We have a curious human habit of assuming that what we cannot see, measure or experience somehow doesn’t exist.
But perhaps the limitation isn’t reality.
Perhaps the limitation is us.
Gravity is invisible. We know it by what it does. Wind reveals itself through the movement of trees. Time cannot be seen, yet sooner or later the person looking back from the mirror provides fairly convincing evidence that it exists.
Our awareness may work much the same way.
While writing a speculative fictional narrative that explores the metaphysical alongside more grounded human experience, one of my characters was struggling to understand something apparently impossible. A woman appeared in one location, disappeared, and then almost instantaneously appeared in another location nearby.
We assume that if we can’t observe something, it isn’t there.
For instance, as I sit in my office absorbed in what I’m doing, I see little beyond what is directly in front of me.
Yet I hear my wife speak to my dog and turn to see them outside my office door. They were there all along, just not in my little corner of awareness.
Maybe that’s the problem.
We have become extraordinarily good at measuring our little corner of reality. We have clocks capable of measuring unimaginably small intervals of time, telescopes that peer billions of years into the past and instruments capable of detecting things our senses could never perceive.
But every instrument still looks outward from a corner.
Billions of us do as well.
Perhaps wisdom begins when we stop mistaking our corner of awareness for reality itself.
There may be considerably more going on beyond sight and reach.
I rather hope there is.
— Lloyd Pilling Tosoff