“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?” Alice, in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland[i].

Some have interpreted the book, Alice in Wonderland, as an allegory for man’s journey to Christ or enlightenment or self-discovery. There are many passages in the book, such as the one above, that are both playful and profound. Initially, in my journey, I was like Alice, “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” I began to entertain the possibility that perhaps there is more to reality than “meets the eye”, or that which meets the eye is not real. The insight of the Vedic sages that the world is an illusion or Maya might be worth investigating further, I thought.

Maya is often misunderstood to mean that the world of our senses does not exist, the correct interpretation, though, is that the world is not as it appears. Dr. Samuel Johnson, an eighteenth century distinguished English writer, is said to have refuted the idea that the world is an illusion by kicking a stone, and exclaiming “I refute it thus”[ii]. The idea that the “real” world is an illusion is hard for many to accept. But, it is a fact that there is more to the world than our senses are able to perceive.

For example, visible light is only a small segment of the full spectrum of light. The full spectrum of light or electromagnetic spectrum is the range of all frequencies of radiation from low frequency radio waves to the very high frequency gamma rays. The human eye only responds to the visible light components which lie between infrared and ultraviolet radiation. Clearly, there is more to reality than meets the eye.

[i] (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lewis-Carroll, n.d.)

[ii] (https://askaphilosopher.wordpress.com/2015/10/13/when-dr-johnson-kicked-the-stone/, n.d.)