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Chapter Six
What Is Reality Anyway
It has been reported that monks in Tibet, sitting in cold caves in deep meditation, can dry wet blankets wrapped around their bodies; that in Indonesia, spiritual seekers in deep trance can walk on red-hot coals without injury; that yogis in India can go without air for thirty minutes – or even much longer; and from numerous studies and accounts from all over the world, it has been reported that prayer has healed the sick. Do you believe all these things have happened? If not, why not? If so, why?
Unless you have gone to Tibet or India or Indonesia to study these phenomena, or have studied the effects of prayer on illness, you cannot know whether these things have occurred – or whether they are occurring now. Therefore, if you disbelieve them, why are you choosing to do that? In disbelieving, you are not being scientific nor rational. To be scientific about them, you would go out and study these reported phenomena with an open mind. After much study, you might form a tentative hypothesis about the truth or falsity of these reports, but this hypothesis would always remain open to new data. This would be the scientific approach. Being scientific, you would not make an act of faith that they were not true before you studied them fully.
To be rational about such reports, you would withhold judgment until and unless you needed to make a specific decision in your own life that related to one of them. As a rational being, why would you need to make an abstract decision about whether they were true or not? If you needed to make a specific decision about a specific course of action in your life, you would take into account everything you knew at that moment in time – and then make the best decision you could, based on what you understood at that moment. Being rational, you would act or not act in a specific way in a specific circumstance based on your best judgment – but you would not need to “believe” one way or the other about the ultimate truth or falsity of these phenomena.
So why do we have such a tendency to make these broad generalizations of belief or disbelief about things we cannot know? All children come into the world within specific culture systems, systems that provide invaluable guidance as to how one can successfully navigate the process of daily living – what to eat, how to protect oneself, how to get along with others, etc. This set of answers we are given is our consensual reality. Without these answer systems, each child would have to derive civilization for him or herself – an impossible task. Yet the process of being enculturated into a consensual reality always includes a strong component of “this is the right way to do things” and “other ways of seeing and believing are wrong.”
As we go out into life, based on this “consensual reality” we were given, most of us think we know what reality is. Yet what we really know is not “reality,” but only that particular consensual reality in which we were raised. It can therefore be quite a shock to discover that other cultures do not agree with our beliefs at all – that they see and believe very different things from what we were taught to believe. Encountering these radically different beliefs of “the other” for the first time, most of us have a tendency to dismiss, to denigrate, to disbelieve those things that do not fit within our conditioned reality.
To get a sense of how we tend to see the world through a conditioned lens, imagine for a moment how different the world would look to you if you had grown up in a rural village in China, or as a member of a remote tribe in New Guinea, or in a family of devout Hindu priests in India. In your mind’s eye, put yourself in one of these situations for just a moment. What would you believe about how to live, what “reality” was really like, what was possible – and impossible? Especially in the modern West, many of us tend to think that we have “developed our own point of view.” But if you look carefully, you will begin to see just how much your worldview derives from the people you grew up with, and the people with whom you now spend your time.*
*Throughout history, a small minority of people have had the urge to break out of their birth culture, and find another “reality” in which to live. But they do not do so in isolation – they either join another existing consensual reality, or with a few like-minded others, create a new consensual belief community around their preferred set of beliefs. Then for most, this new reality becomes just as confining as the old one they left.
For this reason, most of us do not give much credence to the views of people with whom we disagree, or to those who see the world differently than we do. On the contrary, we look for people who agree with us, and we tend to listen to them and spend our time in their company. We look for and hang out with those who reinforce our worldviews, those who confirm for us what we already believe. This observation is not meant to challenge the value of enculturated worldviews, for they are in fact quite necessary. When we are growing up, we have to have patterns within which to function – answers to questions about how to act, how to live, what is important. We have to know the rules we will be functioning within – even if we eventually decide to break free of some of them. We would not be able to function without this enculturation – in fact, one of the definitions of insanity is to be oblivious to the rules of the society in which one lives.
