We Walk in Many Worlds

Here’s why the War for the Ring of Sauron is just as real as the War in Iraq

How do We Know Where our Feet Fall?

Our brains don’t work like mechanical insturments. Our brains never touch the ‘physical reality’ we believe we inhabit. Instead (in current scientific models) our brains only respond to eletrochemical signals sent inside our skulls, ultimately from our senses. Our brains interpret those signals in the light of our past and imaginary ‘knowledge’ that we possess. In light of this, many scientists today are reaching the conclusion that they cannot refute the model of the universe proposed thousands of years ago by Indian sages, that the world is an illusion.

So what is fantasy and what is real, and how do the great talesmen work their magic?

Imaginative Intensity & Wholeness

What I’ve come to believe in studying hypnotism, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy (as well as watching my own reactions with the world) is this:

Whatever we experience intensely and wholly, is more real than anything else.

What counts, then, about an experience is

• how intense it is
• how whole it is

What does this mean?

How Intense

We experience most of our routine lives in a sort of fog or anesthetized trance. Very few of us are strongly awre of everything we do and everything we feel and sense around us. It’s too much to take in and experience. And we grow soon bored with what is usually there before us. ‘Same-old, same-old,’ the saying goes.

But some events we experience more vividly, more sharply. Moments of terror and fear when we believe our lives are threatened. Moments of great pain. Moments of delight. Sexual ecstasy. Times when we are in strange new surroundings and take special care to note how we experience those places (as, for instance, when we travel to foreign lands). And in our dreams.

How Whole

There are many acts we can do all at the same time. We can stir a pot of soup, talk on the telephone, keep an eye on a small child playing on the floor, listen to a song playing in the background. Each activity tugs on a different part of our awareness. None claims all of our awareness.

But to some acts we devote all our attention, feelings, conscious and bodily awareness. These acts usually accompany a heightened intensity of feeling, but the difference lies between the prick of a single thorn while smelling a rose, and the pain of the freezing water when we fall through the ice into a lake.

Fantasy or Reality?

When we read a fictional narrative (or let it be a ‘true’ one, or let it be a movie or videogame) we can enter into a sort of imaginative trance that lies not far from dreaming.

Those of us with more highly developed and more acute imaginations are able to enter into this ‘fictive dream’ more wholly and more intensely than others. We can lose our ‘real’ surroundings almost totally. We can eat, smell, breathe and move with the characters within the tale. It is as if we walked in a strange and foreign land alongside those characters, paying particular attention to all we sense around us.

And for those of us who can achieve this, the fictional tale is as ‘real’ as the ‘real life’ we have sleep-walked through since birth. And we not only experience the events alongside the characters as reality, we care for those characters as much as our kith and kin.

To us, the fantasy is more real than the events of a ‘real’ war taking place 3,000 miles away, of which we can find at best only a few scattered isolated accounts, none of them trustworthy.

To invoke this ‘fictive dream,’ to transport us readers into such rapturous realms, is the highest achievement of the greatest of the talesmen.

I suspect that only those of us who can as audience enter into such dreams intensely and wholly, can go on to join the ranks of those great talesmen.

(Composed by pen on paper and first posted Sunday, January 20, 2008)