I wrote about “essences” (in the essay on The Three Essences), but only hinted at “existence” puzzles, mainly related to what exists in “reality”. Several times already I have been driven to recognize that there may be degrees of reality, of the extent to which things “really” exist. I want to explore this theme a little further now.

There is more than the bare dichotomy of either A exists or A does not exist, as it would appear in logic. Take as an example the basic theorems of the optics of mirrors and lenses: there are objects, there are real images, and there are virtual images in those diagrams of the geometry of light rays. Real images are formed where the light rays really come together; virtual images are only the places where the dotted lines (light rays produced back through a straight mirror, for example) would converge, creating an illusion in our eyes that the rays emanate from there. So we have a series of three degrees of reality here: objects certainly exist as hard pieces of matter; real images sort of exist as convergence places of real light rays, but virtual images are only optical illusions created by our visual apparatus.

I wrote previously about “virtual particles” forming in a cloud around “real particles”. The virtual ones have not paid their energy debt and so cannot have a lasting existence, but they can wink in and out very briefly from the underlying vacuum (nano-seconds?) and have some physical effects (e.g. shielding the electric charge) on the real particle. Virtual particles have some kind of an intermediate reality between existence and non-existence.

The above mention of “energy debt” which must be paid within nano-seconds or you go bankrupt reminds me of getting a bill which must be paid within 30 days. Before I received the bill in the mail, I did not owe it. Within the 30 days’ grace, I owe it but I don’t feel I have to pay it. After the 30 days, I feel I have to pay it or I will be charged interest. After another period of time has elapsed, they may discontinue the telephone service or whatever the bill was for. There are degrees of reality or urgency with which I owe that bill.

Another example previously mentioned is a text typed into a computer that has not been “saved”. It is not in permanent memory and will vanish if the switch is turned off. Yet after talking with a computer expert the other day, I find that I am far from understanding the subtleties. Even when I erase a computer text, he tells me that it is still there and can even be recovered. I have seen him resuscitate all the files on an accidentally reformatted diskette; it’s like raising someone from the dead. “Where was it in the meantime?” I wanted to know. His answers were quite vague. He only knew that it could be done if you follow certain procedures.

And so it is with our own memories. There is supposed to be in our brain a “tape” with a complete record of all our life experiences; brain surgeon Penfield discovered it accidentally during a brain operation, when suddenly the patient relived an experience from his childhood in all its vividness when the scalpel touched that tape. However, we cannot always recall even a vague memory of past events; we seem to lose the access to that memory. But we know that it can be recovered if we just find the right trigger or key, and often eventually we do. In what state of existence or reality is a totally lost memory of a past event (erased from the brain tape by some disease or lesion), a memory which is there but we have not accessed it yet, a memory which we have recovered in bare outlines as usual, a total vividness recall as in Penfield’s patient, and the real experience as lived through? The real experience is like the hard material object in the optics example, but we have here five degrees of reality, not only three. Perhaps it is more than five if I understood memory better.

And what about dreams? They seem very real to the dreamer at the time, but fade in the harsh light of wakeful consciousness into a mere gossamer network, or even just a feeling. You try to hang on to the dream; you might get it back if you close your eyes again quickly; but usually it dissolves, slips through your fingers as you try to grasp it. Does the computer feel like that about its vanishing unsaved text? Is it that in dreaming the brain’s permanent memory is turned off? Is it memory that makes things “real” — i.e. continuity through the time dimension? That applies to some of the above examples, but not all; not to the object/real image/virtual image of optics.

Yet some dreams are “saved” (i.e. remembered), especially if you decide beforehand to save them. That may be like turning the memory on through some switch in the brain before you go to sleep.

There is a feeling of “unreality” about many things, at least in my experience. Some of them are described in my essay The Twilight Zone. I know some people who don’t share this feeling at all – the “super-rational”, I call them. Yet the feeling of unreality must be common enough, or radio programs like “The Twilight Zone” would not be so popular. Some would call it the sense of mystery. In one story, the man entering the haunted house says to the indwelling ghost who has just spoken to him: “But I don’t believe in ghosts. I can prove scientifically that you don’t exist.” To which the rich female voice of the ghost answers “But beyond all knowledge, there is experience.” A good statement of the fundamental principle of empirical science, actually.