But there are many different cultures in the world – very, very different from each other – and none has an objective claim on “reality.” Some are better at accomplishing certain goals than others. Each has strengths and weaknesses. Yet it seems to be human nature – part of our conditioning, perhaps – for each of us to conclude that “our” consensual reality is the most advanced, the most accurate, the most true. Yet how can we really know this to be the truth? What is the basis for such a belief other than our culture’s assertion that it is so? Who has a standpoint from which to “judge” which system of beliefs is closest to reality, since each of us can only look through our enculturated eyes. It would be like asking a life-long soccer player to decide whether soccer was better than basketball.
To explore how malleable our perception of the world really is, an experiment was done involving two groups of kittens (before their eyes had opened) being placed in two quite different environments. One environment had mostly horizontal lines and shapes, with minimal vertical lines in it; the other had mostly vertical shapes and lines, with minimal horizontal images present. After being raised in these separate environments, the kittens were then put into the “normal” world. Remarkably, with these kittens, cultural conditioning determined perception to an extraordinary degree: the “horizontal world” cats could not see vertical shapes in the “normal” world – they would literally bump into them. And the cats from the “vertical world” did not perceive horizontal shapes and lines, and could not function effectively in relation to them.
In the world of hypnosis, there are many experiments that bear on the question of what is really real – versus our enculturation. In one, subjects under hypnotic suggestion were told that they would see three objects on a table in a room they were about to enter. Next, they were taken into the room, seated before a table, and asked to describe the three objects sitting before them. And they did. All three of them! The only complication is that the people conducting the experiment had only placed TWO objects on the table. Thus the people who were conducting the experiment continued to see two objects, while those under hypnotic suggestion saw three.
The really radical implication is that in many ways, our early conditioning parallels this experiment – we were conditioned to see the world the way the people around us saw it, our minds molded and shaped to see that reality. So we see “three boxes” out there in the world because we and everybody around us was conditioned to see that way. Given that this is at least partly true, how do we get outside this conditioning enough to see what is “really real”?
Another fascinating experiment gets at the very heart of this question. A number of subjects were given the hypnotic suggestion that they would start singing a song if they heard a specific word during their normal day. The people conducting the experiment followed them, and discovered that most of the subjects faithfully followed the hypnotic suggestion – when they heard the trigger word (for instance, dog) they would break into song, interrupting the conversation to sing their assigned tune (for instance, Row, Row, Row Your Boat). Up to this point, this experiment is a fairly common example of the power of hypnosis.
But now comes the really interesting part: when asked why they had started singing their song, each subject gave a rational (to them) explanation for his or her behavior. Yet the rational explanation had nothing to do with the real reason they had burst into song (which was the hypnosis). What seems to have happened is that, when asked for an explanation for their behavior, their thinking minds quickly came up with the most reasonable-sounding explanation they could think of. Not being conscious of the hypnotic suggestion they were under, they didn’t know the real reason, so their thinking minds created the most rational reason they could come up with. And, most crucially, the subjects seemed to believe that this was the reason for their behavior. It made sense to them. Of course it did – for their own minds had created this “rational” explanation. It just wasn’t the true reason.
How much, then, do each of us operate in this way every day, giving the people we talk to – and ourselves – the best rational explanations we can think of to explain our actions (and to explain the enculturated world we “see”), while the real motives and reasons lie hidden from us in our enculturated beliefs, fears, ambitions, and expectations.
So what is really out there?
You look out at the world and see a tree, and you think that the tree you are seeing is really what is out there. But if a fly, or a mosquito were sitting on your nose looking in the same direction, what would they see? Would they see the same thing? Since a fly’s perceptual system is quite different from yours, the best assumption would be that the fly is seeing an entirely different picture than what you see. But if so, which of you is seeing what is really “out there"? And the answer is – probably neither one. Each of you is seeing what your perceptual system creates – as opposed to whatever is “out there.”
