My English teacher in secondary school once recommended a book to help us improve our poor English. I can't seem to remember the title though. The book was in a way similar to 'To Kill a Mocking Bird': the world is viewed through the innocent yet precocious mind of a child. It is a wonder (more of an intended irony I guess...) that the child is more philosophical than most adults around her. Yeah the book is quite philosophical now that I remember.
There was one part that really impressed me deeply - it was about shadows.
Have you heard about Plato's shadows?
Plato had this analogy of our world. We are prisoners in a cave. We have our backs turned towards the entrance of the cave and we always face the wall inside the cave; we can't change our position because we are chained. We have spent the whole of our life there that the cave is really our world. Sometimes on the wall, shadows form because things the shadows from outside the cave are projected onto the wall. Now we think these shadows are the real things - because we have never seen what is really 'real'.
Now consider our own world. What do we see around us? It certainly seems real - but it is perfectly possible that they are only shadows. When the prisoners are released, only then they will realise that the world is not all about shadows.
Could it be that we live in a Matrix-kind of world? Are our perceptions deceiving us? Are they filtering the truth? But then again without these filters we can understand nothing. We will be reduced to mind. Do we finally encounter reality when the 'filters' are removed, or the other way around, do we really exist if they are all gone?
So the problem seems to be that our filters are not good enough but we can't remove it. Should we upgrade it? Well, we don't know what is really real so how can we improve our filters to be better in perceiving the true reality (if there is true reality...)?
Back to the point. About 'true' reality and 'lesser' reality, the shadows.
Let me try to recall the part of the book I read about shadows and dimensions. It goes like this. Supposing I have a cube in a dark room and I shine a light on one of its sides to project a shadow on a wall. Then the projected shadow will be a square. Supposing we can take this shadow of a square and also takes its projection along one of its sides. It will result in a line. Take this line and do one more projection - this time round the projection is a dot. A cube is 3-D object, a square is 2-D object, a line is 1-D object and a dot is 0-D object (can we call it an object when it is dimensionless??). That means the shadow of an object is its form in immediate lower dimension.
Well if this is so, taking projection over projection like above will result in us concluding at the same spot - at which point it is dimension zero. But supposing we can do the reverse. If we can construct an object from its shadow, then where will we stop? At 100th dimension? At the point where the number of dimensions is infinity? Perhaps this is where God exists: at much much higher dimension that we puny human beings cannot comprehend.
We humans are sometimes too arrogant to admit that our world is only 3-D. So arrogant that some of us say that divine beings don't exist. What if they exist in higher dimensions?
Talking about dimensions remind me of another book I read: Flatland. It tells the story of 2-D world (it is flat, duh...), oblivious of existence of Spaceland (our 3-D world). Actually this is a satire of us who are oblivious of the existence of higher dimensions.
Suppose you are a 3-D being (no need to suppose, I guess...) then you encounter Flatland with all the flat people inside (onside...?). You can tease them a little by poking your finger on one place then pull it back. The Flatlanders of course would be perplexed since something appear and disappear. Beings of higher dimensions can do this, since they have more 'directions'. In our case the Flatlanders does not know up or down but we do so we can pull our finger in 'up' direction.
So is our world a projection of higher dimensions? Shadow of the divine world? What is real? Does God exist? Where?
It is the question that enlightens not the answer.
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