It’s less than three weeks until Bodhi Day—Monday, December 8, 2025. But we should prepare our minds well before that. This blog is an offering towards that purpose. I list a number of concepts that give us hope and appeal to our stubborn logical minds.
There is much more to this world than just what we experience in our daily lives. Our daily lives are made up of many agents of finely-tuned senses. This post is towards the goal of believing all things are possible—or at least being completely open to it. If all things are possible, the end isn’t necessarily the end. Maybe in some unknowable form, some aspect of our consciousness always exists.
Our brains notice and organize the whirlwind of events around us. A bad or good event isn’t necessarily bad or good across time (like the parable of the farmer, horse, son, etc.). Events are just an indication of change, it isn’t the end result. Change is constant, so change should never be a surprise.
Most of the items listed below have reached cliche status long ago. But that’s good. That traction means I’m not alone in entertaining these whacky thoughts. Each alone is enough to give you comfort for those days when you’re commuting to work and thinking, “Is this all there is?” No, our human senses only see the shadow.
Why all the mystery? Why can’t we just see? Think of life in this realm as one of those survival tests. An elite soldier is dropped off far from any civilization, alone, only minimal gear and rations. No drones, advanced weaponry, cell phone, no roads. It’s the soldier’s final test. But more interestingly, it includes the soldier’s most advanced lessons.
Similarly, our lives in this realm are to obtain the wisdom that finds our way to nirvana. As the Buddha teaches, to find enlightenment in this lifetime. Don’t stress about it. You get as many tries as you need and want—just like on “Groundhog Day”, my 2nd favorite Bodhi Day movie next to “Being There“.
Hopefully, at least one of these lightens the filters to “see” reality through your real eyes. It will be your Bodhi Tree lamp on Bodhi Day.
1 – Most of What Goes On is Invisible to Our Senses
Even without resorting to any new physics or supernatural phenomena, we only sense a small subset of what is out there. However, although we don’t have the sight of a hawk, the smell capacity of a dog, and the hearing of an owl, we have instruments to detect it—so it’s known to us. But yet, it’s not part of our normal life so we’re not always conscious of the things we can’t hear, smell, or see.
Even time is different for different creatures. I recall how learning flies perceive time much slower than us shifted my perspective and realized time is perceived differently. It gives flies a super power over us, even though our technology can thwart it (fly swatters). As I’m older now, time seems to go by more quickly. I know I didn’t have this sense of weeks going by as just a couple of days.
Beyond that, people didn’t know about how the sun is the center and the planets revolve around it, we didn’t know about bacteria and viruses, or atoms, or continental drift. So what else don’t we know?
This seems simple and well-known. But we don’t generally practice “seeing for ourselves”—real seeing takes faith, courage, and patience. So we opt to what’s easier—listen to what we’re otherwise told.
2 – 4D Brains for Our 4D Space-Time Existence
The 2nd truth is that of Flatland. Even one more dimension changes things fundamentally. I read it very early in my life—just past the stage where crazy ideas presented to me might have readily made sense. The gist is that there is a 2-dimensional realm (that is, 2 dimensions of space) of reality where sentient beings live, the Flatlanders. That is unlike our 3D reality(up/down, east/west, north/south).
That 2D realm of flatland would be like our 3D world, but there is no up and down. There isn’t even height. All they can see are lines. But those lines, if viewed from above are actually flat shapes on a plane. These shapes can move around on the plane since there is the dimension of time. But they can’t really know that because there isn’t a way to view from above. All they can see are lines that lengthen and shrink as time goes by.
But there is an odd phenomenon they can’t figure out. Sometimes a line appears out of nowhere, changes in length in unpredictable ways, and then disappears. Long story short, it’s something in a 3D realm that passes through the 2D plane of the existence of the Flatlanders. The Flatlander’s 2D realm of existence is a plane within a 3D space. The punchline is that one of the lines is that of a human poking his finger through the plane of the Flatlanders.
Just one more spacial dimensions provides god-like powers!
It’s pretty well accepted that the universe is more than 4D (3 space and 1 time). For one, the thought of time being more than one dimension has been talked about more recently. Even more so, in modern theoretical physics the universe is often modeled as having 10 or 11 dimensions in superstring or M-theory, while 26 dimensions appears only in the older bosonic version of string theory. (Note: the Eternal Fishnu says the notion of dimensions is just us trying to explain the universe in terms we can comprehend.)
The 4D realm we perceive is just intersections of a “matrix” of many more dimensions. Think about databases at your place of work. That data is collected from many sources. To the people collecting, processing, and interpreting the data, it seems massive—today many terabytes worth, globally, many exabytes.
But that’s a pitifully small amount of data than is actually out there in the real world. Yet, we make decisions on very limited data that is very much out of context. Not just in the context of the matters of human importance, but the context of the reality of the Universe.