The Magician in the Brain – turning neural stimulants into thoughts
When you see a tree, what are you really “seeing?” An image in your mind. And where did that image come from? From the conditioning process that went on in your early life, in which an image was formed in your mind that you now associate with the word “tree.” As you grew up, someone pointed to a picture and said, “tree,” or someone pointed to an object “out there” and said “tree.” And gradually an image formed in your mind that you began to associate with certain visual stimuli. But what if the people around you when you were growing up had – through the eons – focused on the forest rather than individual trees, and, therefore, had directed your focus to the forest, not the trees. What would you be seeing now? (I can’t resist: You would not be able to see the tree for the forest.)
What are these visual stimuli? They could just be imaginings in your mind, random firings of your neurons. Or they could be like dreams that arise without any current stimulation from outside the brain. (How could you prove that they are anything more than that?) But let us assume for a moment that at least some of our sensory impressions are not imaginary. If that is the case, the best current understanding is that light rays strike something out there, and are reflected off that “something” into your eye. At that point, neural impulses are created in the eye that travel along your optic nerve to the brain.
These impulses then stimulate the brain in some mysterious way that causes you to think “tree.” But how does this happen – that neural impulses somehow become “tree?” We do not know. It is a mystery. (And of course the same applies to tactile, and auditory, and all other sensory inputs.) Stimuli arrive in our brains, and brain changes occur that can be studied. The material side of the brain can be studied, that is. We can detect heat and motion and neuron firings. But none of this gives us any clue as to how these stimuli make the leap to conscious experience. We simply do not know how this happens. This is the “big question” in consciousness research. As British philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer A.S. Eddington put it, these two things (a neural impulse and a conscious thought) resemble each other about as much as a telephone number resembles a subscriber. Eddington went on to say:
Some influence . . . plays on the extremity of a nerve, starting a series of physical and chemical changes which are propagated along the nerve of a brain-cell; there a mystery happens, and an image or sensation arises in the mind which cannot purport to resemble the stimulus which excited it.
So what you think of as a tree out there is, in actuality, a set of stimuli on your neural pathways, which in a magical leap somehow becomes a “thought” in you mind. What a mystery this is! The impulses themselves look nothing like the thoughts they generate. Neuroscience cannot distinguish a neural impulse that becomes “tree” from one that shows up as “frog” in the mind. That neural impulses having no discernable relationship to tree show up in your mind as “tree” is a truly great mystery, and calls into question any rigid and fixed view of “reality.”
The Judge in the Mind—selecting what to let in
There is another equally great mystery: How the selection is made as to which bits of information will even get to your mind. At any given moment, there are thousands of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations available to you. How is the decision made, then, as to which ones will be taken in? You do not consciously make the millions of decisions necessary during each day as to which will get in. The Greeks believed that the “eye” went out and found the image it wanted to see. Whether this is so is debatable, but what is clear is that through some completely unconscious and mysterious process, we take in only a very small part of the sensory data available to us.
For instance, remember a time you were deep in thought – absorbed in a book or a math problem – and someone tapped you on the shoulder and said, “Why didn’t you reply when I spoke to you?” And you realize that you were so absorbed in the task at hand that you didn’t hear them when they had spoken to you a moment before. Yet the sound waves created when that person spoke the first time hit your ears in the same way they did the second time. So how did it happen that sound waves of equal volume to the ones you are hearing now did not make it to your consciousness when they hit your ears a few moments before? How was the decision made not to let those initial sound waves into your consciousness?
Or consider the oft-reported phenomenon of a mother hearing the soft cry of her child several rooms away, in spite of the loud din of a party. No one else hears this faint cry of the child, yet the mother does. How did those sound waves make it to her consciousness, and to no one else’s in the room?
The Wizard of Oz in the Mind—organizing meaningful patterns
Whatever data does make it to our consciousness, the next step is for that data to be organized into meaningful patterns – meaningful to us, that is. Immanuel Kant called the raw data available out there in the world a “rhapsody of sensation.” And he went on to argue that this plethora of sensations did not give us the world we experience. In order to make sense of all this data, we have to have concepts. These concepts organize the sense data into meaningful patterns – thoughts, ideas, and images. But our concepts are not “out there” in the world. They are inside of us – in our minds. What is more, they are not the same in each person. As discussed above, to a great extent these concepts are enculturated into us as we grow up, and are quite different in each culture.
