Determining Reality In An Unreal World

By James Donahue

(Part 1 of a three-part series)

Most of us feel confident that we understand the reality of the world around us. We have some kind of place that we call home. We have our friends and family. We have our "things" that we use at home and on the job. We live in a society that has established rules and laws by which we behave so that we are accepted as a member of the herd.

We also know that we are living on borrowed time in bodies that are designed to be magically created by our parents, grow up, produce more images of ourselves, then get old and like all living things in nature, we wither and fall back to the earth.

As humans, we have evolved with brains that allow us to question our existence, and for the philosophers among us, we also question what we perceive as real and what is created in our mind. And there are some folks who wonder if the entire scenario described above isn’t a fabrication of our mind, or perhaps even a computer generated story implanted in our heads to make us believe we are living the life we are experiencing.

The more we think about such things, the more convoluted and abstract our conception of reality becomes. And the more information science collects via the use of extreme microscopes that look deep into the heart of the atom, and telescopes that peer deep into the vast void of space, the more we tend to question everything around us.

I think it is the amazing similarity between the behaviors going on at the atomic level with the things occurring in the stars that caused a grand epiphany for me as to the very identity of God. There seems to be no end to the vastness of everything. As we look deeper and deeper into the microscopic world the more we realize there appears to be an infinity involvement here, just as we appear to find in space. And everything we see is separated by more space than matter, and the matter we find is in constant motion.

So where does all of this energy come from. What keeps the neutrons and protons within each atom constantly spinning around the nuclei? And what keeps the atoms in constant motion without their colliding with one another? And how do those atoms and all that space work collectively to create the matter that comprises the world we perceive around us?

Why is it that the atomic structure that comprises my body, for example, not transfuse with the atoms that form the chair I am sitting on, and all of this create an amalgamated cocktail as it all drops like a batch of muck into the earth below? What unknown law of nature separates me from the things around and below me?

Thus I perceive all of this energy as a part of the Creator, which allows all of this energy to exist and remain distinctly separated from falling into an mass of atomic chaos that has no purpose other than to possibly create another big bang.

What I am attempting to say here is that I perceive us as part of the whole of the Creator. We are the Creator, or at least a minute part of the Creator. Perhaps that old philosopher was correct when he concluded that God created man so he could achieve an understanding of Himself. Is this, then, our purpose?

But suppose that nothing we think we see and do is real. What if we all exist in some kind of matrix, where all that we are and have is a product of either our own minds, or the mind of some kind of puppet-master who manipulates our every move?

We will have more to say about all this tomorrow