For thousands of years Oriental philosophers have been telling us that the world we live in is an illusion. It is statements such as this that have earned for Eastern sages the label “inscrutable,” for most modem people simply cannot understand how any responsible human being could assert that this quite obviously real and solid world does not in fact exist. If we are among those who share a firm belief that modern science will prove the ancient sages to be wrong, we will be surprised to learn that things are not working out that way at all.
   The everyday world with which we are all familiar—the world which we perceive with our physical senses and interpret through our mind—is governed by the laws of classical physics laid down for the most part by Sir Isaac Newton in the sixteenth century. These natural laws were arrived at through reason, logic, and careful firsthand observation of the world around us, and our own day-to-day experience consistently seems to prove them to be true.
   This Newtonian world of the mind and senses is very real to us. It is a world of solid objects separated by empty space; a world in which a mysterious force called gravity reaches across this empty space and pulls all things of substance earthward. In this world, all material objects have just three dimensions—length, width and thickness—each of which can be precisely measured, and such objects cannot just spring into existence out of nowhere; instead, they must be built up out of certain already existing basic elements. Every event in this world has a distinct beginning and end—it lasts for a specific period which again can be precisely measured—for here, time is a sequence of fixed units of duration, flowing at a constant rate no matter where we go, like identical, successive footprints marching out of a beginning less past and pacing off into an endless future.
   Newton’s universe is a system of perfect, clearly definable order; it runs like a gigantic, well-oiled machine with quite distinct parts, each of which serves a specific function and interacts with the other parts in a completely predictable fashion. In this universe, any event can be traced back to some initial cause, and any object can be broken down into progressively smaller constituent elements until at some point we will arrive at certain basic building blocks of substantial, indestructible “stuff” which cannot possibly be further decomposed. Just how real is this world which is so familiar to us all’?
    Until this century, physicists thought that the main goals of their science were to accurately measure the objects and events of the universe and to find out just how these relate to one another. All that they needed in order to accomplish these objectives, they believed, were precision instruments capable of disclosing the exact detail of whatever they wished to observe. As scientific technology advanced, however, nature began to present her observers with some unexpected and annoying paradoxes. With every passing year, physicists have developed instruments of increasing sophistication, yet in spite of this their observations of nature still remain as imprecise as ever. No matter what level of reality they become able to look at more closely, instead of getting sharper it actually appears to be more vague the more closely they look, until gradually another, deeper, level comes into focus, revealing the previous one to have been illusory.
   It seems that any attempt we make to clarify some aspect of Creation only results in introducing us to new dimensions which in turn present us with the same vagueness of resolution. To illustrate this, let’s attempt to take a really close look at an object which we have already spent a great deal of time examining throughout our life: our own face. Now what could be more real than that thoroughly familiar countenance which greets us every morning in the bathroom mirror and looks back at us from every reflective surface throughout our day? Over the years that it’s been with us, think of the many hours we have spent in careful scrutiny of its every detail peering at a bloodshot eye, a new blemish or wrinkle, etc. I low many hours have we invested washing it, moisturizing it, medicating it, shaving or cosmetizing it? But despite all this, how well do we really know our face? Have we ever actually seen the essence of it—the basic elements which make it a face instead of something else, and which make this particular face different from every other one’?
   Our unaided physical senses permit us a reasonably good experience of “faceness” at its most superficial level—a collection of various features such as eyes, ears, nose, mouth, cheeks, chin, etc; but if we wish to look deeper, we will have to take the assistance of scientific instrumentation, which serves to extend the normal range of our senses. Now, with the help of scientific technology, we are able to take a closer and closer look at this object we call our face, but the closer we look, the less we see of a face and the more we begin to see a vast terrain of skin cells.
   The nearer we get to these, the less we see of skin cells and the more we begin to see their molecular structure. The face which we set out to observe more closely has dissolved into a landscape of skin cells, which in turn has dissolved into an orderly array of variously shaped, continually oscillating molecules. Now, as we carefully approach this vibrating network of diverse structural patterns, the less we see of it and the more we begin to see the precise arrangement of atoms which are bonded together to form each molecule.