A similar feeling of unreality, or perhaps of alternative realities, is encountered in our interpretations of past events; not only history, but recent events like car accidents or violent crimes. “What did you see?” the judge asks each witness, and they often report different occurrences, without deliberately lying. Or in recent history, the question “What caused the recent upheavals in Eastern Europe?” has multiple answers, depending on your ideology, sources of information and background. No historian is free of such bias, and it must get bigger the further we recede into the past. Not only the events, but the interpretations, get more and more hazy, just as we knew less about the planet Neptune from distance observations than we know now after the fly-by. But we cannot do a fly-by of historical events, because we lack a time machine, and probably always will. So history is always only one historian’s interpretation, based on a dubious selection of facts. The question “What REALLY happened?” seems to have no existential answer.

As a young person, I wanted a career and a family, both simaultaneously, though I knew that for a woman this would be difficult. That is what I REALLY wanted. It did not prove possible, and so I settled for a contingency plan: I would do these things sequentially rather than simultaneously. I had my three children, but when I stepped from full-time child care into a teaching career, the career failed, for reasons that need not detain us here. There goes another contingency plan; at age 40 I went into a “second career” (peace research at very low pay) without having really had a “first career” like my husband Alan, who went into peace research with me (only he considers it a retirement!).

But note: I was receding from the full reality of my conscious life choices to second and third contingencies. I called this “living in the interstices” of the fabric of life, between the “real” fibers; or in the intercrystalline spaces in a metal matrix. Not part of the “figure”, but of the “ground”. There was always a brief period of regret or “mourning” as an option closed and I got pushed off further to the margins. Yet life was rich in the interstices, and I went on without complaining, doing what I could.

But the process went on; over arguments between Alan and Norman, the peace research option closed also. Straight out of “real” options, I turned to what I thought was “non-attachment”, in light-hearted intellectual banter with Katie. Lo and behold: in another angry blow-up, Katie left, and I found that I had been far from non-attached and light-hearted. The last two retreats from reality (options closings) were attended by escalating grief, in fact they became life-threatening: the first through a suicide attempt (not really carried out, just intended), and the second through a psychosomatic illness.

I survived both episodes, and I don’t know what life-goal I pursue now, and I don’t even try to figure it out. At age 68 I am straight out of options as to goals, though living healthily and comfortably.

The reason why I describe these experiences now is to wonder about the “reality” of the successive options and contingency plans. The primary choice seems painted in bold outlines and filled in with primary colours, and therefore “real” in that sense. But it never materialized in the real world, and therefore is the “least real” of them all. I will have to clarify my definitions of “real”.

It might seem that living in the interstices between the strands of other people’s realities, trying to fit in my ever-diminishing goals, like an adaptable water droplet, to the pores of the fabric, would make me “less real” as a person. Yet in Buddhist non-attachment, we are supposed to jettison our desires; then our suffering will cease and we are happy in the interstices. But when even this carefully reasoned-out option failed, I was spiritually marooned, as I still am. Yet, paradoxically, I now wildly enjoy life, in spite of (or because of) doubting that human life will continue on this planet. Perhaps my time with Katie was not a real non-attachment, and this finally is, because I don’t call it that. “The Tao that you can name is not the Eternal Tao.”

In going from the red-blue-green-yellow bright first life-plan to increasingly more pale and faded pastel colours mixed with gray (less saturation and less brilliance in terms of the colour-wheel diagram), was I going from something more real to something less real, or was I going in the opposite direction? First impulse would say that I went from more to less real; the Buddhist perspective might say that I went from less to more real. The christian perspective, too, says that we can learn from suffering, and presumably become more real as persons. Now I did not suffer all that much, in comparison to some other persons. But the directionality argument still holds.

Deprived of long-range hope, both for myself and for my species, I am discovering a vibrant spirituality I never knew existed. I have come back to Quaker meeting after 15 years of absence, though I am still only a seeker and not a finder. Other interpretations of my life (e.g. “Changeling of the Universe” and “Twilight Zone”) are attempts at partial interpretations, but are no more nor less “real” than this one. We cannot tell what is true or real or actually existing, not only in history, not only in events we witness, but even in the interpretation of our own life story. What is real? No one knows.

In the lila maya world of God’s simulation, real and virtual electrons interact in complex ways at higher thought levels, and the patterns certainly indicate something, but what it “really” is, we cannot know. We all live in the interstices of rock-hard ultimate Reality whom we have never encountered.