Is All of Reality Physical - Essay Example

To understand the question let us first define what is meant by the term ‘physical’. Physical refers to that which we experience through our five senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. And what is reality? Is there an objective reality?

Apart from this, since what I experience is not just through my five senses, but through my brain, my experience, which is my reality often transcends the physical. Scientifically speaking, my senses serve merely as extension cords to my brain. My senses cannot experience anything by themselves. It is my brain that decodes what is happening with my senses and makes ‘sense’ out of that. Let us take a simple example to understand this. When I travel in a train, and look out of the window, my sense of sight tells me that all the trees and people are moving in the opposite direction. My brain, however, unscrambles the data received by my eyes and informs me that it is I sitting in the train and the train itself, which moves forward. And I am willing to listen to the message that my brain gives me, although it contradicts what my eyes ‘see’. So it is my brain and the way I look at the world, which dictates how I see and experience it, and which I term reality. (Note, that a child, whose brain has not been conditioned will insist that it is the trees and the people that are moving, and not the train!)

There is no objective reality (as I stated earlier) even if for our arguments’ sake we accepted that our brains process data in identical ways (which they do not). What my senses experience and the data that my brain receives would differ, depending on the place where I stand when viewing phenomena. During a solar eclipse, if I stand in the umbra, I would claim that the sun is black, but if you stand within the penumbra you would see it as a sliver. So what we see or experience depends on where we stand in our perspective. My thought processes, therefore, give me my reality and my identity. (“I think, therefore I am” – Descartes )

If we are asked the question, “Which is softer, a starched linen napkin or a rose petal?”(Chopra 186) we can answer this without having to find a napkin or a petal. The reason I can do this is because I have gone to a subtler level of the sense of touch, and can visualize that touch. Similarly, I can go to subtle levels of the other senses (sights, smells, etc.). Deepak Chopra states that this level of the mind is not the subtest that we can reach. We can go deeper. When we meditate the visual image of the rose would become fainter on the screen of our mind, till nothing remains but the screen itself. “Then one would be at the true origin of the senses, the field of intelligence itself” (Chopra 186)
There are several other dimensions of reality, apart from the ‘physical’, which, as we discussed earlier is not as objective a thing as we may imagine, but quite a subjective phenomenon. Time and energy are two of the other dimensions of reality. Think of time: what happens if we travel faster than the speed of light? Reality as we know would cease to exist then, and we may travel into yesterday.

Coming to energy — those who practice Reiki1 state that they experience the energy that they transmit and receive in the process of healing, as a feeling of warmth, or a tingling sensation. The fact that energy is a vital reality can be understood if we consider the example of a person who has just died. What is the difference between the person a moment before he died, and a moment after the event? If we check him up physically (anatomically) we would find that he is just the same, but there is a difference, which is the lack of ‘energy’, variously called by others, as ‘soul’ or ‘prana’2.
From the above, we may conclude that although ‘reality’ includes the ‘physical’, it certainly transcends it.