It’s amazing what you can think of on a blowy Wednesday morning.
It’s sometimes amazing how people can be persuaded to believe in far-fetched tales. I don’t say fairy tales, because it is easy to see how a loving and beautiful tale can fire the imagination. No, I mean the sort of far-fetched tales that are usually found in serious publications.
For example. Most people have no great difficulty in accepting the common explanation for those odd things called rainbows. They have read how a rainbow requires three things for it to exist. It requires sunlight : water droplets : and an observer. Take away any one of those things, and the rainbow ceases to exist. And most people also understand that if you approach the place of the rainbow too closely, so as to see the water droplets, the rainbow also disappears ; it ceases to exist.
The really startling thing about a rainbow is that it exists only in a sentient mind.
But how many people have thought about another of the ordinary common things that also disappear when you get close to them? Take the leaf of a tree, for example. From a distance, it appears to have a shape and a certain solidity about it. But physicists assure us that the leaf is actually constructed out of minute particles called atoms ; and these atoms are constructed out of even smaller things such as neutrons, protons and electrons. And when you approach the leaf so closely that these tiny things might be ‘seen’, you will find yourself looking at what is mostly emptiness. And the leaf disappears entirely. Just as the rainbow disappeared when you got too close.
We are not talking about metaphysics here, just everyday experience. The whole world is made up of two parts ; or are there two worlds? Firstly we have the world of rainbows and leaves (and rivers, mountains, flowers, cattle, etc., etc.) ; and secondly we have the world of what we might call the ‘particles’ (the atoms, etc.). The first world is made up of representations in our conscious minds ; representations that arrive to us via our senses. The second world is not represented to our minds at all, because its constituents are out of reach to our senses.
But the really startling thing is that the everyday first world cannot without the second, occult world.
So we have a first world of representations and also a second world of the unrepresented. A manifest world and a hidden world. And it is easy to think of these two quite different worlds when we set our minds to it ; but it is very difficult indeed to keep them near the front of our minds in our everyday living.
When we stroll in the countryside or in the town, it is hard to bear in mind that the things we see, touch, hear, etc., – the fields, the sky, the clouds, the trees, the telegraph poles, the ground under our feet – are actually comprised of entities, such as atoms, electrons, protons, etc., which are quite beyond our senses and are not represented to our consciousness at all ; and that occult world is mostly empty space ; a sort of ghost world. There is no light there, no colour, no solidity, no softness or hardness, no heat or cold, no sounds, no scents or flavours ; for these are all sensory qualities. And our senses cannot reach down to that world.
Is it a sub-sensory world? or a super-sensory one?
At any rate, it is not a material world, for matter is defined by our senses. It is a world that exists in consciousness only in the form of ideas. And these ideas are described in complex logical propositions that only a few specially trained mathematical people understand. And even those specially trained people do not have a satisfying explanation of what the propositions mean. So it is that this non-material, non-sensory world is a mystery ; a mystery that can never be represented to our conscious awareness.
Either we must accept that our familiar world of things – trees, meadows, clouds, rivers, other people, etc. – is a representation (re-presentation) of the insensible world of atoms, etc., or we must reject the theories of physics as nothing more than an elaborate delusion. We cannot have it both ways.
What are we to call this non-sensory, occult, mysterious world that underlies our familiar world? This invisible world that we are quite sure exists, but whose existence cannot be proved by the evidence of our senses? It sounds very much like a spiritual world.
Your comments are welcome