What determines real or unreal?

Lawrence LeShan, in his classic Alternate Realities: The Search for the Full Human Being, writes: A reality is real to you when you act in terms of it. Anything else is just talk. It is a valid reality when, using it, you can accomplish the goals acceptable to it. Common sense rules every reality and ultimately decides on its validity.

LeShan's statement reflects a discovery made by a team of scientists who were experimenting with babies. They found that the only time babies were startled was when something happened to them that defied common sense. This discovery established that a certain level of perceptual prejudice is part of our genetic predisposition, a predisposition reinforced by our various faculties and our brain. We depend on life being what we think it is, and we accept the bias of that perception. Throughout day-to-day existence, we recognize only what we are prepared in advance to see.

Alternate realities and other dimensions of vibration are missed or bypassed most often because we are not aware that we are missing or bypassing anything. We accept what we perceive, and it seems illogical if not impossible to do otherwise.

But this tightly knit package of natural perceptual prejudice (sometimes referred to as environmental integrity) can be based more on assumptions from individual belief systems than on genetic predisposition.

It can be more of a preference than a prejudice.

This is so because of the way we mix together acquired tendencies with natural perceptive skills. We allow our loved ones, our schools, our jobs, our fellows, our society, our governments, not to mention our own perceptions of what we think we perceive, to define and interpret our life. We allow this because it is fundamentally easier, more practical, and less risky, to accept rather than deny the bias of mutually accepted belief. (Society owes its existence to this tendency among people to accept majority opinion as personal truth. Messiahs owe their deaths to the same principle.)

To get at the heart of this issue, three examples of natural perceptual prejudice follow. A fourth is presented at the close of this article. Pay close attention to the paradoxical illusions each example unveils:

EXAMPLE 1

You go to a movie (formerly known as motion picture) to enjoy a good show, but what is it you really see? Quite literally the continuous projection of a series of still frames separated by periods of darkness. It is your perception of what you think you see that supplies what appears to you as the movement of a solid story line. Nothing you see in itself is capable of either movement or coherence until you, the viewer, supply both by connecting what the projector projects within your own mind. What you think you see doesn't really exist. Only the continuous sequence of single units exists. It is your mind which connects them. Movies are an optical illusion.

EXAMPLE 2

You sit down in front of your television set to enjoy a good program, but what is it you really watch? Quite literally one electron at a time (with black-and-white, and three at a time with color) fired from the back of the television tube to the screen to be illuminated once it hits the screen as a tiny dot. The continuous barrage of electrons-turned-into-dots creates the appearance of images, as scanning lines (raster bars) roll from top to bottom separating information coming in (new dots) from information fading out (old dots). You adjust the vertical hold on your set, not to remove strange bars appearing in the picture, but to place all screen activity within the range of your own perceptual preference. A television picture tube is nothing more than a gun which fires electrons at a screen. Your mind connects the electron dots into the picture images you think you see, while it totally ignores the true reality of what actually appears. Television is a mental illusion.

EXAMPLE 3

You go to a concert to hear good music, but what is it you really hear? Quite literally a series of notes separated from each other by intervals of silence. All any instrument or voice can produce is single sounds, one at a time. It is the perception of the listener which supplies melodic sweep or dissonance, what is termed music or noise. Without the listener's participation and his or her perception of what is heard, sound would be incapable of what appears to be a flow. What we hear as continuous sound is a creation within our own mind. Music is an auditory illusion

Because we are not prepared in advance to see through the illusions of perception, we accept what we perceive as the full truth of what is there. Reality, in the strictest sense, is a product of our own creation and is maintained by our own perception.

The issue of realness can be tricky, though.

Certainly, the subconscious mind regularly sponges in over a billion pieces of information per second. Add to this figure a recent scientific finding that the average person today perceives sixty-five thousand more bits of information and stimuli per waking day than did his or her forebears just a century ago. Indeed, our brains are now so bombarded that less than one percent of what comes in ever reaches the conscious mind. Within a fraction of a second, over ninety-nine percent is filtered out.