To put this succinctly, reality is not automatically given to the untrained eye. We are trained from birth to see what we see. And our minds are organized to make what we see fit into what we “expect” to see. An experiment was conducted in which a number of college students were asked to wear special glasses for a month. These glasses had the dramatic effect of, literally, turning the world upside down – anyone wearing the glasses saw an inverted world. That is to say, everything they saw was inverted, bottom to top. The students were asked to wear these glasses every waking moment for one month. At first, as you might expect, this was very disorienting, and caused lots of problems in the most basic things, such as walking. But then an amazing thing happened. After wearing the glasses for about three days – The World Was No Longer Upside Down!
How could this be? The glasses still had the same property of inverting the world. The only explanation seems to be that consciousness wanted to see the world the way it had been trained to see it, so it adjusted the images coming in to fit what was expected – it organized the world the way it had been conditioned to see it. But if our minds do this without our knowing it, how do we know what is really out there? And if we can do this with physical reality, what we can do with subjective things, such as feelings, values, and beliefs is likely to be much greater.
Evaluating the Extraordinary
In this context, let’s say you want to determine once and for all whether Tibetans in deep meditation can really dry wet blankets in cold caves with their body heat. To find a definitive answer, you would have to go to Tibet and investigate the reports. You would interview people who had seen it, or done it, and you would begin to draw some tentative conclusions. But whatever evidence you collected, you could not be absolutely sure about it one way or the other. No matter how many positive reports you heard, it could still be a legend – a legend everyone in the culture believed, because they constantly reinforced this belief in each other.
As a next step, you might find someone who says they are able to dry wet blankets themselves. You would then set up a scientific experiment, using the strictest analytical standards, to see if they could do so. After the test is completed, there are two likely outcomes:
1. The experiment fails. But what does this prove? Only that this one person did not succeed in this one instance – nothing more. This is the sticky issue that is often overlooked in attempts to disprove extraordinary phenomena. If a test fails, no broader conclusion can be drawn, other than that this one experiment failed.
An analogy might be when scientists were trying to demonstrate that an atom could be split. Many attempts were carried out, and each failed. But this did not prove anything about whether an atom could be split. It only demonstrated that each attempt up to that point had not worked. So scientists kept trying, and after many years and many attempts, an atom was finally split.
Here is the crucial point. If you are trying to scientifically prove that something is possible, you only have to have one demonstration that you accept as valid. But if you are trying to prove that something cannot happen, you have to refute every single reported instance of its occurrence, and then you have to prove that it can never, ever happen in the future (and proof is NOT simply a theory that such occurrence is impossible).
Thus to know for sure that something your consensual reality considers “impossible” is truly impossible, you will have to evaluate every single claim of its occurrence. You will have to verify the truth or falsity of each one. Even if this were possible, there would still remain the problem that the evaluation was conducted from within your belief system. And since you perceive from within that framework, how could you be sure that you had taken off your cultural “glasses” long enough to see the real truth? If you started with the belief that it was impossible, you might have “inverted the world” to make your conclusion fit what you already believed.
Thus the fact that one can disprove many individual claims of extraordinary occurrences – and there are many such claims that can be disproved beyond a reasonable doubt – proves nothing except with regard to the one specific case that was being studied. As William James so elegantly argued, if you want to prove that all crows are black, it is not enough to show that many crows are black. No, you must show that there is not one white crow anywhere – for if one white crow shows up, anywhere, anytime, your belief that there are only black crows is completely invalidated.
2. The second possible outcome is that the experiment succeeds. Yet there is also a problem on the positive side of proof. Even if you see what looks like “proof” of a phenomenon, how can you be sure it was not a trick by a magician, or created by your own wish to believe, or arose from a state of hypnosis (in which you are the one seeing the third object on the table that the rest of the world does not see)? This is why broad acceptance that an atom could be split did not come from one successful experiment – but required many repeated demonstrations before it was widely accepted.
