When I began studying metaphysics, or maybe I should say when I became part of the New Age Movement and started studying anything and everything slightly “woo woo” in nature, I learned that there is more to reality than meets the eye.
Interestingly enough, later on, I discovered that scientists, specifically quantum physicians, proved this theory. The things we believe are solid, are not solid at all, for instance. The chair I’m sitting on as I write this blog post is really just a bunch of atoms vibrating in space, and, at their most basic level, the atoms are just space. So, I’m sitting on nothing but space. But it sure does look and feel like a chair to me!
It seems like the Earth is moving slowly as well. Actually, a spot on the surface of the Earth moves at 1675 km/hour or 465 meters/second. That’s 1,040 miles/hour. For every second, you move almost half a kilometer through space, and you don’t feel it or realize it.
We take a lot of things for granted… We perceive them one way—think of them as real, when they aren’t necessarily real.
When I began to study Kabbalah, I sought to find the same basic lessons about reality in the Jewish mystical tradition. Indeed they were there. And I loved that. In fact, it drew me into Judaism and into Kabbalah, creating a passion to find all the lessons I had learned outside of the religion of my birth within it and to share them with others (Jewish or not).
Reaching the King
This idea that there is more to reality than meets the eye is the first premise of Kabbalah, according to Rabbi Lawrence Kushner. It is evident in one of my favorite stories told by the Baal Shem Tov, the father of Hasidism. It goes like this (as found in Rabbi Kushner’s Kabbalah: The Way of Light):
Once there was a king who yearned for his subjects to be close to him. Being a wise ruler, however, the king knew that if the process of getting close to him was too easy, people wouldn’t think it was important. They would be convinced that something as awesome as being close to the king must be challenging and very difficult. So this is what the king did. Since he was a magician, he built around himself a magnificent castle with towers and gates and walls. But it was all an illusion. Then he issued a royal proclamation inviting everyone to come and be close to him. But when they arrive and saw the fortress with all its battlements and walls, one by one they all gave up. Surely such a task was beyond human skill. But then the child of the king came forward. She was daunted but not dismayed. Cautiously, deliberately, she went up to the wall and extended her hand to touch it, but as soon as she did, the wall disappeared. And so it went with all of the walls and towers and gates. Illusions, everyone one of them! In this way, she was able to walk right up to her father, who we imagine was sitting on a chair in the middle of an open field. They embraced, and he said, “What took you so long.”
You Can’t See It, But You Know It’s There
Of course, this story speaks to our ability to access the presence of God, referenced here as the king. The idea is that God is more accessible than we think. The reality we have constructed of an unreachable God is not necessarily the truth of the matter.
But you don’t have to believe in God or want to “meet” God to know Something Bigger than us is at work “behind the scenes” of reality as we know it. Even scientists say they can’t explain why things work the way they do. They admit there is more to reality than meets the eye—or than they can find under their microscopes or prove in some other way.
Rabbi Kushner uses a metaphor to further describe the concept that there is more to reality than meets the eye. I have taken the liberty of updating it in my own words:
You are watching television, and you hit the mute button on your remote. Now, you can see the picture but you can’t hear what the woman on the screen is saying. Suddenly something happens to your reception, and the picture becomes pixelated. You can barely make out the person on the screen. As the reception worsens, the screen goes black. You see and hear nothing. Yet, you stare at the screen anyway because you know something is there. You know someone is speaking, but you can’t see or hear her. But you know that a message emanates from that dark, silent place.
Or imagine it this way. You are like a cell phone trying to connect to a cell phone tower. Sometimes the reception is good, sometimes it’s not. You might have to adjust where you stand or how you hold the phone before the phone connects to the signal. Then you can receive any number of different types of messages. Can you see the signal? No. Do you know it’s there? Yes. Is it there even when you aren’t looking for it? Of course. And the messages are present in the ether even when the phone isn’t receiving them because it can’t get a signal.
What We Can’t See We Can and Do Believe
In fact, there’s a lot in life that you can’t see but that I bet you, like me, believe in anyway. You know cell signals exists and trust your messages will arrive upon them. You have faith that the chair will hold your weight. You trust that particles really do spin around in space, that your heart pumps blood and your blood feeds your body, that airplanes can and do fly, that electricity turns on lights (and that the switch you flip will make it so), and that the earth orbits in space. Sometimes you sense that something is going to happen. Occasionally you experience a synchronicitous event. You trust your gut. Once in a while you just know something. And you know there is more to reality than meets the eye.
We all believe in what we can’t see more than we know or admit. And on some level we want to access that part of reality that we can’t see. We want to move through the illusion. We want to hear and see what is in the darkness. That means being more like the king’s daughter—being willing to extend our hands to the walls…and to watch them disappear.
Copyright: Gudella / 123RF Stock Photo
