"Reality is an Illusion"

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Have you ever heard two people arguing about the same thing they saw? Each person claims to be telling the truth, and they say the other person is wrong, or they are just making things up. Well, maybe one person is making something up, or maybe they didn’t see clearly what was happening. But in many cases, both people are telling the truth.

Just consider what happens when multiple people observe a crime taking place. When police interview different witnesses, they usually get very different stories, sometimes radically different stories. It isn’t that the different witnesses are necessarily lying; it is that their perception of what has happened is simply different, and they are reporting what they think they saw.

There is one reported case, some years ago, of a woman who was assaulted in her apartment. During the assault, she later testified that she had carefully studied the face of her attacker so that she could identify him later. The police lined up several suspects and had the woman identify her attacker. With confidence, she identified one man and described his features as those she remembered well. Based especially on her testimony and other factors, the man she identified was found guilty, and he went to jail.

Years later, when DNA testing became available, the police arrested one of the other suspects, and DNA revealed he was the actual attacker. He admitted to the crime. Despite this, the woman could not identify him, and she told the police she did not recognize the actual attacker. Her perception of reality was incorrect.

I have mentioned in previous sermons that human beings live is small bubbles. Our perception of reality is skewed by the environment we live in, our family upbringing, our friends, our education, our lifestyle, and because we are fallible humans.

The bottom line is: If a person ardently tells you they “know what they saw,” I think it is best to believe them. But this doesn’t necessarily mean what they say they saw represents reality.

Our brains are computers. By themselves, our brains know nothing. They take input from our senses, analyze all the inputs, form a picture and then decide what the senses are perceiving. This means our brain uses knowledge of memories to decide what reality is. If a person’s brain has no memories of what the senses are inputting, they still use other memories to guess at what reality is, and it then becomes reality for them. (example of the conquistadors).

Some quantum physicists suggest all realities happen at the same time. This is what is called “The Many Worlds Theory.” According to this theory, every possible outcome happens in an infinite number of different worlds. So, faced with a decision, whatever you decide or do not decide, becomes a reality in a different universe. Everything you decide and what you don’t decide actually happens. (I guess if you have a difficult time making decisions, you have nothing to worry about because all the possible outcomes will all come true!) This theory is backed up by some pretty complicated quantum mathematics. However, it is not a proven theory despite the mathematics.

Philosophers and spiritual thinkers have grappled with the concept of reality for thousands of years. In his “Allegory of the Cave,” Plato suggested that what humans perceive as reality is, indeed, an illusion. “It would be like a group of people,” he wrote, “who are trapped their whole life in a cave. A fire behind them casts shadows on a wall of the cave. These people believe the shadows are real.” True reality for Plato was an eternal realm of absolute ideals that did not change. Plato saw the material world as unreal because human perceptions are always changing.

Immanuel Kant believed the true world was unknowable to human beings because our minds filter reality according to how our brains are structured which may also be influenced by our physical attributes, our environment and life experiences. Kant’s view of ultimate reality being unknowable is similar to that of Buddhists and Hindus.

The Eastern religions of Buddhism and Hinduism suggest that reality cannot be perceived by the human mind because of “Maya” which is a term that suggests there is a veil of desire and physical attributes that cloud the human mind and create a kind of ignorance.

Hinduism, particularly Vedanta Hinduism, says the human mind cannot grasp reality because reality is actually everything in the universe, including you and me. The human mind separates and categorizes everything, but reality is all one. There is no separation. The one reality is Brahman. Hindus do use the term God for this. The thing that makes you unique is your soul, your atman, and it is just a piece of God, but because of how the human brain is designed, you cannot perceive this.

From a purely scientific and evolutionary approach, it is rather obvious that human beings cannot perceive ultimate reality. Human beings are biological machines that have been subject to evolutionary forces for millions of years. Our sensory systems–our senses, have evolved in order for humans to survive and reproduce. There is no need for the human animal to be able to perceive ultimate reality because it would not assist in our survival or our ability to reproduce. In addition, focusing brainpower on understanding ultimate reality would overload our brains and distract us from the business of survival and reproduction.

