truly be a remarkable and wonderful thing.

If you would like to know where I sourced this article from, I found it here.

And… Lastly… I would like to draw the readers attention to a pertinent idea that David Bohm brings to light when discussing aspects of perception.