Up, up and... ouch!

When we went downward into the lands of fantasy and daydreams, the grains of reality became fewer, larger and softer.  The opposite happens if we ascend into slightly higher realms, usually by way of religion in some form.  Notice that you can join a religion and hang around in the large portal courtrooms without ever setting foot on the pyramid of ascension, in which case you may not notice any of this.  But if you move ahead up, the grains of reality become smaller, harder and denser. As below, the forms may seem familiar, but they now contain more than they did before in the same space.

This may impress you: There are words up there that have stood unchanged for thousands of years, while entire civilizations rose and fell in the herebelow.  And there seems to be no reason why they should change for another thousand years, if only there are any around to heed them. There is a majesty to this unyielding durability, that provokes awe and confidence.

But there is another side to it.  Having come from a softer realm below, you yourself are soft. You will find that things do not accomodate you, do not yield or compromise.  If you bash against them, you get bruised or cut easily. There seems to be rough edges everywhere, and the garments of the realm chafe, and your feet blister.  Worse yet, those who reside habitually on this plane often seem not to care.  "That's just how it is" they will say if you complain about your fate. Worst of all, they may even hurt you themselves.  They say things that cut you deeply, and you may think: "This is a hard speech." Of course, there were plenty of people who hurt others where you came from, but you could get back at them. Here, this doesn't work. The people of this realm ignore your needles and laugh at your barbs, as if they themselves were made of living stone, impervious to mundane attacks.

This is where quite a number of people leave in a huff.  "There was no love" they say, meaning that they could not do as they pleased and still be accepted.

Others take on a discipline up there, but find it too hard.  It seems needlessly rigorous, as if made for someone more than human.  You are chafed and blistered.  The discipline does not compromise:  You may chose to make exceptions for yourself, but then you start to sink in mysterious ways.  This sinking is not easily visible to those still in the worldly realm, so you can fool them for the longest time.  But for those who still stand in the discipline you compromised, your position is clearly visible, like a hare hiding its head in the bushes.  As you hide your head in the lower realms of thought where you feel at home, your ass remains visible for the longest time until you finally disappear from sight entirely.

The only way to endure at a higher level is to absorb and be transformed into the same quality. But who is capable of that?

Down with creation

When I say that reality is more "fine-grained" higher up, and each "grain" contains the same amount of reality, it is merely an aid for the imagination. We should not try to identify such grains, of course. My point is that these "grains" only determine the amount of reality, not the FORM. If you go down about as far as a human can reach, to the level of daydream, the forms seem virtually identical to those of our own plane of being.  But they have extremely low reality: They are malleable, unstable, and transient.  A day hence you may have forgotten all of it.

If however several people share one lower "world", or if you spend a lot of time and interest in one of your own making, it will take on more reality.  It will be more permanent, less fluffy, things will stay in place etc.  Imbuing a lower world with reality is an act of creation, and this is inherently joyful for creative beings.  Since humans are "created in the image of the Creator" (in Judeo-Christian terms) this is actually a natural thing for us to do.  However, it is not without its risks.

If we neither receive more reality from above nor give any to lower worlds, then we become stagnant and, in a manner of speaking, dead.  But if we lose ourselves in the lower worlds without being replenished from above, we could be dangerously weakened.  This seems to happen to many geeks, nerds and otaku.  They lose themselves in a "fandom" or some such lower plane, and become unable to endure the harsh light of day in the "real world".  In Japan, it is estimated that a million or more otaku (fans of comics, movies and games) have become hikikomori  and shut themselves in their rooms for months or years, possibly for life. Their relatives provide them with food, while they spend all their days in imaginary worlds.

Vertical gradient of reality

Merely as an aid for imagination, not as a scientific theory, do I propose the image of a universal ether with a gradient.  Let us posit that there is another dimension in addition to our three (or foure, counting time). Let us imagine this as vertical, squashing the usual vertical dimension for the sake of this little model. Most people who would stumble on this blog would be familiar with this model anyway, otherwise I could have chosen other words.

The plane we humans inhabit is itself a bit varied in elevation, and I still speak metaphorically here. Some cultures are down in the swamps and some are up on a hill.  This may be unpopular to say in certain circles. This does not bode well for those circles, as these differences are glaringly obvious. It is in fact a good way to get familiar with the concept of elevation, since we can see it with the naked eye, so to speak.

Now the universe extends upward from here and downward as well. And it has a gradient. (Which means it is a scalar field, but that sounds too scientific for an aid to imagination, I think.) We could most easily imagine it as becoming increasingly fine-grained upward. This implies various things, such as it being harder, more durable, more solid, more real. We could also say that it becomes more energetic, vibrates with a higher frequency etc, but I am fond of the "fine grain" image. It is easy to grasp and its implications are obvious, if we see each grain as having the same amount of solitidy or content of the real. 

Conversely, further down from us reality becomes loose and porous.  Digging and shaping there is ridiculously simple - it is in fact hard to avoid even if you try.  But creations in these lower shales are less solid, whatever permanence and reality they may have is gifted on them from above, namely from us.  To take an earlier example: A daydream is very easy to fashion but collapses quickly when you leave it, and may fade entirely from memory.  Many novels are rather close to this level as well, in that they become hard to tell apart from each other and from common daydreams, and fade quickly; but they are easy to get into and so many of them sell surprisingly well. 

In the opposite direction, where the ether or "stuff of reality" is more fine-grained, digging with our bare hands is not a trivial task and does not take us very far!  Reality soon becomes harder than rock.  We are imprisoned under a glassy ceiling of stern, unyielding reality. And that would have been that, if we lived here by accident.

But there are cracks or faultlines in the stuff, which any of us could find if we remain aware. I believe this is what is commonly referred to as grace.  And there have been souls in the past with greater power and greater solidity than most men.  Whether they are actually avatars descended from a higher realm, or whether they are sages grown from below, this is beyond what I will explore today.  What seems certain is that they have lived here, and found places where they broke through into higher worlds.  Normally few were able to follow them, until structures were built, which we commonly call religions.  Be aware that the religions partly exist in our own world or plane (which is why they are so accessible) and it is possible to be very religious outwardly and yet never poke your head outside the mundane reality. 

We could think of religions as giant stairs (or step-pyramids, a kind of monument found on both sides of the Atlantic at different times).  They should allow us to ascend to a higher realm and colonize it. From below the step-pyramid seems to grow smaller and smaller and stop completely.  But the metaphorical step pyramid which they symbolize are stairs to a vast realm. Because each of the small grains is as real as each of the larger grains below, there is far more room than it looks like up there. Seen from below, those who go there will also become smaller and smaller.  Not to worry.

There is to all religions a temptation to spread ever wider into the present world and build ever more elaborate entrance portals, since these are easily seen and appreciated by everyman. The steps could fall into disuse, though I won't give any examples of that. It could happen though, that the Way could get lost.

Not blind men and an elephant after all? Or..?

In the book "A Christian Pilgrim in India" the author (not the main character) claims that the different world religions are not different descriptions of the same higher reality, but that the religions have created the universes they inhabit.  I partially disagree with this, as you can see from my earlier entries (which, of course, I wrote right before reading that.)

Rather I would say that higher worlds are different and imperfect emanations of an even higher reality.  As I said poetically, even the heavens have heavens. These worlds being imperfect follows naturally from us being able to settle them so easily. So we discover something higher and we settle it. Each of the religions has settled a different higher world, which existed only as potential until humans colonized it and "hollowed it out" from the primordial ether of potentiality. Of course the different cultures that settled these worlds made their mark on them.