Have you ever had a dream that you were so sure was real? What if you couldn't awaken? How would you know the difference between dream and reality? The Matrix took the world by storm when it was first released in theaters. It chronicled humanity’s post-apocalyptic war against the machines they helped create. Space and time are traditionally thought of as the backdeop to the universe, but new research suggests they may not be fundamental but an elaborate illusion. Physicists are starting to suspect physical reality is an illusion. The idea that we may be living in a matrix-like universe is called the simulation theory. Physicist Max Planck said "I regard consciousness as fundamental…" And other and scholars argue that consciousness is a fundamental quality of the Universe. "If we are living in a simulation, then the cosmos that we are observing
is just a tiny piece of the totality of physical existence" - Nick Bostrom
Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that while we should take our perceptions seriously, we should not take them literally. Beliefs inherited from family or tribe influence people's values and actions strongly. So your eyes and ears don’t tell you the truth. That’s not what they are for. The senses evolved to enable us to survive in the world, not to represent it accurately. The reality that we experience each and every day is what we must use to survive in our environment. A human body comes equipped to interact with only certain frequencies. But that doesn't mean other realms are not real. The visible spectrum is the tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible to the human eye. The electromagnetic spectrum covers electromagnetic waves with frequencies ranging from below one hertz to above 10 25 hertz, corresponding to wavelengths from thousands of kilometers down to a fraction of the size of an atomic nucleus. So the visible light spectrum is only a tiny part (0.0035%) of the much bigger electromagnetic spectrum. In a similar way we ordinarily see ro experience only a small bandwidth slice of what we call physical reality.Increasingly there are reports from people who have experiences with what we think of as non-ordinary reality. Richard Feynman once suggested that nature is like layers of an infinite onion. With each new experiment, we peel another layer of reality; because the onion is infinite, new layers continue to be discovered. And they need not be simulations. A parallel universe, also known as an alternate universe, parallel world, parallel dimension, or alternate reality, which is a hypothetical self-contained plane of existence, co-existing with our own. The sum of all potential parallel universes that constitute reality is often called a "multiverse". Our universe would constitute just a small or subset of this multiverse. A person having a dream, or hallucination, or a Near Death Experience (NDE) tends to argue that the experience didn’t have the disjointed quality of being unreal. Some are able to describe details and events that happened around them while they were unconscious or clinically dead. A lucid dream is a type of dream in which the dreamer becomes aware that they are dreaming. During a lucid dream, the dreamer may gain some amount of control over the dream characters, narrative, or environment. Lucid dreaming has been studied and reported for many years and has shown potential for overcoming fear and other healing effects. In ancient shamanic tradition, there are 3 worlds-states of non-ordinary reality that are richly layered over our consensual reality (the physical world most of us walk around in most of the time). You reach each reality level through the process of shamanic journeying. The lower world in shamanic reality, contrary to what many might think, is a place of discovery, exploration, learning, and healing. And the middle world in shamanic reality is the non-ordinary reality version of our physical world in which your consciousness first leaves your body, before you head to the upper or lower worlds. The concept of an otherworld in historical Indo-European religion is reconstructed in comparative mythology. Hinduism is a major world religion, with one of the longest-surviving pantheons in history. Within its rich mythology, elephant-headed gods clash with powerful demons and titans, preserver gods send out their avatars to restore the righteous order of the universe, and powerful sages challenge the gods themselves. Years, or even lifetimes of spiritual disciplines were thought to bring enlightenment to some. Our understanding of reality has changed over time. From the scholars of ancient Greece to the modern physicists of today, there have been changes and breakthroughs about the way we view the world. Beginning with Anaximander’s discovery of the Earth floating in the sky and Democritus’ discovery ot the atom. There is now a twentieth-century paradox in modern physics. The West as a culture or civilization historically evolved out of Greco-Roman classical antiquity. But the rigid power structure of Western religion was almost too precarious to be analysed. Holy wars and the inquisition took a great many lives. Even mentioning possible alternate realities was forbidden. The 8th Ecumenical Council of Constantinople even "abolished the human spirit" (as an abstraction). But just because we had it all wrong for a long time doesn't mean thhere is no divinity, though perhaps different than what we thought. And similary our idea of reality might also have all wrong.We think of matter as atoms that are an organized group of electrons and protons zooming around a neutron, but this figure is completely wrong. The particles that make up the atoms have no structure or size, no weight, and are just vibrating electrical energy. There could be infinite frequencies or types we don't know about. Perhaps there is only one real thing which is the sum of all frequencies. It is similar to the idea that drops of water can exist without the ocean, but the ocean cannot exist without dtops of water. And this water can be solid, liquid, or gas. As gas it may be clouds or steam. As liquid there may be lakes, rivers, oceans or even floods. As solids there may be hail, sleet, snow and solid ice. But it is still just water. Human beings are conditioned to hold onto culture, beliefs, tradition and politics, even at the expense of our well being. Without knowing it, we usually live and express these distorted ideas, practices, and patterns that influence our perceptions of reality and in turn create our reality. Emotion is said to be the trigger that activates thoughts. Emotional reality, unlike physical reality, is created rather than observed. By and large, people create the emotional reality in which they live. Unfortunately the choice of which reality we create is usually made by default, a kind of habitual automatic pilot derived from temperament, metabolism, and experience. The human brain filters information within its default choices, processing that which conforms to them and excluding that which deviates from them. Beliefs inherited from family or tribe influence people's actions more strongly than those with weaker genetic bases. Indeed, highly heritable attitudes, such as political persuasions, may even steer our choices of the social "niches" we carve out for ourselves. If challenged we my not have reasons to justify inherited beliefs becuse to us it is a given that they are the truth. People simply believe that they are right in their own ideologies and cannot accept the ideologies of others which causes conflict. People's political beliefs actively demand of them that they ostracize those who do not fit with the party's agenda. Inclusion rather than isolation is the key to peace and happiness. There are basically only two human motives: approach and avoidance. But like other apparent polarities such as hot/cold,; light/dark; good/bad, each is only a degree of the opposite. How can it be possible that the world we see is not objective reality? And how can our senses be useful if they are not communicating the truth? Many people want to believe that there are some extrasensory powers like the ability to read minds, foretell the future, communicate with the dead, or with "spiritual helpers." The internet offers many "psychics," and some offer "proof" of their abilities. As finite creatures we look to the infinite for true identity. Parapsychology is a growing field of research that studies a number of ostensible paranormal phenomena, including telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, near-death experiences, reincarnation, and apparitional experiences. Is mankind alone in the universe? Or are there somewhere are there civilizations more advanced than ours, civilizations that have achieved interstellar communication and have established a network of linked societies throughout our galaxy? Such questions are bearing on the deepest problems of the nature and destiny of mankind. Today for the first time in human history extraterrestrials have entered into the realm of experimental science. They may not all come from other planets or galaxies, but from other realities, sometimes being invisible to us, to bring about drastic changes in our reality. So it may be that ultimate reality is like 3D TV with uncounted channels and bandwidths. Our body is like the TV and our brain (consciousness) is the tuner. And whatever channel we focus on seems more real than the other channels.
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