3 – The Universe is a Simulation
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve noticed that recognizing a video or even picture as real of “AI” isn’t quite as easy as before. I see a video that is in the uncanny valley for me, only to realize it was a false positive. It’s still not that difficult to tell, but I do need to take a few seconds to analyze what I’m seeing. A few seconds to do that is an awfully long time to spend when we used to just assume something is real.
Simulation theory, at its core, isn’t really about computers or programmers. Rather, it’s the idea that reality behaves like a system generated by rules. If the universe is built from stable laws, fixed constants, and repeatable interactions, then what we experience is less like a free-form chaos and more like a governed environment, the way a simulation obeys its underlying code. Whether consciousness emerges inside a biological universe or a digital one, the argument goes that any sufficiently coherent rule-set produces beings who experience their world as “real”—because for them, it is.
Whether we live in the base simulation (the bottom layer of reality) or inside a simulation of something deeper, we already inhabit a rule-governed world. Another way to say it: we are “simulated” by the laws of physics. Change the parameters—the constants, initial conditions, allowable interactions—and you could get a very different, yet still intricate, universe. In that sense, “simulation” doesn’t require servers behind the curtain (at least not like the servers on today’s server farms). It means reality runs on a consistent rule set.
If reality is rule-generated, then what we experience is one rendering among many possible renderings. Endings and labels like “good” or “bad” belong to this run under these rules; they aren’t the final word on what reality can be. Even without mysticism, it’s reasonable to believe there’s more in the design space than our current build reveals.
4 – Complexity Means Free Will or No Free Will, It Doesn’t Matter
Complexity is a magical phenomenon that means although the mechanics of physics might possibly imply that the world is deterministic, the paradox is that we can’t compute it. That is, at least with resources within the universe—implying that resources outside our universe or from the perspective of other sets of dimensions might.
The intelligence and behavior of individual creatures versus the intelligence and behavior of the collective is a phenomenon of emergent properties, a phenomenon of complexity. How do we know there aren’t different intelligences, some bigger than ours, at other levels of hierarchy or sliced by different aspects of everything?
5 – We are Trained, Not Programmed
This is the very familiar, you are what you eat. And the equally wise, you are what you think. There aren’t magic pills or software downloaded into our brains. All athletes and musicians know their skills involve massive doses of repetition. It’s a long path you should stay on, breathtaking or tedious, it’s up to you.
Our brains are trained, not programmed. Everything we learn has been trained through repetitions of events we’ve experienced and thoughts we entertain. Even if we see something and mimic it, our ability to mimic is based on foundational skills learned through repetition. Anything we think isn’t necessarily the truth, no matter how much we believe it. It might be, but probably lies somewhere between nonsense and truth, for all the things we believe there are different levels. So one must always cultivate an open mind.
It might sometimes be nice if we could directly program our brains by manually wiring the synapses, just like writing code. But this way, we’re all unique to the Universe.
6 – Everything is a Process
Everything is a process, not just events. The proof is in how magical Fourier transforms are. A Fourier transform is a mathematical algorithm that takes any complex signal and revealing the pure sine-wave components hidden inside it—like turning a tangled chord into the individual notes that created it.
Every other algorithm such as creating clusters, linear regressions, and decision trees are neat, but Fourier seems magical. It works because everything is a process, a system of periodic cycles. So all signals can be broken down into regular waves defined by amplitude, frequency. The ability to see systems, “systems thinking”, is much more powerful than reacting to events and tending to see only a step ahead. The ability to see things as systems gives us the wisdom of sacrifice and investment, that the next step isn’t the most important thing—the ability of delayed gratification hones in us a higher perspective on reality.
7 – Gift of Sentience
Fully appreciate our Gift of Sentience. It’s what let’s us imagine something beyond what we’re experiencing. It’s the gift underlying the wisdom we require for the job of being good stewards to all that we find ourselves with.
The “unpleasant” side of the Gift of Sentience is that we can imagine unpleasant things. That’s good because unpleasant things do happen. We need to be wary of them and use it as signs to avoid one turn in the road for another. The key is to choose our turn and accept what comes, knowing that whatever comes is just a temporary obstacle in the way of the path we’ve chosen.
8 – You Live Somewhere in Time
Einstein’s everyday starting point is spacetime: space and time woven together. Which means that just as you live somewhere in space, you live somewhere in time. That may sound mystical, but it’s well within the mainstream frame of modern physics.
Before Europeans knew of the Americas, the Americas still existed—peopled and vibrant. The Europeans just didn’t know about it. Likewise, we don’t know how to “get to” the past. That doesn’t mean it’s unreal; it means we don’t know how to get there.
In fact, there is something called Poincaré recurrence. In a finite, closed system that just keeps evolving, the system will wander but eventually return arbitrarily close to where it has been before. The path through time winds back near its old neighborhoods, even if no one has a map for revisiting them on purpose.
If life is a kaleidoscope through time, not a dot in an instant, then what we call endings are only the edges of today’s chart. The rest of the coastline is there, beyond the fog—already real. You live somewhere in time, and the sea around you is wider than you can see.
Faith and Patience,
Reverend Dukkha Hanamoku
Bodhi Day 