Reality - How Real Is It ?

It is very ambiguous to be able to define something as completely ‘real’. If I ask people what they think is real and what is unreal, the most common answer I receive is that all that we can see, hear and feel is real and the rest of everything is unreal. This is not true, you see humans have great limitations of senses. In dreams, the wind, the height, the taste, etc. feels so real but, it all goes away as soon as we wake up. Is it not possible that what we consider as awake is also some kind of sleep that we all are in? We are so naive that we believe that a red ball is red in color when actually it is of every other color but red!

Most of the time, we only consider what is real based on what we see naturally exists in some physical space and reflects light. But, is it not that the most useful components that support life are invisible to us? Things like magnetic fields, EM waves, gravity, and even air for that matter as we cannot see with the naked eye. Now, EM waves for example are everywhere around us, yet we cannot see or feel them. But do not they exist? They are only supposed to exist when they perform the function that they are meant for. Humans will agree that they exist if we can convert them to a visible spectrum with some technology. Just like infra-red rays were identified from their existence years ago. Therefore, our senses are limiting us to see beyond what we currently consider as reality. There exist phenomena in nature that we are not able to solve for 100s of years. Phenomena like the observer's effect, quantum entanglement, or the energy consumption of the human brain during sleep. Let me explain one such phenomenon so that we can understand the basics.

In the early years, it was considered that light behaves like a wave and therefore when we shine light from a double slit, an interference pattern is observed. But things do not behave as they do normally when we dig deep into the quantum level. Imagine we now have a single electron and it is allowed to pass through any slit. We have a series of electrons and they randomly pass through any slit before hitting a photosensitive screen. What should it look like on the screen? We think that because there are no waves, there should be no interference pattern. But somehow mysteriously there develops a pattern matching the interference pattern that we get from passing light. This is only possible if the particle knows where to go. It gets even more weird and interesting when we try to observe this phenomenon. The interference patterns vanish and become random patterns! as if the particle knows that we are watching. This happens, and people are still working on understanding how something like this is even possible. Another such phenomenon is quantum entanglement. This happens when we separate two photons from a single light source and polarizing one of them affects the other separated photon. It seems that the photons and such particles are sharing some information in some form across space and time. But yet, we do not know how and why this happens. Since these phenomena are beyond our understanding and are not dominant in the reality of our day-to-day life, they are simply ignored. Famous scientists like Schrödinger, and Niels Bohr were in unrest after seeing such phenomenal happening in nature. It is then that they sought and found explanations in Hindu mythology.

It is easy to fall into the 'maya' or materialism. Human 'mind' is different from the 'brain', it is not physical. Are the thoughts, and dreams physical? Why do the nightmares seem so real? There is a need to approach understanding the brain differently. Recently the ideas of consciousness and conscience have caught the attention of people mostly during the pandemic. But, in the farther east and India particularly, we have been talking about mind, yoga, consciousness, and meditation for ages. I believe that there needs to be an amalgamation of historic knowledge of India and other eastern mythologies with western logic to attain some level of knowledge about the mind. I also hope that understanding this will solve the long-standing mysteries of quantum anomalies such as the observer’s effect and quantum entanglement.

Experiences like the near-death experience or brain activity when the patient is in a coma, are just a couple of mysteries that can be addressed. But, till the time we have unarguable experiences like death and dreams in humanity, we have to be on this quest of finding answers and trying to see what is beyond. Humans can never stop thinking about what happens after death. How can this mind just stop? There is something in us that always tells us that we are going to live. We have that feeling that there is still something left to do, we are somewhere deep inside us so sure that there is something more waiting for us to come. Why is this?