   Here, according to Newtonian physics, our excursion is expected to end, for the word atom means “that which is indivisible.” Until the beginning of this century, atoms were thought to be the basic building blocks of our material world—solid spheres of indestructible substance which rebound off one another in a completely predictable way, like tiny billiard balls. Indeed, what could possibly be more elementary than these miniscule particles of matter, so small that one-hundred-million of them, placed side by side, would make a row only this long: (one centimeter).
   Sure enough, as we observe these shadowy spheres from a distance, they do indeed appear to be solid halls of some material substance, a substance which must therefore he the very essence of not just our own face, but the entire objective universe as well. To discover the nature of this essential substance, all we need do now is take a closer look at one of these quivering atoms.
   As we draw nearer, however, we note with amazement that the atom, too, becomes vaguer instead of clearer. Its “solid” surface begins to appear more and hazier, like a fog-bank which becomes less substantial the closer we approach it. Finally, we simply pass right through this misty outer shell, and as we do we hear an eerie, high-pitched musical tone, some thirty-four octaves above our normal hearing. Then, inside the atom we discover what appears to be nothing but a vast void of empty space!
   At first it seems as if our atom has simply dissolved into pure nothingness, but upon closer examination we discover that this space we’re in is not entirely empty after all; in fact, it contains new particles which are so much smaller than the atom that half a million of them laid side by side would barely stretch across the width of single atom! The atom, then, is not the very bottom rung of the material ladder, for it is also made up of smaller elements, infinitesimal spheres of substance arranged in much the same way as our own solar system. In the center of the atom is its nucleus, composed of particles called protons and neutrons, and spinning around this nucleus, like planets rotating around a sun, are a third type of particle called electrons.
   Like our solar system, the atom consists almost entirely of empty space. The electrons are separated from one another and from the nucleus by distances which are comparatively greater than the distances between heavenly bodies in our own solar system. If we could enlarge a single atom to a diameter of fifty yards, its nucleus would be no bigger than a grain of salt, and its electrons would be like a few specks of dust circling the nucleus at a distance of twenty-five yards.
   Now, let’s go back to our bathroom mirror a moment and try to comprehend the significance of this discovery in terms of that face we see reflected before us. If our human body is made of cells, which arc made of molecules, which are made of atoms, which are made of a little bit of ”stuff” and a lot of empty space—just how substantial is our body and all the objects in the world around us?
   The nucleus of an atom accounts for almost 100% of the atom’s solidity, yet this same nucleus occupies only one-millionth of’ the atom’s total volume; the rest is empty space. This means that if all the actual substance in our entire body could be plucked from all that empty space and packed into a compact mass, the resultant speck would be barely visible under a high-powered microscope. In fact, if we were to extract just the substantial part horn every human being on earth, then pack it all together into a single mass, we would end up with a lump no bigger than a pea!
   The planet we live on is a sphere of “solid” matter 8,000 miles (13,000 km) in diameter; yet, if we could remove the empty space from all its atoms and compress only the real substance into a solid chunk, the entire earth would fit quite comfortably into any major football stadium. Imagine a stadium full of dust being hit by a cosmic hurricane which lifts the dust particles into the air and disburses them throughout an area of space 1.5 trillion cubic miles in size. That’s how solid our world really is.
   How does this reality compare with what our senses tell us? As we stare at our self in the bathroom mirror, can we really fathom the fact that we are looking at almost completely empty space? Despite what we seem to see, only of our body is solid substance, which means that 99.9999999999% of it is empty space.
   But no matter how often such information forces us to realize the awesome difference between the true nature of the world and the way we all perceive it to be, our right understanding soon erodes away under the steady stream of false testimony furnished by our own eyes, which constantly assure us there is dense substance filling matter, when in fact there is almost none. As Plato aptly put it, “Our prison house is the world of sight.”
   How can matter be so airy, yet look and feel so solid? As we observe our sample atom through more advanced instrumentation, we discover that it’s the movement of atomic particles which accounts for the solid appearance of matter, and it’s the electrical forces acting upon these particles which give matter its solid feel.
