Do we know what reality is? What is real and what is unreal?  In our lives? Buddhist philosophy believes that we live in a world of illusion, that everything we see and we experiment is unreal, and that we live in a world of appearances. Indian philosophy talks about maya, (Sanskrit) and we can find and complete explanation in the Bhagavad Gita, the most important of the Indian documents and which was written around two thousand six hundred years, (600 A.D.). This work, synthesizes the most important philosophies and doctrines of the Vedas.

It is known that oriental philosophies see life in a way that we are not used to, and their beliefs differ from the way we understand life. Our minds and our cognitive structures, which condition the way we interpret what happens to us, are based on Christian beliefs (because our civilization has been brought up on Christian, Greek and Roman philosophies), and the findings of science in the last three hundred years. Due to this long period (two thousand years of Christian civilization and three hundred years of science) we understand and interpret life and reality in a very specific manner.

Regarding science, the principles of reality were established by important scientists like Newton, Kepler, Galileo or Descartes. All of them thought that what we see and perceive with our senses was everything. So reality was limited to our perception. And the world outside was objective reality, independent of the person and our mind. They also believed that the Universe was a big machine with stars and planets that interact following laws that humans could discover by observing and describing these movements. Newton discovered gravity and the laws that supposedly moved the planets and stars in the sky. The Greek philosopher Democritus was the first to consider the existence of the atom, the smallest thing which could not be divided. A thousand and five hundred years later, scientists like Einstein demonstrated mathematically its existence, and others proved it with experiments that are now well known. Descartes, was the first philosopher who separated the mind from the body, and has conditioned the way we see ourselves especially in medicine and biology.

Around the end of the XIX century and the beginning of the XX, oriental philosophy started being known in the Western world through philosophers like Arthur Shopenhauer, Carl Gustav Dürckheim, Alan Watts, and other people interested in discovering new ways of understanding life, and compared these to Western philosophy. In the last twenty years, many books have been written and published on oriental philosophy, and there is an ever growing demand for this kind of literature. Nowadays many libraries hold an extensive selection of books that treat reality, transpersonal psychology, energy, religions and books that stimulate self-knowledge and self-evolution. It is interesting to observe the ever growing demand for more and more information on the meaning of life, and the sense of our existence.

Are we sure that all that we see is all what exists? Are we sure that the world outside is independent of ourselves and in specially our minds. Is it true that we live in maya, in an unreal world?. At the begging of the XX century a new science was developing from one of the oldest sciences, physics. A new way of looking at reality was emerging, changing the way in which reality had been interpreted for many centuries. The discovery of the quantum paradigm created by important physics like Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, M. Plank, Pauli, Broglie, Schrodinger, and others, started to treat reality as maya, an unreal world. Was there a subatomic world within the atoms of Democritus? This started to change the idea on which were the bricks that reality was based on. In the quantum world, everything is probabilistic, so uncertainty is the principle that guides the subatomic world. One of the principles is: the reality we chose with our consciousness, is the reality we live in our current life. What we see outside, is what we have in our minds because our consciousness interacts with matter. We create our reality with each decision we take. And as Einstein said, we cannot change the world if we do not change our minds. Isn’t this interesting?

Einstein's theory of relativity changed time and space. And with the discovery of J.C. Maxwell's electromagnetic spectrum of light at the end of the XIX century and posterior findings, we started to realize that reality was made up of more than what we see with our eyes, and perceive with our senses. We now know that we only see a small range of the big electromagnetic spectrum. Now it is known that we only see, 0.3% of matter and energy that exists in the Universe.

It is interesting because modern physics, under the quantum paradigm is changing the way we had been seeing reality for many centuries, and ancient philosophies like Buddhist and the Indian beliefs are getting closer day by day, as our scientific findings have started to confirm the beliefs of those ancient civilizations.

Subir al inicio.