" What is reality?"... Can any of us say we really know for sure? I think spirit is probably more real than anything we see with our physical eyes or anything we interpret with our physical brain...

To be real, the self must be immersed in reality. Spiritual man requires a spiritual world to live in. We are free any time as spiritual beings to choose reality. But if we want to get on in the real world, we have to get out of the counterfeits.

(Dudley Zuver...from A Retreat to Reality)

"There is no spoon" is a pointer to the idea that everything is really no thing. The paradox is it's impossible to bend a steel spoon with your mind, but it is possible to change your reality to a new one in which you believe and thus have defined that the spoon before you is bent.

Look into the idea of parallel realities and you will see that life is a continual moving through probable parallel realities. Each picture of reality is a discrete Universe unto itself. The illusion of movement, growth or change is accomplished by believing in and thus seeing a different picture.

Your eyes will see the version of reality that you've defined to be reality through your beliefs and definitions. From the infinite soup of possible realities, your brain picks out the most probable reality that most fits your definition of reality (your brain only has access to a limited range of probable realities). Your brain receives and your eyes perceive.

One of the most helpful things to understand is the idea that there's 'no one fixed reality' that's more real than any other reality. To change the reality you're receiving, change your beliefs and definitions about reality and then your brain will tune into another probable version of reality that fits with your new beliefs and definitions and thus then, that's the reality you will perceive.

If you study what quantum scientists have discovered to the point of understanding the overall concept, you will ‘get it’. If you read quotes that have been left by others through the centuries, you will ‘get it.’ I don’t mean all the details, just the overall concept. Remember that everything that exists in the material world exists due to someone’s imaginal act. Imagination creates reality, so really, all reality is a concept or fiction 8-)

neither the eyes nor the brain sees. its the mind that sees, hears, tastes, feels, smells. suppose u r sitting in a lecture hall and a lecture is going on. now all of a sudden u drift to some other world in your imagination. when u return, u r not aware of a single thing. why? your ears were there. even your brain was there. but it was your mind that was not there. there is a huge difference between the brain and the mind. read .................... 'mind- its mysteries and control'.............. by 'swami sivananda'............. and you will understand that mind much much more than just the brain.

The eyes see and the brain interoperates.

Your eyes are the tools that your brain uses to see. The illusion is this: we think that our eyes see what we are seeing. But actually, the eyes just take in the images, and the eyes are stimulated to report what they see to the brain. Then the brain interprets what the impulses say, and yet another part of the visual cortex says, "I see a cat." But in reality, the eyes can be fooled. If this were not so, optical illusions would not work. Our eyes are very similar to organic cameras. They just send signals to the brain. It is the brain- the occipital lobe, in fact- that "sees". This is how a blow to the back of the head can "blind" someone. If the blow is severe, it destroys the brain's ability to interpret the signals sent from the eyes. Conversely, if the eyes are damaged, our brain cannot see properly. If our eyes are shaped like footballs instead of spheres, and we are seriously near-sighted (like me), then the first thing in our day is to put on our glasses in order to allow our eyes to send the right signals to the brain.

Now, there is something called perception. Since we actually "see" with our brains and not our camera-like eyes, what we see depends upon what we expect to see. But we know for a fact that our eyes do tend to give us a pretty good representation of reality. If they did not do this, we could not function as beings in a sighted world. I could go on and on, especially about the tricks of perception vs. reality, but basically, we get it right most of the time. It seems that the only times we do not are when scientists are around, checking on us and our "perceptions" (LOL!)I hope this is the answer to your question. It is a good question!

Blessings, Jai

the sophistication of the lense as well as the quality of the film presents the picture taken by the camera,
the eyes alone would receive the varring light from the shape/s in view,
the brain processes the sensory input from the perceptive eyes,
does the mind have any memory that may run a short cut to the recall of what the eyes perceived.
we see what type of energy we are capable of seeing,
we interpret what we believe we saw

the eye see a very narrow spectrum. there is many light spectrum that we do not see. example: x-ray, microwave,infrared,proton,photon etc. lets say that we see the right thing but there is much more to see. the mind see the things of the mind the though and physical sensation of your body. and the spirit you the things of the spirit emotion feeling etc... experience and enjoy. ![alt text][1] [1]: http://www.spiritual-reality.com/images/thirdeye.jpg

****The brain sees, not the eyes. You can close your eyes or even be without eyes (sight) and your mind will still image a thing perfectly. Close your eyes and think of anything you think you cannot see without your eyes, and I garuantee your mind will show it to you.