   Each electron circles its nucleus at an enormous speed of about 600 miles per second, constantly veering this way and that, like string wound around a ball, moving so fast that the atom appear in be a solid sphere, in the same way that a spinning propeller appeal’. to be a solid disk. Our face, as well as every other material object in Creation, appears solid to us because our visual response is too slow to detect such rapid movement. Atomic particles move so fast in the vast space around them, they appear to us to be everywhere at once seeming to fill space with solidity by virtue of their ability to occupy an enormous number of different places in the wink of an eye. Because of the dizzying speeds with which particles move within each atom, atoms themselves oscillate at a frequency of about a quadrillion times per second, and this makes them appear to be even bigger. Atoms combine to form molecules which vibrate a million times per second, and these in turn combine to form cells which vibrate a thousand times per second. When any object vibrates, in effect it moves from point A to point B and back to point A again: and if it repeats this movement fast enough, it will appear to us to be one solid object whose length stretches from A to B. How can we expect to detect between a thousand and a quadrillion different images in a single second if our eyes cannot even register the separate images delivered by a movie projector, which flash upon the screen at the rate of only twenty-four per second?
   Although the rapid oscillation of material particles explains matter’s solid appearance, it still does not explain the opaqueness of material objects. After all, while a spinning propeller may indeed present us with the impression of a solid disc, the disc we see is quite transparent: why then can’t we also see through all material objects’? The answer, science tells us, rests in the fact that human eyesight functions only within a particular range of sensitivity. It seems that atoms and molecules are about a thousand times smaller than the wavelengths of light to which our vision responds; therefore, since none of these light-waves are small enough to pass through dense aggregates of atoms, they can give us no indication of such objects’ porous structure. If, on the other hand, our eyes were sensitive to smaller wavelengths—X-rays, for example—much of what now appears opaque to us would seem transparent.
    In addition to the solidity that we see being an illusion, so too is the solidity that we feel. Just as planets are kept in constant orbits by a balance between the attractive force of their sun’s gravity and Ike repulsive centrifugal force exerted by the planet itself as it circles, there are also electrical forces of attraction and repulsion which keep an atom’s electrons at a certain distance from the nucleus. Therefore, when we touch any material object, whatever solidity we feel is a result of the forces within the atom, which greatly resist its being further compacted. What we feel pushing hack at us is not some solid “stuff” at all, but the same force which makes it difficult for us to push together the alike poles of two magnets.
   That face which gazes back at us from our bathroom mirror looks and feels solid because the two properties just described are inherent in every atom, and each material object is made up of a staggering number of these miniscule illusionists. If just our head could be enlarged to the size of the entire earth, the atoms which comprise it would be only as big as peppercorns. Imagine how many peppercorns it would take to fill a sphere the size of this planet; that’s how many of these minute electrical entities have united in harmony to form the incomparable information processor we call “my head.”
   At our present level of observation we now see that there is really nothing of actual substance in the objects of our material world, except for three solid particles called electrons, protons and neutrons. As continued scientific progress permits us to approach these elementary particles, however, Mother Nature once again unveils before us some unsettling phenomena.
   As we close in upon an electron, for example, while we are still some distance away from the speeding nuclear satellite, we suddenly spot another type of particle moving through the void toward us. It turns out to be a photon, an elementary particle of light energy traveling at an awesome 186,000 miles per second, which makes the electron’s velocity of only 600 mps seem snail-like by comparison. The two particles seem to be on a collision course, and we watch excitedly, fully expecting that in accordance with Newton’s laws, the mass less photon will simply bounce oil the solid electron, for this is the way we have been taught that light reflects off of material objects.
   We hold our ears as the two speeding objects meet, but to our amazement there is no resounding crash at all, and the ball of energy is not deflected from its course; instead, the photon seems to become absorbed by the electron. Infused with this additional energy, our electron now becomes extremely excited—so much so, in fact, that it leaps into a completely new orbit and races about even faster than before. This lasts for only a short while, then suddenly, the photon seems to spring back out of the excited electron and dart away into space at the speed of light, after which our electron calmly returns to its original orbit as if nothing at all has happened!
Was the ejected photon really the same one which was absorbed earlier, we wonder, or did the electron create a new one out of the energy it absorbed from the other? For that matter, we cannot even be certain that the electron we are now observing is the same one that was there before the collision. In fact, a quantum physicist would tell us that when the original electron and photon met they were both annihilated and a new electron of higher energy was created from their united forces; this new electron lived a very brief existence and then spontaneously transformed itself into yet another electron and photon! Undeniably, something very strange is going on here. Despite the atom’s seeming similarity to a miniature solar system, it certainly is not behaving like one at all.
