Seeking Truth and Reality; Do They Even Exist?

By James Donahue

Elusive words in the English language are "truth" and "reality." While they both sound like worthwhile goals, it is impossible for us to have them. Seeking either is like looking for the fabled pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

Consider the physical rule of speed. Einstein said, and we believed him, that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, which is 186,000 miles per second. Einstein also theorized that there was a relationship between light speed and time. He believed that the closer an individual can come to reaching the speed of light, the slower time moves for that person.　This knowledge has always made the possibility of traveling to distant galaxies and solar systems beyond our reach because of the extreme distances involved. New work by U. S. physicists recently revealed that Einstein was both wrong and right. The speed of light can be broken. And, yes, speed does have an effect on time.

Dr. Lijun Wang,　of the NEC research institute in Princeton, transmitted a pulse of light toward a chamber filled with specially treated caesium gas. Before the pulse fully entered the chamber, Wang found that it passed through and traveled another 60 feet across the laboratory. In effect, the pulse of light existed in two places at the same time, a phenomenon that Wang said could be explained in the speed at which it traveled. . . an estimated 300 times faster than the speed of light.

What Dr. Wang and his staff proved was that (a.) nothing is absolute and (b.) time travel may be very possible. If we could build a machine that projects us around the world at a speed reaching 300 times the speed of light, we would conceivably arrive back at the starting point before we left.

So much for truth. Without trusting in absolutes, there can be no real truth. We can sit in a chair held in place on a floor and trust that both the floor and the chair will hold us up. We do this daily, even though science tells us that both the chair and the floor and comprised of a mass of swirling atoms separated mostly by space, much like the planets and stars in our universe are positioned. What we should find surprising is that our bodies, which also are comprised of a mass of swirling atoms separated mostly by space, don't fall through both the chair and the floor.

We trust in the chair and the floor to remain in place because, after years of using chairs supported by wooden floors, we are comforted by the memory that they have always remained constant. Yet once we leave the room and close the door, what assurance do we have that the chair, or even the floor, are still there? Are they not a creation of our collective universe? And if we created them, is it necessary that they remain in place after we no longer need them, or are present to observe them?

This line of thinking leads directly to the question of reality.

We spend our lives learning rules established by the society in which we live. We are educated by parents, Sunday School teachers, public school teachers, civic and social leaders, sometimes our college professors and always the media about the world in which we live. Most, if not all of what we are taught is only a distorted and clouded version of what is really true. It is a narrow view of our universe as it is perceived by a controlled society trained to observe it that way.

Contemporary author, the late Robert Anton Wilson, portrays us as a people conditioned from childhood to see the world with one eye peering down a long hollow tube. All we understand is what we perceive through the tiny hole at the other end of the tube. We spend our lives drawing conclusions from this extremely limited bit of information. We never learn how to open our third eye and see the entire picture. Because of religious teachings and belief systems, most people are satisfied with using only a small part of the left brain and they never learn how to turn on and use the right brain. Only a few, like Stephen Hawking, Jesus, the Buddha, and perhaps Aleister Crowley have dared to defy the rules and turn on more of the brain.

Just so you understand clearly what we are saying: the left brain deals with basic motor nerves and daily routine functioning. We can literally live very useful and functional lives with only the left side of the brain working. In fact, brain specialists have learned that removal of the entire right hemisphere of the brain to assist severe cases of epilepsy have had no ill effect on the patient's ability to live what is perceived as a "normal" life. This has led many medical people to think that we don't need the right side of our brain.

There is a question that should enter the minds of anyone capable of any level of reasoning. Why were we given such massive heads and such large brains if we don't need them? The answer is that we were never supposed to remain fixed in this zombified state of mind. The human race is a special, genetically produced species of life placed on this planet thousands of years ago. The plan was for us to evolve into something much finer than we have become.

The serpent portrayed in the ancient book of Genesis was right when it promised Adam and Eve that eating fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil would open their eyes and make them like God. The error in this story is that they would be like God because they would know good from evil. In other words, the Bible falsely states that Adam and Eve fell into sin the moment they lost their innocence and understood what sin was.

Since we are all supposed to be descendants of Adam and Eve, the Bible says we are all genetically condemned to be sinners. At this point we should be asking for a description of the true definition of sin? I suggest that anyone who attempts to answer this question will refer to the Bible or some other holy book to find a definition. Sin is what our culture teaches us it is. No more. No less.

In the predominantly Christian society in which I live, you can be assured that the definition will come right out of the Bible. The Ten Commandments is usually where we start. But what about the hundreds of other commandments allegedly defined by God when he had his talk with Moses? They are in the Old Testament too. The old Books of Law, plus the later teaching of Jesus, make even "bad thought," from enjoying the sight of a shapely woman in a bathing suit, to coveting our neighbor's new car, an evil act suitable for sending us all plunging into an eternity in Hell. Our natural sex drive plus a social conditioning that leaves us wanting shiny new things, makes it impossible for us to avoid sinful acts as defined in that book. To escape, we must submit to Jesus, the "god-child," and do his bidding. This creates a life of fear and slavery for anyone who follows this belief system. Fall into sin without finding a way of redemption and we are doomed even before we start. And this is just the Christian point of view. The Jews have another program of condemnation and escape, the Moslems, Hindu and Buddhists yet others. What a quagmire we have created for ourselves!

The Christians have worked at proselytizing with such zeal they have sent missionaries around the world, even sneaking into China and Russia against the expressed wishes of the Communist controlled state, which wisely forbid the people to practice religion.

Instead of evolving into the state of Godliness we were supposed to reach, we have allowed religious dogma to pollute our world, create a number of crippling belief systems, and doom us to slavery. We all possess the power of God and don't know it. And if the human race doesn't wake up soon, we are going to find ourselves going into self destruct on a dying planet, with no way out.

The religious complacency that exists all over the world, in both primitive and complex belief systems, is deadly. We all know we made some very bad mistakes. We overpopulated and polluted our world to the point that it now is dying. The storms, the deadly heat waves, the solar blasts through the holes we punched in our protective ozone layer, the dying trees and animals, are all proof of this. But people don't seem worried. Because of religious beliefs, they are all expecting a savior to come at the last moment and set things right.

This is not a good plan. What if I am right and the others are wrong? What if the savior lies within ourselves? It may already be too late to alter the total collapse of our environment so our future looks grim. What are we going to do when the Jesusmobile doesn't arrive?