If you are having trouble understanding that you really cannot truly grasp reality, consider color. Colors are beautiful and they do make life interesting. Did you know there are millions more colors than the human eye can perceive? The human eye can detect about a million colors and shades of colors, but there are over 100 million colors. The human eye contains what are called rods and cones. Rods are sensitive to black and white and shades of gray. Cones process colors. The human eye has three types of cones, which can perceive three types of colors and their variations: blue, red, and green and the color wavelengths close to these three colors–like yellow. But we cannot detect others.

Some animals have more sets of cones. The mantis shrimp, for example, has twelve types of cones. There are nearly endless types of light wavelengths that produce colors. It is just that our brain cannot perceive colors beyond the colors and shades of colors our three cones can detect. The reality of colors is beyond human ability.

OK, by now, I hope you can see that all of us have a limited view of the true reality of the world. So what? How does this affect my life?

Well, it does affect people’s lives. If a person is convinced what they see of the world represents true reality, they can become very close-minded. We all know and see people like this every day. I suppose it is natural for people to think the world they see is actually what exists–but it isn’t. The world people see is just a product of what our brains process through our senses. This means we may be correct in what we see, but it is an illusion in terms of true reality.

This impacts our day-to-day relationships with other people. It’s really easy for two people in a relationship to accuse each other of saying something or doing something that they deny or offer another explanation. “You insulted me with your comment,” says one person. “I didn’t insult you. I was merely pointing out a fact,” says the other. What is possibly or probably happening here is that the two people have a different perception of what happened. They argue and argue, sometimes with verbal abuse without realizing the other person perceives things differently.

One person feels deeply hurt by what another person says. The other person tells them that what they said was only a joke. Both people are telling the truth. It is just that their perceptions differ.

Perception has everything to do with why people like and do not like certain things. One person says that this furniture is beautiful. The other person says it’s ugly. One person loves a particular type of music, which the other person hates. Same with food and hundreds of other things. The reason is because each person’s perception of reality is different. The list of different perceptions is endless. Each person’s reality is an illusion. They can’t both be right–or can they?

To be sure, reality finds its way into religion. Consider Christianity in the Age of Enlightenment–say, the seventeenth-and-eighteenth centuries. After the Protestant reformation, or revolution, as some people have called it, two hardcore Protestant religions formed among others. One was Calvinism and its offshoots, the Presbyterian religion and the Puritan movement.

John Calvin took two short passages from Paul’s Letter to the Romans to create a whole theology which became Calvinism, then the Presbyterian religion, and later the Puritans. That passage from Romans 28 says:

29 For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.

³⁰ Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified.

What this means, is that before anyone was born, God decided who was going to heaven and who was going to hell, and there was nothing you could do about it. (Not a particularly uplifting theology and a far cry from the teachings of Jesus.

Well, where did this very negative theology come from? It came from many Europeans’ perception of the world around them in the 16^th century. Europe had lost nearly half its population during the bubonic plague in the 14^th century. Climate changes had created massive flooding and then droughts in Europe. In the 14^th century, crop failures resulted in famine throughout many parts of Europe. On top of this, there were decades of religious wars, political instability, and corruption. All of this gave Europeans a very negative perception of reality.

The result was the rise of Calvinism in Europe, which later found its way into the Puritan movement, which came to America and dominated New England in the 17^th century. Later, many New Englanders (at least White New Englanders) saw the world in a different way. Life in America didn’t seem as bad as Calvinism suggested. From this came the rise of both the Unitarian and the Universalist movements.

The basis of the Western religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is a belief in one God who created the universe and human beings. We all know the story from the Hebrew Book of Genesis. This story says that humans were created in God’s image which led many people to think God must look like a human being. In any case, the idea is that God is a thing. The perception is that God is a being outside of the universe. God is separate and distinct from the universe.

This concept of God as a being is an Iron Age concept that found its way into Judaism. And if you look at the worldview of human beings in the Middle East thousands of years ago, you will find that all the cultures of the period had pantheons of gods and goddesses which were beings of a supernatural nature. The Jewish people originally believed in lots of gods and goddesses as beings too; it was just that Yahweh was the supreme god. Hebrew scripture–the Old Testament is filled with references to other gods and goddesses.

Gradually, over time, later Jews and then Christians began to believe in only one God. This belief found its way into Islam. The story of Genesis includes a belief in one supreme God and a concept that Earth is the center of the universe and stars are just points of light with heaven beyond. This became the reality for people in the West. It is still true for some people today. The belief in one supreme God is found in Christianity and Islam, and these two religions account for more than half of the world’s population.

