You came to an epiphany in 2012, which inspired this book. What can you tell us about the epiphany?
I have been exploring the nature of knowledge and human perception since I was a boy. I was a troubled lad, psychologically speaking, and around 1964-65 at the age of 12 or 13, while walking home from school, and following the yellow traffic line down the center of our deserted neighborhood street, it hit me, that the veil separating sanity and insanity was as easily crossed as stepping to the left or right of that little yellow line. It was revealed to me, at this young age, that major shifts in perception and behavior could be driven by the tiniest of movements. Over the course of the next 12 years, though mostly in the later part of them, my studies led me in two directions. One was in math and science, which I loved and had an aptitude for. The other was in alternative, for the times, philosophies and religions, especially eastern ones. But it was not just mental study but experiential practice and knowledge that I craved. It was not enough to ‘know’ something mentally, I needed an ‘experience’ that could shape and alter my world. I began in earnest, in High School, studying yoga and meditation with Swami Satchidananda, and by College was involved in Zen Buddhist meditation, Tai Chi Chuan study with Chen Man-ch’ing (Zeng Manqing), Shiatsu practice with Wataru Ohashi, as well as the study of Hindu, Taoist, Buddhist and Shamanistic thought and practice. In the meantime, my studies in College began in Math, then led to Chemistry, and finally to Psychology. My main interests were in the work of people like RD Lang, Carl Jung, (far from the behaviorism of the day as espoused by BF Skinner), Edward Edinger, Joseph Campbell, James George Frazier, and in the philosophy of people like Jean Paul Sartre and Martin Buber among others. I innately felt that the worlds of science and metaphysics, with their own unique experiences and knowledge, were deeply connected along the continuum of one seamless reality. Both Relativity and Quantum theory showed great promise in the possibility of combining metaphysical and rational thought into a unified gestalt as well.
1980 saw my career begin as a visual artist, which continues to this day. The visual arts furnished me a way to work with archetypal and ‘un-rational’ thought and ideas, which, for me, were incapable of expression in words or cleanly conceptualized in any other way. Concurrently, I continued to read and study on the continued revelations occurring in Relativity and Quantum theory and their offspring. One quote, by Albert Einstein, has always stood out for me; “Reality is merely an Illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” My experience of the world had led me to the same conclusion, but my experiences were not hard evidence. Einstein, on the other hand, seemed to have a more quantitative handle on the phenomenon, and I wanted the same. Late one night, or perhaps very early in the morning, on a day in early 2012, I awoke from my sleep with a start, sitting bolt upright in my bed. My sudden movement awoke my wife, who asked “What’s the matter?” To which I replied, “I have to write something down.” I had seen the outlines of this persistent illusion and how it functioned in reality, and knew that I had to put this tenuous idea on paper, for if I went back to sleep it would disappear forever. For the next 3 years I would struggle to bring it into clarity. This shadowy yet singular and elusive form, emerging from the background of my ordinary reality, was the epiphany that led to the writing of my book TotIs.
You’ve made a life’s work of studying psychology, Eastern religions, physics, cosmology, and more. What existential questions have you been seeking to answer?
My mother was Catholic, Russian Orthodox to be exact, and my father, Jewish. In my rearing I was both baptized and received communion, as well as, attending Hebrew school and having a bar-mitzvah. Indoctrination into two very different eschatological ideologies led to great confusion in my young mind, with the antecedent confusion, fear, self-doubt, and shyness, materializing in my behavior. Eventually, though, I came to realize that these two, mutually exclusive ideologies, with their very different ultimate outcomes, couldn’t both be true. Plus they were but two of many different ideologies and religions that seek answers to ultimate questions of existence and meaning. And yet, I yearned for their promise, something that might reveal what is true, whatever that may be. Seeing how the indoctrination behind these ideologies of my formative years worked to stifle any questioning or freethinking I might have had, I realized that thought and ideas alone would not be enough in seeking such answers. Whatever there might be that could reveal any truth must contain both mental and physical experiences with the potential to transform perception. It seemed to me that any system of thought that purports to reveal any truth about reality must include the whole ‘body’ with its mental, physical and spiritual parts. This naturally drew me to Hindu and Buddhist practices with their focus on physical activity like yoga and meditation to help lead the practitioner out of the ‘illusory’ state of ‘everyday’ reality into perceptual shifts like Nirvana and Satori. Indigenous and Shamanistic practices were also meant to lead the practitioner into ‘other’ states of ‘alternate’ and ‘hyper’ reality that were inaccessible to our ordinary perceptual systems. Zen Buddhism, with its ‘irrational’ Koan’s were meant to help one, break free their minds, from the structured thought patterns that sustain the illusion of reality. Similarly, Taoism, throws down the gauntlet in the first lines of its first poem, “The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao.” This is a philosophy that asks us to imagine an ultimate reality, which our own minds are incapable of imagining. These were just the kind of practices I felt could transform my perceptions, and ways of being, and could lead, eventually, to a breakthrough.
My studies in physics and cosmology showed that such breakthroughs were most definitely needed. Relativity, with the erasure of any ‘now’ moment in time, or ‘place’ in space, that could be considered as The Reference Point, by which all others are measured, revealed our ordinary reality as inaccurate at best; A reality where past and future ‘now’ moments are all relative and equally ‘real’ and unable to be set in an ‘actual’ place. Clearly, reality is not what we experience it as. And Quantum physics blew any notion of our everyday reality as ‘real’ out of the water, with its ‘spooky action at a distance’, its wave/particle duality, and Young’s double slit experiment, to name a few of its counter-intuitive phenomena. So, ultimately, the question I have been exploring and seeking an answer to had to do with a way to ‘grock’ this Taoist revelation of the un-nameable, and, with all the other ideologies and practices, to ‘break out of’ the deeply rutted thought and experience patterns written into our DNA, so as to be able to stand before something revelatory and real, if even mutely.