The area within the brain/mind assembly which does the filtering is the reticular activating system, a small bundle of densely packed nerve cells located in the central core of the brain stem below the limbic system. What directs the filtering, though, is perceptual preference, not necessarily inborn perceptual prejudice.

Yet neither our natural predisposition nor the preferences we acquire as we mature need to prevent us from the fullness of true perception that is possible for each of us to attain. What is automatic, even from infancy, can be altered, expanded, enhanced, or changed.

Remember the children's story about the emperor and his new clothes? The tale concerns an emperor who was tricked by con artists into buying invisible apparel, which was then fitted and tailored with imaginary flair. Since the emperor believed the phony story as told him, none of his subjects dared contradict him for fear of what they assumed the emperor might do to them if they did. A public parade was later arranged so that the emperor could show off his new finery. As the emperor strutted among the crowd, one youngster recognized the truth of the situation and shouted, Hey, look, the emperor's not wearing any clothes! (Children, by the way, have the least amount of learned perceptual preferences blocking true perception, hence they have the clearest minds. They confront situations directly, not indirectly.)

Slowly, throughout our lives, we accept, decide, and viscerally integrate structural thought models of what we will believe and what we will reject. These thought models (perceptual preferences) create the filters (densely packed nerve cells) which prevent us from becoming aware of what we do not want to know. Like the emperor and his subjects, they each accepted a particular reality as true and rejected any other alternative.

Genetically speaking, this filtering of input operates like a shutoff valve in how it gives the conscious mind an opportunity to play catch-up, so that it can sift and sort through a hodgepodge of information while assessing value and worth. Without such filtering, we would surely be inefficient and ineffective; we could neither decipher nor decide, nor could we focus our attention.

And that's the catch.

We can overdo it. We can block out more than we need to. We can create so many blind spots, we become as if blind or in a trance or half asleep or locked into various stereotypes of foolishness and bigotry. We can deceive ourselves. Daniel Goleman tackled this situation in Vital Lies, Simple Truths, where he notes: The great antidote for delusion is insight, which is simply seeing things as they are. Like the youngster in the crowd yelling at the emperor and speaking the truth others chose to ignore, we benefit when a fresh viewpoint is offered and a new challenge is met.

We need our natural genetic predisposition to perceive the continuity of motion and the cohesion of form so that relationships and comparisons can be made. We even need the bias of mutually accepted beliefs, since these very preferences and prejudices provide the filters which allow enough time and space for us to develop social skills. But we don't want too many or too much.

This means we would be wise, each one of us, to inventory our filters (accepted beliefs) periodically, reevaluate them, and consciously decide whether or not each is still operating in our best interest. We may find by doing this that some are not only outmoded and outdated, but were never really needed to begin with. As Ralph Waldo Emerson, the famous poet and philosopher, once said, A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

But what about the solid realness of ordinary reality?

Yes, the examples given thus far illustrate that our faculties enforce the appearance of a solid environment. Yes, it is possible for us to retrain our perceptual skills, widen them, so that more territory can be included in our worldview. Yes, we can reassess and then release outworn and outdated preferences and belief systems.

But when you kick a chair, your toe still hurts. What appears as solid feels solid, and responds accordingly.

Still, the nagging question remains: Is solid really solid?

Meditation and other practices similar to it help us to retrain our perception so that the sequences of both motion and rest (described in each of the three examples given earlier in this article) can be viewed simultaneously and separately at the same time. A near-death experience or a spiritual awakening shifts the capacity of our brain even further. Such a brain shift cleans out our filters, blocks, and beliefs in such a way as to enable us to slip between the cracks of perception into alternate realities, and coexistent realities, the likes of science fiction. This convergence of information (chaos) is disorienting at first, but eventually we are led to that wellspring of clarity and insight formerly masked by our inborn predispositions and our acquired perceptual filters.