   Shifting our attention to the more massive particles which make up the atom’s nucleus, we draw nearer and observe that the nucleus is in a state of terrific agitation. The protons and neutrons seem to be held in close proximity by some very powerful force, strong enough to override the repulsive force which particles of similar charge exert upon one another; and these particles react to their close confinement by racing about the nucleus at speeds of about 40,000 miles per second! This causes the nucleus as a whole to quiver at an enormous rate of about ten sextillion (that’s a one followed by twenty-two zeroes) vibrations per second.
   Then, as we look more closely at this seething maelstrom, we are struck by a series of staggering discoveries. First, we see that ions and neutrons are not irreducible entities after all; it is now clear that they are composed of smaller particles called quarks, which arc hound together by still other particles called gluons. We also see that the protons and neutrons themselves are prevented from leaving the nucleus by other basic particles called mesons.
   As such bewildering observations continue, we also discover that the so-called empty space around us is not as empty as it once looked, but instead is populated by a vast array of distinctive subatomic particles. In fact, working at this level of observation, modern physicists have enlarged their list of elementary particles from three to more than two-hundred separate types, none of which seems to be much more elementary than any other. What has happened to our classical notion of matter being made of basic building blocks?
   Still another amazing phenomenon comes to light at this level of observation. With disbelief we watch as two supposedly solid material particles collide head-on at high speed, and instead of bouncing off of one another or breaking into smaller pieces, they somehow become transformed into four different particles, none of which is smaller than the two which collided. As if this were not enough of puzzlement, we then see two of the newly created particles leap together and merge, causing one of the recently annihilated particles to become reborn. (This is comparable to watching a red crystal ball crash into a blue one, and instead of shattering or rebounding, they both simply vanish, leaving in their places four new crystal balls of the ‘same size, none of which is either red or blue; then, as these “spheres from out of nowhere” roll away from the scene of the accident, two of them suddenly come together and flow into one another, transforming themselves into the red crystal ball once more!) The inescapable conclusion seems to be that subatomic particles are both destructible and indestructible at the very same time.
If a basic particle of matter is a solid sphere of some substantial “stuff,” then how could two of them merge, and how could one of them break up into two solid particles the same size as the original? By this time we are dying to get a closer look at these mysterious entities, and the moment scientific progress presents us with further extensions for our senses, we eagerly begin to zero in on an electron, whose behavior accounts for most of the major properties of matter.
   As we approach this orbiting particle, we notice that it appears to be surrounded by clouds, much like the earth, but it is traveling so fast that the cloud layer seems to trail off behind it, stretching all the way around its orbit; in fact, the electron looks like a comet that is orbiting the sun so fast it’s catching up with its own tail.
Soon we are at the surface of this shadowy smear; then, taking a deep breath, we plunge inside. To our amazement, there is nothing of substance in here at all—that is, nothing solid that we can see or feel. And yet, there is a presence here, a power which can be felt all around us, and there is an incredible, ethereal music as well, as if we are standing in the center of a vibrant energy field. In vain we search its limits for some trace of solid substance, but there is none. Leaving its confines, we back away into empty space and note that the farther we recede from it the more solid it appears: then we approach again and move inside it, where once more we find nothing but a field of singing energy.
   In desperation we rush to the nucleus and examine every type of particle we come across, but each time the result is the same. The nucleus of our atom seems to have dissolved into nothing but a vortex of singing energy patterns. The elementary particles which make up our material world have proven in essence to be nothing but minute packets of vibration—quantities of energy which display the special property of appearing solid!
   As we sit here in the middle of our atom, watching “solid” particles which have absolutely no solid substance in them, we are suddenly reminded of a cryptic statement penned nine hundred years ago by the Christian saint, Paul, who wrote, “The world was created by the word of God so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear.
   Though it may well seem that somehow we have slipped away from physical reality and entered a reality of mystical theology, the world which we have entered is,  in fact, the universe of modern science