I believe it was in The Universe and Dr. Einstein by Lincoln Barnett that Albert Einstein said, “We think that an object is there and so we see it, but rather, the truth is, we see it and so it is there.”  I paraphrase this quote, but it’s a startling concept that has stuck with me for years since I read it.

I’ve always been fascinated with this wonderful little man with the big mind.  He turned the world’s perception of ‘things’ inside out on so many levels.  I have read or struggled to read many of the books about him over my lifetime and though I nearly always get my mind blown by some historic revelation that he had, most of the time I’m frustrated because I can’t keep up with the mathematics.

But this one idea has always stuck with me — that what we perceive to be true about matter is, in fact, false.  It’s not that we see something because it’s there, but rather, it’s there because we see it.

So we’re each making this all up, this material existence.  This revelation by one of our foremost thinkers and physicists has been supported in so many ways by other great thinkers like Guatama Buddha, Lao-Tsu and Jesus over the centuries and now the discoveries in quantum physics also support the idea that we are living this life experience in an illusion that is being made up in our mortal minds.

I love to contemplate this stunning consideration and laugh at its consequences.  I am making this all up – all that I experience through the five physical senses.  What I see, what I hear, what I taste, what I smell, what I feel with my hands and body.  How does one even get out of bed in the morning?  What are we to do with this?

When Jesus healed the man with the withered hand, he saw the perfect hand with such understanding of the unreality of material law, that the true reality came to the forefront, even in this material space.  He knew the perfect hand; he saw so clearly the perfect design and correct idea and therefore because of the power and elevation of his mind, it was so.  Here is the science of this ‘miraculous’ healing, taking the miraculous-ness out of the moment, and instead, using the science of Einstein’s idea, “we see it and so it is there.”

Jesus walked on the water because he knew that the material laws of this planet Earth were simply illusions, laws made to be broken because they were not the truth.  In these ‘miraculous’ moments Jesus simply stated the truth of ‘the way it really is’ by example.  He overruled material law.  We call him the Way Shower because he showed us the way to the true reality of being.  He showed us the way it really is.

Then there’s the great old story of the fraternity hazing gone wrong.  The older boys blindfolded the frightened freshman convincing him that they were going to cut his wrists.  Tying him to a chair, they pretended to slice his wrists by quickly drawing an ice cube across his wrists and then pouring warm water down his hand into a bowl on the floor.  The freshman was so convinced that the older boys were really doing this to him that he died.  A later autopsy revealed that the freshman had died from loss of blood.

The freshman, in his all-consuming fear, only knew one thing:  He was bleeding to death.  And so he did.  The body responded on all levels to loss of blood even though no cut had been made.  The way he saw it, he was dying.  And so he did.

“We see it and so it is there.”  This wasn’t Einstein’s idea.  He just put it in different words – just the way all the great prophets put the great truths of existence into different words with different languages that later on received different translations.  But make no bones about it; truth is truth.  The basic laws of existence are true whether we understand them, like them, believe them, or agree with them.  There’s nothing we can do about it except try to stay open and learn, not get stuck in the falsehoods of past misconceptions.  We’re just visitors here; not lawmakers.  Besides, the laws are already made.  We just need to learn them.

When you get right down to it, it’s really just like lookin’ down the railroad tracks.  The tracks coming together in the perspective distance suggest that the train will crash, but there is a law, higher than the illusion, that governs the safety of the train, that is in disagreement with one of the 5 physical senses: Seeing.

The truth will out.