Let me illustrate what I'm saying: A few months after my near-death episodes occurred in 1977, I began to experience sensory input unlike anything I was accustomed to (including the synthesia or multiple sensing I had throughout my youth). At that time, phlebitis and the damage done by blood clots and other physical traumas required that I relearn how to crawl, stand, walk, climb stairs, as well as run. Therapeutic exercises were ongoing. A letter I wrote then describes a particular sunny day in downtown Boise, Idaho, when I could at last run an entire city block without falling and without pain. Note the extreme sensory alterations which accompanied this feat:

Each minute sensation from my legs was received in my brain as if it were the afterclap from a sonic boom. That loud, and I could both hear and feel simultaneously. If I couldn't hear a sensation, then I couldn't feel it either because, for some reason unbeknownst to me, both faculties had merged. They were now equal halves of the same sensory mechanism, reverberating in shouts of feeling/sound throughout my body.

As I cried out for the joy of being able to run again, I noticed rays of energy protruding from me and spiraling out into the air. They looked like pulsating flares glinting in the sunlight. A car honked when I wobbled off the curb into the street, feeling somewhat dazed and giddy. I jumped back, and when I did, those energy flares flipped into fireworks, setting off a cascade of what appeared to be miniature rockets shooting off in all directions.

I could taste it, the sun, and I could taste the satisfaction of being there standing on the sidewalk. Whatever I saw or thought about deeply had flavor, a taste. My faculties for sight, thought, and taste had also merged. Feeling/sound. Flavored sight and thought. Who in their right mind would believe any of this? Me? Anyone?

My tears of joy at being able to run rolled into wracking sobs that day, for I was overwhelmed by the strange sensing multiples which assaulted my brain. This wasn't the first time since my near-death episodes that the sensory stimuli I received did not match either the perceptual conditioning I was used to or what I had experienced throughout my youth. Still, this incident was a turning point for me, because it forced me to realize that more than my body needed retraining.

I have come to believe that the extremes in sensory distortions I had to deal with during this initial period after dying thrice over, were the result of losing much of my inborn perceptual prejudice. I now recognize that the strange sounds I heard and the energy flares I saw were, in all probability, a magnification of biological processes normally not discernible to conscious awareness, mine or anyone else's. This magnification made my world seem oddly different when, I suspect, it was really my perception of my world which had shifted the most. It could well be that my reticular activating system might have been damaged; certainly my limbic functioning was stimulated or perhaps altered in some manner. Regardless of cause, these novelties of perception eventually worked to my advantage in how they enabled me to enhance awarenesses beyond what was normal for me. After I learned how to control them (along with the other sensory multiples that emerged), and apply common sense in their use, my life was enriched immeasurably.

Once your consciousness transforms, whether sensing processes magnify, as I believe they did for me, or whatever else begins to shift around, the very first thing you lose is a sense of time and the second is a sense of space. The world reorders itself, and you find that you are no longer as influenced by the paradox of perceptual illusions.

You come to realize that solid is not really solid!

This is a dramatic switch in perception, and one I want to discuss further. Using science as an aid, here are a few illustrations of what might be taking place when time and space become illusory to one's perception.

In Newtonian physics, it is generally accepted that all manifestations of energy create time by their vibration and space by their wavelengths, that time and space are properties of energy. Where there is no energy, there is no time and there is no space. There is no-thing.

Here's what is offered in science as a classic explanation for this phenomenon: The repetitious cycles by which energy vibrates what creates what we call time. When energy vibrates in a continuous fashion, forces within it separate as two opposing poles of attraction. The attraction between these poles causes energy to move back and forth from one pole to the other in an oscillating movement. This oscillation creates a sine wave (like a curved line or arc, considered in physics to be the most basic of all wave forms), and the length of that sine wave between the poles is what we call space. As energy swings back and forth between the poles it manifests by continuous vibration, it appears to rest at each pole before beginning the next swing. Thus, energy is said to be either in motion or at rest as it swings back and forth in an oscillating movement.

Back and forth.

Motion and rest.

