(c) John, Rekesh 2004-2008. No part of this work may be copied or reproduced without the author's permission
Objective Reality - Is the World An Illusion?
Is there objective reality independent of an observer? Eastern philosophy and spirituality often carry the notion of 'maya', which is commonly interpreted as illusion. Is the world an illusion, or does it at least have some kind of illusory nature?
The ancients who first put forth the notions of illusion did not have sufficient linguistic terminology or concepts from their material experiences to convey those ideas in better form. The depictions of 'illusion' were essentially a restricted form of interpretation, as human experience at that time lacked sufficient words and concepts such as which are available today. Now, with the advent of the information age and computing machinery, the task is made a little easier.
What may be recognized is that, behind any experience, is something intangible, which may be called the
information content of that experience. When Scrat the saber-toothed squirrel chases after an acorn in a popular Ice Age movie, what essentially creates that experience is
information, manipulated through certain principles and projected from a world of information to that of sensory perception. When a web page on the Internet is visited by millions, each one experiences an individualized version of that page, which can look different in color, size, formatting and so on, but has the same information content. There are objects on a web page that one may interact with, click around, and enter information, as though they were real. Is the web page with its interactive elements an objective reality, or is it an illusion? In one sense it is an illusion, because there are no real objects there on the page, and the experience of interacting with it is 'virtual'. Close the web page and it ceases to exist, at least for the observer, while it remains accessible to others who are viewing it. Yet it is also real, because one experiences it, manipulates it and finds information within it. Whole 'worlds' may be created in it. There are 'laws' as it were, that determine the construction of a web page, and in delivering the experience. Its appearance is a
projected reality, where the projection is based on techniques and laws, yet is much like an illusion. Thus a web page is partly illusory, yet has an underlying reality within a computer system, a reality that is very different from what it seems.
Such a perception of reality is much closer to the truth than is typically represented by the term 'illusion' or 'maya'. Those who are cognizant of the computer sciences may also recognize that it is possible to generate or present different web pages, depending on who is viewing, from where and so on. That is, while a large population shares a common 'reality', it is eminently possible to change or affect the perceived 'reality' for selected individuals, and to switch from one 'reality' to another as it were.
Following the above analogy, it may be recognized that what is usually expressed using the term 'reality' is
perceived or projected reality, which is accessible to the senses and measuring instruments, and appears to follow natural laws. This reality can be variously viewed as relative, objective, observer dependent and so forth, analogous to the reality of a web page. But behind all these expressions there is reality of a very different quality. This is reality beyond manifestation, which is unlike anything we perceive or consider to be reality.