Chapter 9 Veiled Reality: Affirmations of the Apophatic from Physics – The God is No-Thing An Apophatic Assertion: An Introduction for Humankind’s Transpersonal Actualization– revised -. Copyright Rodger Ricketts Psy.D.,2023. All rights reserved. Protected by international copyright conventions. No part of this chapter may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever, or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, without express permission of the Authorpublisher, except in the case of brief quotations with due acknowledgement. Chapter 9 Veiled Reality: Affirmations of the Apophatic from Physics We have seen that science supports the apophatic assertion that a transcendent reality is beyond the normal range of human perception and conceptualization. Yet, at the same time, the Transcendent is a reality in the human life process. We have also seen that awakening or transcending the ignorance of duality is a common experience of the mystic. I will now highlight how the theoretical physicist Bernard d’Espagnat argues that we cannot directly know the transcendental reality or mind-independent reality: When, in its spirit, quantum theory and Bell’s theorem are used as touchstones, the two main traditional philosophical approaches, realism and idealism, are found wanting. A more suitable conception seems to be an intermediate one, in which the mere postulated existence of a holistic and hardly knowable MindIndependent Reality is found to have explaining power. […] This model considers Reality as not lying in space and time, indeed being a priori to both, and it involves the view that the great mathematical laws of physics may only let us catch some glimpses on the structures of the Mind-Independent Reality. (On Physics and Philosophy (2006) vol. 41) D’Espagnat calls this model “veiled reality” to suggest that the mind-independent reality, like the transcendental of transcendental idealism, is, for the most part, unconceptualizable. “Veiled reality” refers to a “world” independent from human perception, brain structure, and the language of our minds’ participation in knowledge. D’Espagnat, as well as others, also assert that we are directly involved in this actuality; we exist in it. We are an integral part of the actual. We are “swimming” in it. Reality is not a specific area of the universe that exists separate from our senses. Our limitation is that we can delineate only an exceedingly small aspect of it. As the Buddha taught, d’Espagnat explains that sense impressions and sensations are genuine, as are our sense organs. In sight and color, both the photons, or waves, as well as the retinal cones are actual and their interactions create our vision. The same is true of our other sensations. This is the middle way of understanding our place in reality. We do not have to seek our participation in it; we are a part of it. However, in our dualistically based ignorance, we normally take our cognitive representations, or pictures of reality, to be reality itself. However, under certain meditative conditions, we can understand how our subject/object dualistic world creates this illusion—the illusion that is our ignorance. As the Buddha explained in a descriptive explanation of the doctrine of kamma and dependent origination, life has a certain predictability; certain conditions have their origins in certain other conditions. Life is not total randomness, but it is also not total determinism. We see a similar approach in d’Espagnat’s account of the “veiled reality”; we know we are participating in it when we obtain approximately the same results, regardless of our methods of investigating a phenomenon or replicating behaviors. Stability is a reliable criterion of reality. In other words, a reasonable or practical attitude is one that recognizes that events can be created when a certain cause or causes originate them. Space and Time The Buddha’s teachings suggest that how we experience time and space has important implications. As Buddhist Scholar Sue Hamilton (2000) notes, […] if the structure of the world of experience is correlated with the cognitive process, then it is not just that we name objects, concrete and abstract, and superimpose secondary characteristics according to the senses. It is also that all the structural features of the world of experience are cognitively correlated. Space and time are not external to the structure but are part of it. Therefore, everything that is knowable in temporal and spatial terms is dependent on our subjective cognitive process. In the Buddhist Sutta, “There is no first beginning, no first beginning is knowable.” (Samyutta Nikaya 15.1-2) Hamilton continues, If the entirety of the structure of the world as we know it is subjectively dependent, including space and time, it follows that the very concept of there being origins, beginnings, ends, extents, limits, boundaries, and so on, is subject-dependent. The entirety of temporality and of spatial extension are concepts which donot operate independently of subjective cognitive processes. Indeed, as discussed in a previous chapter, language has significant influence on our concepts and experience of reality. In her study How Languages Construct Time, (2011), Lera Boroditsky summarized: How people conceptualize time appears to depend on how the languages they speak tend to talk about time—the current linguisticcontext, what language is being spoken, and also the particular metaphors being used to talk about time in the moment. Further, people who conceptualize space differently also conceptualize time differently, suggesting that people co-opt representations of the physical world/space in order to mentally represent more abstract or intangible entities. Taken all together, these findings show that conceptions of even such fundamental domains as time differs dramatically across cultures and groups; the results reveal some of the mechanisms through which languages and cultures help construct basic notions of time. The influence of language over thought patterns is deeply pervasive, affecting even basic concepts such as space and time. While the transcendental idealism model assumes that reality is embedded in space and time, in contrast, the Buddha and other apophatic mystics teach that space and time do not exist outside of us but are a part of our cognitive constructions, observing and reckoning the transformation or the constant change of reality. Renowned theoretical physicist John L. Bell explains it thus: “Gödel explained it this way… there could be no such thing as an objective lapse of time, that time or, more generally, change, is an illusion arising from our special mode of perception.” Or as the information philosopher Ruth Kastner wrote, “Time is the measurement of change.” Angelus Silesius says, “Time is of your own making, Its clock ticks in your head. The moment you stop thought Time too stops dead.” The physicist d’Espagnat takes a similar position: I am therefore inclined to think that ‘the Real’—alias human independent reality—is not embedded in space-time. And indeed, I go as far as speculating that, quite the contrary, the nature of space-time is […] not ‘nominal but phenomenal,’ that space-time is a ‘reality’—for us. He emphasizes the fact that our experience of space-time is subjective to our cognitive constructions of phenomena. Wolfram Schommers takes a similar perspective on space and time: We normally assume that our sensations produced by the brain are identical with reality itself, but this should not be the case as we have argued thatspace-time cannot be outside the brain because space-time has to be considered as an auxiliary element for the representation of physically real processes. In other words, the outside world, the material bodies, cannot be embedded in space-time….Space and time are obviously elements of the brain; they come into existence due to specific brain functions. (1998) This model asserts that even space and time are intimately linked in our cognitive experience, resulting in a composition of a reality constructed by our cognitive representations. All form is temporary, transforming, and impermanent, including (X). Instead, there is the Present and the constant transformation of manifestations. Or as physicist David Bohm said, “Ultimately all moments are really one. Therefore, now is eternity.”
As Nobel winner physiologist Walter R. Hess (1973) wrote,
Much exists and evolves in this world, which is not accessible to our comprehension, since our cerebral organization is primarily devised so that it secures survival of the individual in natural surroundings. Over and above this, modest silence is the appropriate attitude.
As Buddhist Scholar Sue Hamilton (2000) notes,
[…] if the structure of the world of experience is correlated with the cognitive process, then it is not just that we name objects, concrete and abstract, and superimpose secondary characteristics according to the senses. It is also that all the structural features of the world of experience are cognitively correlated. Space and time are not external to the structure but are part of it.
The neuroanthropologist Terrence William Deacon wrote,
“We live our lives in this shared virtual world […] The doorway into this virtual world was opened to us alone by the evolution of language.”
Author R. G. H. Siu wrote that humans deceive themselves because of their unique capacity:
Human beings are destined, as humans, to live in a world of make-believe, people with virtual presences of each other and all things existing and not existing. Neither the observer nor the observed can remain human entirely in truth and reality. Fable is the fare of the human.
We are all Interconnected even with the Universe 