As the swing between the poles increases in speed, the poles are said to draw back together until they converge into the whole which existed before they separated. But, conversely, when the speed of swing between the poles decreases, the poles are then said to separate and pull apart, creating more and more space as the distance of the swing widens and lengthens.

If energy did not oscillate, creation as we know it would not exist.

The observation and study of this phenomenon is complicated, though, for according to science, you can't see motion and rest at the same time, even though they are aspects of the same basic sequence. You can see motion, as in the path a particle takes, or you can see rest, the particle itself in suspension, but you cannot observe the two at once, at least not scientifically.

In quantum physics, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle states that any attempt to observe the miscroscopic world can have an effect on what is being observed. Because of this, we cannot prove that absolute motion and absolute rest exist. Nor is there any way to know for certain if attempts to measure objects or incidents alters in any way what is being measured. Of significance here is the fact that what seems certain is actually uncertain.

Therein lies yet another paradox: Our physical world appears as solid and stationary when it is anything but.

For instance, while you sit motionless in a chair, the molecules in your body are vibrating, all matter in your environment is vibrating, the earth is rotating about its axis while orbiting around the sun, and even the universe, as we understand it, is expanding. You think that by remaining still, you are not moving, but that is not true. Motionlessness is filled with motion.

Only by separating the various aspects from the whole can we be certain of what we think exists; we can then study, examine, observe, analyze, and measure. But we can never measure simultaneously all aspects of the whole together, nor can we measure with certainty (thereby proving) what seems real to us. (As an example, a flash picture taken in a dark room does not show what the room was like while it was dark, because the light of the flash made the room, for an instant, completely bright.)

Separation, then, enables us to be objective, but only the whole as a whole can help us to maintain perspective and context. What seems to be whole is actually a myriad of single units. Yet what seems to be a myriad of single units is but related parts of a connected whole. Neither can exist without the other, yet we cannot interact with both aspects simultaneously (according to present-day science). And therein lies the greatest of all illusions.

Because of the way our faculties operate and the way our brain processes information, we are conditioned to perceive everything as whole and solid when it is not. The reality we think exists seems real because of how data is connected together within the confines of our brain. What we see and hear and feel and touch and sense and taste and smell is totally and completely real to us, and appropriately so. But as near as science can tell, it is the length of the sine wave, that distance of oscillation between the two poles or points of rest, that enables much of creation as we experience it to exist. This illusion of wholeness and solidity maintains its own integrity as long as vibrating energy oscillates rhythmically and nothing interferes with that oscillation.

EXAMPLE 4

Quantum physicists tell us that everything which exists actually flashes in and out of existence about a billion times per second. First you see it, then you don't. During an on flash, existence is illuminated and everything is visible; during an off flash, there is only the darkness of invisibility and nothing can be seen. On and off. Back and forth. Motion and rest. Our built-in perceptual prejudice is what enables us to regard anything as continuous or solid. This natural prejudice shields us from the fact that motion and rest are separate sequences. We see solid objects and we see continuous movement and we think we are seeing both at the same time, when actually we are not. The world around us exists as perceived because of how it is perceived. Creation, as we think it exists, is a physical illusion.

I have noticed that when vibrations within and around us speed up (and this can be sensed by anyone willing to), time is no longer able to act as a buffer between events that happen to us in the earthplane and our responses to them (i.e., time whizzes by, there's never enough of it, the consequences of our actions manifest quicker). But when vibrations slow down, the span that exists between experiencer and thought (the tit for tat of cause and effect) widens and lengthens. Thus, the slower the speed of vibration, the greater the distance and the longer the timing between the events that happen to us and our response (i. e., time pokes along, there's plenty to spare, we have all the time in the world)

To say this another way: Time protects the manifestation of existence space allows, so that thought can reproduce itself.

P.M.H. Atwater is author of Beyond the Light: What Isn't Being Said about the Near Death Experience, (Avon Books), Future Memory (Birch Lane Press), Goddess Runes (Avon Books) and other works on consciousness and new science.