By James Donahue

The most elusive words in the English language are "truth" and "reality." While they both sound like worthwhile goals, it is difficult, if not impossible for us to acquire either.

An example of what we are saying can be found at the scene of a crime or an automobile accident. There may be as many as ten witnesses, but all will have a slightly different version to tell as to what they observed. This is why courts use juries to listen to all of the stories. After a trial the jury goes into a private room where its members attempt to sort facts from fiction and reach a general conclusion as to what really happened.

Even so-called laws of physics can be and often are challenged as science acquires new information about the universe in which we live.

Consider our long understood rule of speed. Albert Einstein said, and we believed him, that nothing can travel faster than 186,000 miles per second, or the speed of light. Einstein also theorized that there is a relationship between light speed and time. He believed that the closer an individual might come to reaching the speed of light the slower time might pass.  The Einstein theory on the limit at which we might travel has appeared to make the possibility of traveling to distant galaxies and solar systems beyond our reach because of the extreme distances involved. But new work by contemporary physicists has revealed that Einstein may have been 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 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 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 at the point we start before we begin.

Without trusting in absolutes, there can be no 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 the floor, chair and our bodies are comprised of a mass of swirling atoms separated mostly by space, much like the planets and stars are positioned in our universe. What we should find surprising is that our bodies 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 the scientific evidence exists to suggest that they are not real. Once we leave the room and close the door, what assurance do we have that the chair and the floor are still there? Are they not a product of our collective universe, which is created by the minds of all who believe in them? And if we created them, is it necessary that these objects remain in place after we are no longer present to observe or think of 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 our friends and the media. Most, if not all of what we are taught is a distorted and clouded version of truth. It is a narrow view of our universe as it is perceived by a controlled society trained to believe our world is what our teachers, neighbors and the textbooks say it is.

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 in 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 people like Wilson have dared to defy the rules and open the second and perhaps even the third eye.

Just so you understand clearly what I am talking about, the left brain deals with basic motor nerves and daily routine functioning. We can literally live very useful and functional lives with only a part of the left side of the brain working. In fact, brain specialists have found 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 some 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 in this simplified mental state. The human race is a special, genetically produced species of life placed on this planet thousands of years ago. Whoever or whatever put us here gave us the tools and obviously planned for us to evolve into something much finer than we are.

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, like so many of the slants in that book, is that they would become 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 perceived themselves as sinners.

As the Christian story is told, we are all supposed to be descendants of Adam and Eve and consequently all genetically condemned to be imperfect creatures, condemned by an inherited sinful state. But what is the true definition of sin? We 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. Like all things in this strange world that emerges from our collective minds, sin is but a myth.

In a predominantly Christian society you can be assured that the definition of sin 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 talks with Moses on the mountain? 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 a burning abyss called Hell for all eternity. 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 this terrible fate we are told that we must submit to an invisible entity that calls itself Jesus and do its bidding. This creates a life of fear and slavery for anyone who follows this belief system and puts us in the control of an entity outside of our own awareness. Fall into sin without finding a way of redemption and we are doomed even before we start. 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 created a number of crippling belief systems that doom us to a form of mental slavery. When bound by the chains of “faith” in these false powers, we cannot grow spiritually. We all possess the power of God and don't know it. Collectively, the people of the world have the ability to fix all of the ills, heal our bodies, stop wars and put ourselves in a state of bliss. Instead of this, we fight among ourselves, killing, stealing and lying for personal gain. We ravage our planet. We have lost our ability to love. 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 have 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 melting ice caps and 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 arrive at the last moment and set things right.

The savior has always been here. Instead of being among us the god is in us. If we are to be saved, we must all do the work.