Sometimes I’ll be walking down a street on my way somewhere.
Everything appears as normal: people passing me by and cars speeding past. Me with my thoughts, more often than not, pretty mundane. What shall I make for dinner? Shall I have a bath or shower? What’s on telly tonight? And so on…
Then, out of nowhere, bam. My legs turn to jelly and my head feels heavy and fuzzy.
Nothing about me or my surroundings feel real. I start to panic. Are these cars real? Is my body really pumping blood through it? Am I me? Do I exist?
It’s scary when it happens. But the feeling always passes within seconds.
Before I know it, I’m back to my old self, posing the same banal questions about food and washing.
But I haven’t forgotten – and I spend the next few minutes or so watching my feet to make sure they touch the pavement.
This occurance happened to me again recently and finally prompted me to find out if others experienced this.
I spent a few hours on the internet that evening (once Baby C was fast asleep), energetically typing and re-typing code words into the toolbox. Weird feeling in street, feet feel like jelly, and so on.
After a few hours, I had my answer. A metaphysical one.
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined.Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:
- ‘What is there?’
- ‘What is it like?’
The word ‘metaphysics’ derives from the Greek words μετά / beyond or after and φυσικά / physics.
Although it has been around for centuries, it’s only now with recent advances in science that we are beginning to find answers to questions philosophers, scientists and just ordinary people like me have been asking themselves for years.
The central question is: could this all just be a hologram. The apples we buy from the shop, the cigarettes we smoke, the wine we drink, the cars we drive, the houses we live in, and even the feelings we experience.
There are so many questions that come to my mind:
1. Do we feel pain when we knock our elbow or scratch our leg? Or are our brains trained to send out pain signals? Is it all mental, not physical? But then, how does bruising occur for example?
Science over the years has proven that the core matter of the physcial world is energy.
Some scientists argue that, these small particles that the ‘real world’ is made of, act like waves as opposed to particles, and waves do not have substance.
Waves cannot be matter.
If at the core of what we believe to be physically real turns out to be nothing but energy, then we cannot be in something physically real?
