The Surreal Starlit Veil
FACTS CAN STARTLE. Facts can amuse or enrage us. They can make us marvel or fill us with despair. Facts can be hard and solid, though in many cases, they are slippery and subject to interpretation. Facts can be as cruel or as horrible as the slaughter of innocents, or provoke a reality check that leaves us profoundly astonished.
In the case of the latter instance, for example, I recently read a book entitled Unbounded Light by William E. Williams, who wrote about how the nuclei in atoms are so small that if a single atom were blown up to the size of a cathedral, the nucleus itself would only be the size of a coin within that huge structure. This alone is startling enough, but then Williams quoted a French writer named Amaury de Riencourt who wrote a book entitled The Eye of Shiva. In that book, de Riencourt wrote how: “The world we see and experience in everyday life is simply a convenient mirage attuned to our very limited senses, an illusion conjured by our perceptions and mind. All that is around us (including our own bodies) which appears so substantial, is ultimately nothing but ephemeral networks of particle-waves, whirling around at lightning speed, colliding, rebounding, disintegrating in almost total emptiness. So-called matter,” he went on, “is mostly emptiness, proportionately as void as intergalactic space, void of anything except occasional dots and spots and scattered electric charges.”
A little later in the piece, de Riencourt tells us that “An atom…is almost completely empty space in which minute particles whirl around within its confines at speeds of up to forty thousand miles per second — enough to make us dizzy when we grasp the fact that, in the last resort, that is what our physical bodies and everything material are ultimately made of.” He further explains that if it weren’t for a certain fact regarding the properties of an atom none of us could even put an elbow on a table without our arm simply sliding through the thing. “The saving grace is the negative charge of the atom’s electrons which repel each other. Turn off this electricity, and the whole world would disappear.”
In other words, if this were not a fact, we humans and the entire universe would not even exist if this were not one of the ultimate facts of our atomic substructure.
That certainly says something positive about negativity for a change! After all, negativity generally always gets a bad rap, but in this case, it proves itself to be the true hero of the cosmos.
As if all of that wasn’t enough to totally astonish in terms of facts about atoms, de Riencourt then goes on to say something about the nuclei of atoms that really blew me away: These nuclei, it seems, are so small “that if all the nuclei of all the atoms that make up the whole of mankind were packed together, their global aggregate would be the size of a large grain of rice!”
Think about that the next time you eat a Chinese or Indian takeaway! The nuclei in the atoms of all the damn billions of us amounts to no more than a large grain of rice.
Now consider, once more, what de Riencourt said above: “The world we see and experience in everyday life is simply a convenient mirage attuned to our very limited senses, an illusion conjured by our perceptions and mind.” Add to this, for good measure, the following by Gary Zukav from his book The Dancing Wu Li Masters: “Our experience tells us that the physical world is solid, real and independent of us. Quantum mechanics says, simply, this is not so.”
What does all of this tell us? It tells us that we humans are denizens of a reality shrouded in a veil of illusion.
And that is exactly what so many of the returnees from a near-death experience insist is precisely the case. The world, it seems, is indeed a stage and we all play a part on that stage in order to learn life lessons in the most powerful of all settings: a life or death situation. It is here in this illusory realm that we humans face the ultimate karmic truths.
Those truths are real, however, and they have everything to do with the evolution of the soul. Whether we evolve upward into finer, more spiritual realms or involute and go back down for another round on the Great Wheel is all on us.
We can do what we will and create our own fates.
Can there possibly be anything better than that?