But that supposed reality is an illusion. To say the least, a lot of people today, and certainly a lot of Unitarians Universalists, have a hard time accepting this version of reality. The rise of science with reason, rationalism, and empirical evidence has certainly challenged this notion of God to say nothing of our modern understanding of the nature of the cosmos. Our modern scientific view of reality seems pretty good–or is it?

Along with this trouble believing in the Biblical God, some people call themselves an atheist which is a belief that there is no god or goddess–no supernatural being. Some atheists affirm this, while others simply say they see no proof of this. Agnostics say that the existence of a god or gods cannot be known or they are just not sure.

When someone asks me if I believe in God, I always reply that “it depends upon what you mean.” Do I believe in the God of the Bible, the God who “walks in the cool of the evening in the Garden of Eden” as stated in the Book of Genesis–no, I cannot perceive this type of God as a reality. But that certainly does not mean I do not see a force, some kind of power in the universe that is responsible for the universe.

Interestingly, I look back to the ideas of a German Dominican monk, Meister Eckhart, who lived from 1260 to 1328. Eckhart was accused of heresy by the Catholic Church for his ideas about God because he too did not believe in the God as described in the Bible. One of his famous quotes is: “The God we must let go of is the God we imagine, conceptualize, and grasp.” He also said, “that the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.” This is similar to the 10th-century Muslim Sufi mystic, Al Halaj, who said, “God and I are one.”

Meister Eckhart believed the force behind the universe, behind all things, cannot be known by humans. It was “a primordial, nameless divine nothingness that does not possess qualities that can be described other than, perhaps, it is a kind of spark that was creation and it is in all human beings.” This means that the reality we think we see is an illusion.

Eckhart died before his trial for heresy began. Today, the Catholic Church suggests Eckhart was correct in his viewpoint.

Curiously, there are a number of modern physicists who agree with Meister Eckhart’s views. Two of the major figures who established quantum mechanics were Erwin Schrodinger and Werner Heinsenberg. In describing their studies, they noted that quantum mechanics requires a framework that is non-dualistic. They proved that electrons could be both particles and waves, not just one or the other. This suggested that reality is interconnected and difficult to understand with the human brain.

Building on this is the fascinating concept that at the root of reality is consciousness. Traditional thinking once suggested that consciousness exists in the brain only and, furthermore, it exists in the human brain only. Animals, it was thought do not possess consciousness just like they do not possess emotions. This is because emotions require complex brains, which animals do not have.

Well–anyone who has had a dog or cat knows very well that cats and dogs, and other animals, for that matter, have emotions. Modern scientists are beginning to acknowledge animals have both emotions and consciousness in varying degrees depending upon the animal.

There is an idea that a universal consciousness pervades the universe. It is in everything, including you and me. This has been called “panpsychism.” It has similarities to the Hindu notion of Brahman.

Panpsychism is actually not a new concept. This idea was promoted by dozens of philosophers and scientists for thousands of years. One, in particular was Baruch Spinoza who lived in the 17^th century. Spinoza was of Portuguese-Jewish descent. He believed that God and nature were one. According to him, the universe is God. “This is the ultimate reality,” he said. It is difficult for humans to realize this because our senses provide the brain with an incomplete picture, so people then imagine a human-like God outside of nature which is what human religions have been promoting for thousands of years.

Professor Maria Stromme, is a physicist at Uppsala University in Sweden. She proposes that “consciousness is the fundamental basis of reality and matter and spacetime emerge from it.” (In an article written by Annice Hulth) “Rather than treating consciousness as a side effect of brain activity, she describes it as a fundamental field that underlies everything we observe, including physical matter and the flow of time.” What we see as reality is really an illusion.

What we have here, in my view, is a different way to look at what God is. There seems to be some similarities between what has been said by ancient Hinduism, Sufi mysticism, panpsychism, Spinoza, and modern quantum physicists. Maybe the Taoists were right where in the Tao Te Ching is says:

The Tao (the Way) that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things. Ever desireless, one can see the mystery. Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations. These two spring from the same source but differ in name; This appears as darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gate to all mystery.

Reverend Christopher McMahon

September 6, 2026