There is yet a further problem with “proof” about reality. Even in science, many things that were seemingly proven in the past have eventually been shown to be mistaken. For instance, many experiments “proved” that light was a wave – experiments conducted under the assumption that light is a wave, with evidence proliferating to confirm the starting assumptions. Things were therefore settled, until it was discovered that if you set up the experiment the other way – with the assumption that light is made up of particles, the “evidence” that appears switches sides and confirms the new assumption. In many less dramatic examples, evidence tends to confirm the beliefs of the experimenter, creating the notorious “experimenter effect” that colors every single attempt to pin down what “reality” really is.
Living with the Mystery
It is hard to come to grips with just how mysterious this world in which we find ourselves living really is. So much is unknowable – yet at the same time, most of us have a great need for something solid to believe in, to take as our “givens” as we make our way through this complex and confusing place. We want to think we know how things are, so that we will know what we can count on, what we can expect. Yet in truth, the only intelligent response to the dilemma of “reality” is to approach this mystery with humility, to see that there is no need to make sweeping generalizations about what is finally true, and that being a prisoner to certainty leads more often to error than to truth.
How then do we function in such a mysterious world? If you have to make a specific decision in your life, take everything you know into consideration, and then make the best decision you can – while holding open the possibility that what you see and understand at this moment might not be the whole truth, and that your understanding could well change in the future. If you need to act, or decide something, then act and decide with courage and confidence, yet all the while having the strength and courage to realize that there is much you do not know – and that you might be wrong. Humility and courage are invaluable tools in dealing with this mystery of “reality.”
Returning, then, to fire-walking Indonesians, breath-holding yogis, and Tibetans drying blankets, many people tend to disbelieve certain phenomena simply because their consensual reality does not recognize their validity. But one’s consensual reality provides no assurance as to final truth. Each consensual reality excludes many things included by others. Millions of Chinese see realities that most Americans do not see, and millions of Americans believe in events that most Chinese would consider ridiculous. Millions of tribal peoples have had experiences that skeptical scientists do not believe could happen, and many scientists believe in “laws” that tribal peoples find laughable.
(As an aside, Harvard Professor of Medicine Herbert Benson went to Tibet four times and studied the reports of Tibetans drying wet blankets while in meditation. He reports:
Our teams documented that monks could indeed dry icy, wet sheets on their naked bodies in temperatures of 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Within three to five minutes of applying the dripping three-by-six-foot sheets to their skin, the sheets began to steam! Within thirty to forty minutes, the sheets were completely dry, and they were able to repeat this process two more times. )
In coming to terms with reality, the crucial point to understand is that our cultural conditioning is necessary and important, but it might not provide “the truth.” In fact, our enculturated consensual reality might be hiding the truth as much as revealing it. Thus our challenge is to use our consensual reality as a tool to live in relation to others, but to understand that it is not absolute truth. And most importantly, that deeper truths might lie hidden behind the veil of the way we were conditioned to “see.”
Yet the mysterious nature of reality is not an argument for the absence of objective truth, as some have claimed. Nor does it suggest that all truth is relative. What it does show is that most – but not necessarily all – of what we take for truth arises from our consensual reality, whether that consensual reality be a scientific one, a skeptical one, or that of a devout Christian or Hindu or Sikh. As this relates to the Unseen Order, all we can conclude is that those who argue that such does not exist make this argument from within their consensual reality, and those who approach its existence from within a particular faith system do so from their consensual reality. Thus all sides are subject to Einstein’s observation that “it is the theory that decides what we can observe.” Perhaps this suggests that if there is a “real truth” out there, or if there is an Unseen Order, it is mediated by the thought that, “Truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing,” that we will discover whatever deeper truths there are only when we are free of expectations, fears, agendas, and beliefs.
For a good discussion of this, see LeShan, Lawrence, The World of the Paranormal, Helios press, 2004, p. 42-43
Eddington, A.S., Science and the Unseen World, New York, Macmillan, 1937, p. 34
Benson, Herbert, Timeless Healing, Scribner, 1996, p. 163
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