This book is about the difference between what is real vs. illusory. It consists of two components. The first is a series of fables that express nuanced ideas about life, fate, illusion, and action, as only legends can. The second is built around a conversation between the protagonist, CT, and his friend, Bella. They meet in a bar. Through the game of Solitaire, they discuss what is real and illusory and how, because our conscious awareness of reality is a product that is a bio-sensory interpretation of the source reality, it is difficult yet essential to know the difference between the two.
In this new book, Chuang Tzu uses the game of solitaire much as the Zen archers use archery. The practice bends space and time in the practitioner’s experience into a unified whole. For the archer, the aim is to be neither the shooter nor the target. The shooter and target are a unified whole, two sides of one coin. It is useless to ‘try’ to hit the target, for it has already been hit…or not. And so, rather than grappling with trying to do something, the archers aim for the self; they are ‘being’ within the circumstances their life provides. To understand how this can be, we must recognize the difference between a ‘manifest reality’ and an ‘unmanifest reality.’
Consciousness is a manifest phenomenon. Consciousness and the reality it is aware of around itself is only real at the continuously manifesting and very special ‘now’ moment between the past and the future. What was in the past and will be in the future does not exist as real. The manifest experience of being is so fundamental to conscious awareness that it is believed by consciousness to be the true state of reality throughout the entire universe. In other words, consciousness experiences a universe in which objects in space change state through time, and all of this can only be observed and experienced in the ‘now’ moment. This DNA-fueled interpretation is the foundational experience for conscious awareness and goes unquestioned. This is what is meant by the phrase ‘manifest reality.’
But this manifest reality only exists for biological, conscious beings. We ‘experience’ a manifest reality through an interpretive bio-sensory process that literally creates, in our brains, just such an experience for us. As an interpretation, it is, by definition, not the same thing as whatever it is interpreting. By the same token, what is being interpreted is under no compunction to comport with the attributes of a ‘reality’ created by this ‘interpreted’ product. In other words, because we ‘experience’ reality as a manifest phenomenon does not mean reality IS a manifest phenomenon. Modern science has given us good reason to believe it is not.
Enter Albert Einstein with a universe of infinite ‘now’ moments in a unified space-time and John Bell with a Superdeterministic universe where everything within it is already ‘done.’ These states are examples of what we might consider as ‘nonmanifest’ realities or non-local realities in physics language. In such a universe, reality, and thus existence itself, is not dependent on time or space as we consciously experience them. I like to ponder it in these terms: No amount of time can change such reality, and no amount of space can contain it. In such a universe, all within our experienced past and future times exist as real. All within the furthest reaches of space, both immense and minuscule, are connected and united as one thing. This is how I try to conceptualize and what I mean by a ‘nonmanifest’ universe.
And so, what C T’s practice, his game of solitaire, does for him is to help him expand beyond the boundaries of his experience as set by his DNA. We can picture those boundaries if we consider the nature of the horizon. As a phenomenon, it gives us insight into the difference between what we experience as real and what is real. What we call the horizon is a perceptual illusion. It only exists as a bio-sensory product. It is a function of conscious perception. Thanks to science, human beings now know this to be a fact. We will not fall off the horizon’s edge, for no edge exists. The sun does not go down, nor does the moon rise. And yet, though we know these to be facts, the illusion persists. We know it is an illusion, yet we accept it as real.
However, though we can consider the horizon as a specific ‘phenomenon,’ it can’t be separated from the overall reality of the world as we consciously perceive it. For us, the bio-sensory process that creates the illusion of a horizon is responsible for every experience we consciously perceive. For human consciousness, our experience of ‘the world’ is real in the same way we consider the horizon to be real.