I will add here that I ended up dropping out of College after 3 years of study, for the following reason. I found the ‘educational’ process required me to ‘think’ like everyone else. I found great resistance for any and all of my own thoughts, which were met with derision and hostility by teachers and students alike. I am not saying that college and education should be eschewed, quite the contrary, I believe education to be the most worthwhile endeavor a person can undertake, but for me, the path to my ‘higher’ education lay outside of these prepared paths, and so I set out on my own path of education and discovery.
This book is an imagining of conversations between such noted thinkers as Socrates, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking about concepts of time and reality. Where did the idea for the book come from?
After my epiphany, with the discernable idea now penned, I spent much time writing and re-writing a ‘paper’ in which I labored to flesh out the ideas in a readable and understandable format, but, to no avail. Though I understood what I was trying to get at, I just couldn’t find a way to make the ideas comprehendible using language. My attempts at ‘editing’ and simplifying the text only resulted in a longer, more complicated if re-worded text. These first two years of work did help me to clarify the concepts, but helped not one iota in the production of a document that anyone might deign to take up and read. Then, one fine day, as I sat reading Lawrence Krauss’ book ‘A Universe From Nothing’, I flashed back to a class I’d taken in which I read The Republic, by Plato. I think it was a High School class, but may have been in college. I remembered how using the Socratic method, Plato was able to bring the reader on a journey of discovery that involved the reader in that very same discovery. During this journey, the ideas themselves came naturally into focus with the questioning and answering of the various characters involved in his literary symposium. This was when the idea to write my treatise in such a manner came to me. I thought that, at worst, it would help me to clarify, even further, the difficult ideas in the treatise, and at best, create a readable and comprehendible book. So I re-read The Republic, with an eye toward style and voice. From there I came up with a list of characters and used transliterated Greek words that relate, if somewhat ambiguously at times, to famous personages from science and physics, as an homage to them and their ideas. From there I set the opening scene, and from there on, I simply let the characters discuss and relate with each other in a convivial and supportive atmosphere of curiosity and inquisitiveness. The natural atmosphere of friends discussing the nature of space, time and human perception coupled with the Socratic method to elucidate the concepts made the book entertaining as well as eminently readable and comprehendible.
In the book you talk about antIs, “the human observer’s experience of reality and the universe,” and totIs, “which defines a total reality of the universe unavailable to human observer’s created antIs reality.” Can you break these concepts down a little for readers new to these subjects?
In order to understand the nature and source of the ‘persistent illusion’ Einstein describes in his quote, it is imperative to understand that for all biology, and for humans in particular, there exist two classes of reality. The ‘prime’ reality, what some call ‘ultimate’ reality, and which I define as ‘totIs’ reality because of certain attributes it embodies, that are described in the book. The word totIs is a combination of the Latin word totus, meaning total or complete, and Is, with a capital I, meaning being, but, in this case, being in absolute terms. The second class of reality is defined as antIs reality. It is a combination of the Greek word antilipsi meaning ‘sensation’ and Is, for being, again, with a capital I. It is a reality born of our ‘sense-experience’ from our interactions with totIs reality.
So, what does it mean to have two classes of reality? TotIs reality is the prime reality upon which everything in the universe depends. It would be equivalent, though only in some respects, to what physicists call ‘The Theory of Everything’, or what Theologians call ‘God’. It stands alone, in an, as yet, undiscovered way, as the source of all things, known or unknown to us.
AntIs reality is the reality we ‘experience’. I use the word experience in a scientific way to mean an organism’s interpretation of reality, which is the created product of our central nervous system, using the input of our sensory systems five senses, touch, taste, smell, sight, hearing, plus the other internal sensory systems that keep the organism functioning. This ‘experience’ of reality is not equivalent to totIs reality itself. It is, in all respects, an interpretation. An interpretation of a thing is not the same as the thing itself. When we ‘see’ the red of a rose, we experience a biological product, based on a signal sent by a retinal cone that has interacted with what we call a photon. That signal is the cone’s highly processed ‘interpretation, sent to the brain, via the optic nerve, and tells the brain “I’ve just interacted with something and here’s my interpretation of it.” The brain acts to collect, assemble, re-interpret and present a constant stream of sensory input into an ‘experience’, which we believe to be totIs reality. In fact, neither you, nor I, have ever ‘seen’ a photon. That goes for the interpretations created by all of our sensory signals.
As an ‘experience’, antIs reality is completely dependent on totIs reality for its existence, whereas totIs reality is dependent on nothing for its being, it is source reality. Also, because antIs reality is ‘created’ through a bio-sensory process, it is prone to quantitative and qualitative limitations and malfunctions. For this reason it can be classified as a type of illusion, according to our own definitions of illusion. Furthermore, because the bio-sensory system is a closed loop system, existing solely within the organism, one hundred percent of its product, that is, the ‘experience’ of reality it provides us, can be considered illusory. Nowhere on the continuum of experiential outputs created by our biology do any of those experiences jump the tracks of their own processes and become equivalent to totIs reality. This is an important point because it includes our ‘experience’ of a ‘now’ moment and the subsequent flow of time it engenders. The ramifications of these ideas are, needless to say, profound, and are discussed in the book.
I will note that these definitions, on their face, require the reader to take logical leaps of faith they may be unable or unwilling to take. In my book, using the Socratic method, I take the reader along a logical path, step by step, building a series of bridges, so as to render such daunting leaps unnecessary.