Another way you can know eyes are not doing the seeing is because "nothing appears more real than color....but there is no color except in consciousness. When an object appeal's to us to be a given color, as red, it is really not so. The "red" object reflects or refuses to absorb and receive the red in the ray of light which strikes it and throws it back to the eye; we see the color it rejects and not the color it is. Where there is no eye to receive the reflection, color has no existence. (And where there is a eye to "see"/receive the reflection, it does not see reality). So it does not serve to believe appearances to be true; we must look through them and see the only reality - and the only reality of all things is Spirit. The first step to be taken by those who would lead the Power Life is to cease to be misled by appearances, and to perceive (through the mind) truth; to cease to believe in what seems to be and have faith in what is. They must get to the heart of things, and instead of trying to reason from appearances to realities they must believe realities and disregard appearances." Excerpted from a writing by Wallace D Wattles titled "A Powerful Life". Emphasis mine.

In short, "we walk by faith (mind), and not by sight." (2 Corinthians 5:7)

Someone here made a point to refer to the mind rather than the brain to be exact, and I agree - for the brain is something that can be "seen"/has an appearance/dies, while the mind/Spirit IS.****

"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly, for what is essential is invisible to the eye." -Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

My interpretation of the quote is: if you carry sadness, sorrow, pain, misery or bitterness in your heart, you'll see and  experience more of that in life and  that is how you will  view the world.  If you have a happy and loving heart, you'll see and experience the world from that view.  Your dominant vibration reflects back. Our hearts are all about feelings and emotions.

The world of perception ~

My beloved grandma Nini died in 1984. A few months after her funeral, her three adult children--my aunt, my uncle, and my father--gathered in their childhood home to see to their mother's belongings. It was a sad job but an important one, and they were all feeling especially tenderhearted and unguarded that weekend.

At one point, they found themselves sitting around the old kitchen table, eating sandwiches and talking about the past. My uncle, the baby of the family, looked at the refrigerator and said, "I can still see Mom standing there, pouring me a glass of milk. Do you remember that sweet thing she always used to do whenever she got us a glass of milk? Remember how she'd take a tiny sip first, to make sure it wasn't spoiled? Always looking out for us."

My father, the analytical engineer of the family, raised his eyebrows. "No," he said. "You are so wrong. Mom wasn't sipping our milk to test it for freshness. She was sipping our milk because she always overfilled the glass. She had no sense of spatial relations. It used to drive me crazy."

My brilliantly sardonic aunt looked at her two brothers like they were the biggest idiots she'd ever seen.

"You're both wrong," she said. "Mom was stealing our damn milk."

So, what have we learned about my grandmother from this story? Was she a devoted caregiver, an incompetent dunderhead or someone who would steal the milk out of the mouths of her children? (Or maybe just an exceptionally thirsty woman.) The world will never know the truth.

But does the truth really matter?

I don't think so.

The older I get, the less interested I am in investigating the truth about our lives, and the more interested I become in the way we see that truth. Because what seems to matter in the end is not so much what happens to us, but how we perceive what happens to us. That perception, ultimately, becomes the world that we will inhabit.

This is not to say we shouldn't be honest. There are certainly instances in life when we must demand that painful truths be exposed and dealt with. And I'm definitely not making some Orwellian argument here, claiming that facts are not facts. Without a doubt, facts are facts. But facts can take us only so far. For instance: Everyone in my family agrees that my grandmother always sipped the milk. That's a stone-cold fact. But what did her milk sipping mean? Ah, now we have entered into the realm of perspective, and now limitless interpretations are possible.

This is why two people--or three, in the case of my dad and his siblings--can experience the exact same circumstances in life and turn out completely different. A trauma that might make one person a monster can make another a hero. An incident that you might read as a gift, I might consider a curse. What I hear as a compliment, you might hear as an insult.

You may be robbed or you may be blessed (or some combination of the two), but that's not really the point. The point is: If you feel you're constantly being robbed, then you live in a world that's all about constantly being robbed. And if you feel like you're constantly being blessed, then you live in a world that's all about constantly being blessed. What we usually see when we interpret our lives is nothing but ourselves--as the truth gets screened through a thousand-layer filter composed of all our weirdness and wonderfulness.

If we try to see things with the most generous eyes--searching for the truth, yes, but then bestowing upon that truth the brightest and kindest interpretation--we can learn how to perceive a more beautiful world. Do that, and I promise you this: You will get to live in one.

~ Elizabeth Gilbert