This chicken-or-egg question has been keeping thinkers busy long before Descartes' statement "Cogito ergo sum" and maybe scientists will be able to proof and construct a formula for whatever truth will have in store.
Meanwhile, whether reality is what we've been taught or just merely something similar to an illusion or other kind of mind construct, we have to live in, with and through it to the best of our ability, knowledge and even more important - belief. Whereas belief does not necessarily mean religious, but rather the belief in to what extend reality is real and how much the mind can influence it including the universe, all matter, anti matter and the space in between, classic water, earth, fire, air, as well as the human body with its interface and control center called brain.
I am always amused when a new scientific discovery reveals that there is so much - some say 99.99999 (cannot find the infinite symbol here) % - or maybe more empty space between the particles. And whenever they manage to zoom into the then smallest particle, they are confronted with the same situation again. And isn't it funny that the space scientists have to deal with a very similar problem at the macro end of our reality. Ever wondered what happens if both ends are endless?
I will have a field day saying: I've known it all along.
I am always amused when a new scientific discovery reveals that there is so much - some say 99.99999 (cannot find the infinite symbol here) % - or maybe more empty space between the particles. And whenever they manage to zoom into the then smallest particle, they are confronted with the same situation again. And isn't it funny that the space scientists have to deal with a very similar problem at the macro end of our reality. Ever wondered what happens if both ends are endless?
I will have a field day saying: I've known it all along.
One time in high school I heard about Max Planck's words that 'there is no matter as such'. Ever since, maybe in the late 1960's, I have been experimenting, practicing, valuing the effects of mind exercises like meditation and hypnotherapy. In those days for the general public hypnosis still belonged to occultism or on the stage of some freakshow.
I am happy now to see that 'the times they are a changin' and many a respected scientist (e.g. Prof. Dr. Herbert Benson, Harvard School of Medicine; Prof. Dr. David Spiegel, Associate Chair of Psychiatry at Stanford University; among many others) provide scientific backing and proof that we are just about to (re-)discover the power of the mind over matter.
One of the advantages of science taking over is that we will soon have scientific gobbledygook with distinct definitions and delimitations for those millennia old unnamed phenomena. Vaguely ill-reputed as witchcraft, shamanism, voodoo and whatnot it has been, for obvious reasons, banned from the use in serious healthcare.
One of the reasons is, it's cheap if not free. Another is that it is not controlable by a religious, political, economic, or any other system. <to be continued so_on>
Meanwhile, I found another interesting website about: 'The holographic paradigm' and want to deposit it here for further use, as I'm not yet too familiar with blogging.
'The holographic paradigm' also has implications for so-called hard sciences like biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia Intermont College, has pointed out that if the concreteness of reality is but a holographic illusion, it would no longer be true to say the brain produces consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain -- as well as the body and everything else around us we interpret as physical.
Such a turnabout in the way we view biological structures has caused researchers to point out that medicine and our understanding of the healing process could also be transformed by the holographic paradigm. If the apparent physical structure of the body is but a holographic projection of consciousness, it becomes clear that each of us is much more responsible for our health than current medical wisdom allows. What we now view as miraculous remissions of disease may actually be due to changes in consciousness which in turn effect changes in the hologram of the body.
Similarly, controversial new healing techniques such as visualization may work so well because, in the holographic domain of thought, images are ultimately as real as "reality".
... (concluding) ...
Whether Bohm and Pribram's holographic paradigm becomes accepted in science or dies an ignoble death remains to be seen, but it is safe to say that it has already had an influence on the thinking of many scientists. And even if it is found that the holographic model does not provide the best explanation for the instantaneous communications that seem to be passing back and forth between subatomic particles, at the very least, as noted by Basil Hiley, a physicist at Birbeck College in London, Prof. Aspect's findings "indicate that we must be prepared to consider radically new views of reality".
