Is the reality as we know is real?

Morpheus: “This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill — the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill — you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.”

The 1999 science fiction action film — ‘The Matrix’ contained numerous references to philosophical and spiritual ideas. The critically acclaimed movie also raised the question of “How do you know whether the things you perceive are real or just an illusion. 
In the movie, the pills serve as a mechanism by which one can either remain in the illusory world of the matrix (the blue pill) or exit it to the real world (red pill).
We may or may not be living in a matrix created by some powerful machines and we certainly don’t have any blue and red pills, but the big question remains : is the reality as we know is real?

You may ask that why does the question arise at all? Isn’t it self evident that the physical world we see is real and exists by itself, alone? Most people do think this is self-evident, but physical realism has been struggling with the facts of physics. There are numerous paradoxes that baffled physics through the last century and still baffle it today.

And when Max Planck states that there is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. Then, we are compelled to sit up and notice.

This world or that world: Materialists verses the Spiritualists…

In this article, we will focus on understanding the two prevalent concepts of reality propagated by the materialists and the spiritualists.
Let us start with a famous distinction drawn by the philosopher Wilfrid Sellers between the ‘manifest image’ and the ‘scientific image’ — the two ways of seeing the world we live in.

According to the manifest image, the world is…

full of people, plants, and animals, houses and cars…and colors and rainbows and sunsets, and voices and music, and home and money and problems and opportunities and mistakes, among many other such things. These are the myriad things that are easy for us to recognize, love or hate. It is the real world to us.

According to the scientific image, on the other hand…

the world is populated only with molecules, atoms, electrons, gravity, quarks, and who knows what else — dark matter, strings etc. These entities through a complex interplay, acquire various solid liquid and gaseous forms to create everything in the real world.

Now…

The materialists firmly believe that the manifested world as seen by us is only a perceived image of the scientific world, composed of matter and energy and observed differently by our own individual consciousness. All of our experiences and knowledge takes place through physical senses and the function of mind is to deal with the facts provided by these senses.

It can be explained further by this simple example: when you look at a beautiful flower, it may seem that you have splendid colors in your subjective visual field, but that is an illusion: the only reality, of which this is an interpreted, rehearsed version, is that a physical process is going on in your mind; your visual cortex to be precise. The vivid colors in your visual field which provide happiness and joy when you look at the flower are just the intentional object of such a belief and thus an illusion. Only the physical form of the flower and the process it starts in our brain is true, the manifest image in our mind (Consciousness)is in fact not an image at all.
 So, the materialists assert that…

Consciousness is an illusion and the matter is the only reality!

This is the blue pill!

The materialists do admit that there are a few things unknowable behind this real world but they believe that they are unknown only till the man comprehends it.

So far so good. Most of us do agree with this view.

But wait…

The Spiritualists argue that there is an immaterial reality that cannot be perceived by the senses. That the world is much more complex than it seems, there are in this world realities which are beyond the range of ordinary senses.

When we envision a universe composed of only physical forms and laws, we miss the bigger picture. And science will have to expand to accommodate facts of a kind fundamentally different from the physical laws we use to explain our world.
Human mind is unique and in man there are yet unexplored faculties and powers — the subtle senses that can help us to widen our individual consciousness into a cosmic consciousness. Through higher consciousness we can witness physical facts beyond the range of our sensory organs and enter a domain which is entirely different from the domain of matter. 
We can understand this by a simple example — a computer desktop has click-and-drag icons, folders into which files may be dropped, and many other familiar items. We use these items at their face value. knowing perfectly that the real stuff actually going on behind the desktop is mind-numbingly complicated, but interface designers unknown to the us have simplified the affordances, making them particularly salient for human eyes, and adding sound effects to help direct attention. Nothing complex and useful inside the computer corresponds to that little file-folder on the desktop screen which is visible to the user’s eyes and ears!

The same applies to the world; the world as we see is not the real thing. While we use the familiar icons and tools, the reality is far beyond our comprehension and it is multidimensional and complex, following the laws of physics which are beyond the grasp of man as yet.
The spiritualists postulate that…

There is reality beyond matter — and the transcendental consciousness is the truth — the reality!

This is the red pill my friends!

Interesting, isn’t it?
To be cont.…