What can we know about reality? Nothing really; although we can discover what it is not, and therefore where it begins.
To begin with, there can be no motion in reality. Motion is relative, dependent on objects, space and time; anything dependent for its existence on something else cannot be real. So motion is not real; although it is actual.
Looking at motion more closely we see that every structure in the creation is in motion, within and without. The universe, the solar system, the earth, and every object on earth including everything that appears to be motionless is composed of atoms moving at tremendous speeds. Actually everything is in motion — is motion. Therefore nothing is real.
Everything is different every moment. Nothing has real individual existence, except perhaps the ultimate all-encompassing ‘structure’, life itself. The nuclear physicists have proved this ‘absence of reality’. They have found that the position and speed of an object cannot be fixed at the same instant; if you assess the speed you cannot fix the position, and vice versa.
It is an actual world we live in, not a real one.
What is the only real thing in the world? What is the essence and totality of life, the thing that creates, delays, solves all problems; the thing that contains all possibilities yet selects the fact of the moment — and never moves?
Action.
The appearance of reality in the world is action.
This world, the actuality, ends with action.
The world of actuality is produced by action plus motion. If we take motion away we will be able to see what action really is.
Motion is the difference between time and position.
Time is succession; position in space plus object.
So motion is succession plus space plus object.
Take away these three and what remains has to be ‘real action’, the significance of motion.
What is left of our world when you take away time, space and all objects?
Nothing.
But something does remain — the observer. So it is more correct to say that actuality disappears. No matter what you remove you are always there.
So the observer is the action.
To grasp the significance of all this we must look at what the observer is.
The observer is as nothing in relation to actuality.
So what is real begins with the apprehension of nothingness.
I said that the observer is action. To find out what that means, let’s bring back the actuality and see what happens between the world and the observer.
For the observer to remain as nothing, what happens will have to fulfil three conditions. It must be motionless. It must be out of time; that is, instantaneous. And for it to be true you must be able to experience it.
What happens is perception.
Perception is timeless and motionless action.
What about the observer or perceiver?
There is none. There is only perception. In this reality there is no perceiver, no individual ‘I’ as the mind knows it.
In reality you are timeless, immortal, conscious, motionless action — as you are now, if you could just perceive and be.
If you want an actual existence as an observing or perceiving individual, you must perform in the world of thinking and dreaming. Thinking, like everything actual, is motion. When you think, the motion takes place in memory — as evaluation, judging, owning, worrying, naming and all that keeps you out of the moment where reality is.
Memory, as we have seen, is where we dream while asleep; and thinking is dreaming while awake. In thinking we are closer to actuality; in sleep we are closer to reality.
As the memory arises from the actuality, so actuality must arise from reality. In other words, reality must substantiate this world. It must be here now, if it can be perceived. But as it lies behind appearance and motion it is extremely subtle and fine, a significance beyond the comprehension of sense-perception.
Reality is in your head. But you can never know what it is because you use your physical senses to know that you have a head.
Your head and the whole sense-perceived world is in the reality — in you — but it has no real existence. It is all the actual existence of our world of action and motion perceived through the senses.
There is no real, outside world, only an appearance of it, an actuality.
Every world or environment, including the physical body and the dreamworld of memory, is within perception itself — which is you, purified of wanting and trying.
Perception, at this moment, is recreating your environment in your head from the information received by your senses as nerve-signals. No signals, no physical experience: that means unconsciousness or death.
Unconsciousness, irrespective of how it is induced, is a response to a signal or command from reality within.
Signals from reality are communicated by pulses of ‘antimatter’. (Do not allow the mind to interfere and produce questions. Keep reading.) These pulses are potentials or possibilities and appear in two ways.
A pulse from reality rises up and strikes your memory (the dream world). It throws up the concept stored there that most closely approximates to the pulse’s real significance.
Or: a pulse directly enters the world, the actuality, by travelling out along your perception as your attention. It strikes an object or relationship in the actual world, then rebounds into your memory as an associated suggestion.
Actuality is the world of physical form.
Reality is the world of perceptive space-energy.
All worlds in-between are a mixture of both.
Actuality is the world of the body, not the mind. Reality should beam straight through into actuality as a harmony of action and pure perception, but it cannot do so while man’s mind stands in the way like a dirty window.
The mind is the corruption that pollutes the pure perception and creates the intervening world of disharmony. It is man’s shackle. Yet it is the easel of his frame of reference and only through the mind can man reach the point where he can begin to go beyond it.
Actuality arises out of two facts: space and perception. So pure perception and uncorrupted space together are the experience of reality at this moment, if it can be perceived.
The corruption of space is form, so reality consists of formless space — containing, as an unexpressed energy, the actual physical world and all that will ever appear in it, along with all less-formed worlds in a unity of will, knowledge and being. This is the being of reality, a being inseparable from the pure perception that can be experienced now.
In other words, pure perception in us is the real and only being, God Almighty, or whatever you like to call it.
To summarise:
Actuality is the apparent world outside the head.
Reality is inside the head where the actuality occurs, really.
Space and the world of forms outside the head are reported to us by sense-perception. Sense-perception is an intrinsic phase of something immeasurably vaster — pure or real perception
Pure perception is our highest potential. It is the worldcreating point of reality.
Pure perception is always the same perception: the real being, watching, motionless, unmoved, indefinable, in its own formal expression of itself.
To the extent that the corruption is removed from our perception, we are this infinite, unknowable being.