The Biology of Existence
We sense the world to be real because we feel our bodies to be real, and vice versa. ~ Nisargadatta Maharaj
It seems natural to accept that reality constitutes what our senses provide us. We believe the observable to be true, even comprehensive. This naïve realism is foolhardy. The expanse of our perception is so miniscule that our experiences are merely a make-believe movie compared to the vastness of Nature.
Other organisms – animals, plants, microbes, et cetera – experience completely different worlds. Like us, they are confined to their sensory apparatus as a basis to constructing mental worlds. Their empires of existence may be so alien to us as to constitute a different universe, but those realms are no less ‘real’.
According to quantum mechanics, what we can observe about the world is only a tiny subset of what actually exists. ~ Sean Carroll
Actuality appears as a set of spatial scales. Through microscopes, telescopes, and mathematical projections, we can conceptualize vistas which we cannot directly observe, such as the dynamics that transpire at the quantum and cosmological levels.
The world looks classical because the complex interactions that an object has with its surroundings conspire to conceal quantum effects from our view. ~ Vlatko Vedral
The mirage of objects we tangibly experience are quantized fields which remain ethereal and entangled in interactions. Only the mind makes the world appear.
This is the primordial illusion: that the world is ancient. Actually, it rises with your consciousness. ~ Nisargadatta Maharaj
Our experience is of duality: a mind housed in a body, looking out onto an external world. Dualism is only our proximate actuality – it is not real.
All existence is imaginary. ~ Nisargadatta Maharaj
We feel within ourselves our own energy and witness it in the world. Yet the mind tells us instead of bodies moving through spacetime, not energetic gyres ecologically interacting in a vast entanglement.
Without objects, consciousness would be nonsense. ~ German philosopher and psychologist Johann Friedrich Herbart
The mind insists that Nature is of discrete objects. We accept it, even as we wonder what is behind it.
It is ironic that one’s mind takes the body to be itself while trying to know its source. ~ Nisargadatta Maharaj
