"What We See v.s. What Is There"

The idea that the world as we know it is an illusion has existed for thousands of years, and is one of the tenets of the Perrenial Philosophy, though phrased differently. But to say that the world is an illusion is a little misleading, because it implies that, not only is nothing real, but that we should not/cannot be affected by anything that happens to us, no more than we can be affected by our dreams, which are clearly NOT real.

Interestingly enough, when we're having dreams, our nervous system can't tell the difference, i.e. if you're having a dream that you're being chased by a tiger, your heart beat quickens, your muscles tense, and in that moment, you actually do believe you're being chased by a real tiger. I recall Wes Craven once saying that he got his inspiration for "A Nightmare on Elm Street" from an article he read about a young man suffering from chronic night terrors (the worst of the worst nightmares) and eventually had a heart attack in his sleep and died. I'm guessing to that guy, his dreams seemed real enough.

Okay . . . but then we wake up and think, "Oh, thank God. It was all a dream. But it seemed so REAL." Well . . . who's to say that we've stopped dreaming? Who's to say that in our "waking life," we're not just experiencing yet another level of fantasy, and are actually operating on a level of consciousness far below what Ultimate Reality actually is? Take your perception of the average person. You notice immediately the person's race, sex, clothes, various physical characteristics, the sound of their voice, their scent, the touch and (depending on how "familiar" you're getting with aforemetioned person) the taste of their skin--essentially, everything one could possibly perceive using the five senses. What that doesn't include is the massive amounts of heat that our bodies generate, which can't be seen with the human eye without the aid of infrared technology. We don't see the 10 trillion cells or so that are constantly at work, interacting, sending information, dying, regenerating. In our most basic form, it seems that we're localized points in the universe where matter and energy are consistently changing form. Which doesn't mean that what we actually can see is an illusion; just that what we see is not all there is.

I wonder what we would look like if we could see it all, everything that's going on within us and around us. A couple words come to my mind, but the one that sticks out the most is "luminescent."

Which reminds me of a quote from THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK:

"Luminescent beings are we. Not this crude matter."