To Believe: A Man’s Quest to Understand Reality

by M I A Harba

  ‘Well, thank you very much. I came with you to find something to believe in, and now, I'm even more confused than I was before. You haven't told me who you are, or what you represent. Why do you bother to show your world to us in this rather fake interpretation? Don't you realise that in a way you are lying to us? Or you've been telling us fake storeys over the millennia. Where is the morality in this? In my reality, you would be called a liar, and be looked down upon as a despicable character,’ Sam exploded with insults on the elusive visitor and his version of the truth.

  ‘Don't take it that way. We are not lying to you. We're only showing you part of our world in a way that you understand it. And it is, in a way, preparing you for the ultimate disclosure of the truth,’ answered the guest, calmly.

  ‘But when will this happen? When is this time when you tell us the absolute truth?’ asked Sam.

  ‘Not in your generation definitely, and if I tell you when, you won't believe it, either. It will be futile,’ answered the elusive visitor in his favourite vague manner.

  ‘What about you, your individual you? Will you live to see this ultimate time?’ asked Sam.

  ‘Hahahaha. You're misunderstanding my world. You think that I'm an individual, and my world is like yours. It's not like that. You need to have a completely different frame of mind to understand my world and where I fit in my world,’ answered the elusive visitor.

  ‘You haven't answered the question. Will you, or the group of you or whoever, live long enough to see the ultimate time?’ Sam asked again, hoping for a comprehensible answer.

  ‘Our world will see that point in your world, and the ultimate truth will come,’ the elusive visitor answered in the usual vague manner.

  Sam was totally confused and very dismayed. He knew what he was seeing was not true but in his mind. He could, at the flick of the elusive visitor’s finger, be again back in the tunnel looking at machinery. He wanted to go back home to think about what he'd been told and how confusing it was.

  The elusive guest took him back to his pickup, and they drove back together, silently.

  ‘Okay, I think you've seen enough for tonight. I'll give you time to think about it,’ said the guest.

  ‘Will you come back again?’ asked Sam.

  ‘Do you want me to?’ replied the elusive visitor with a question.

  Sam was unsure whether he wanted him to come back again, but he might have other questions to ask. So he said,

  ‘Yes, I'd like you to come back again if possible. I might have other questions,’ answered Sam after some hesitation.

  ‘Sure, I will be back. Thanks for your hospitality.’

  With that, the Bedouin said his goodbye and disappeared into the darkness. Sam looked at his watch and it was exactly the same time as he left. It is as though he never went with his guest in the pickup and never went inside the tunnel. All the time taken was just time that didn’t exist.

  A Revelation or a Lie?

  The following morning, after the night of the UFO base station, Sam woke up late, not until about noon. His sleep was disturbed by all kinds of vision. The elusive guest gave him only a little, apart from that humans’ senses were incapable of understanding his reality. He doubted whether he actually went on that exertion last night or he imagined it. The time taken, as he clocked it, was no time at all.

  Wasn’t it possible what he saw was the same as witnessed by the so-called ’UFO abductees?’ A fantastical story? Wasn’t it possible that he was shown something that his inner mind was ready to accept? He’d been led to somewhere he could believe. The elusive visitor was a very good liar. What he showed him was a complete fantasy, which he decided not to believe.

  Sam was adamant it was a complete imagination, another lie by this phenomenon, that John Keil said it should be left alone. Sam decided to leave it alone, too. He regretted asking the elusive guest to come back again. He was a liar that might make things even worse for him.

  But his logical mind was still active. He took the GPS coordinate of the presumed UFO base. He could go there again to check for himself. He fetched his portable GPS device and searched for the coordinates he saved on it. To his utmost surprise, there was no such recording. But he did save it.

  He could retrace his route using the pickup’s GPS receiver, unless that was deleted or not recorded, too.

  Yes, it was a big lie, he thought. He would face the elusive visitor with this lie when he came next time.

  He went to the kitchen and prepared fried eggs and tomatoes for breakfast. A big steaming cup of coffee should clear his mind. He had it with his food on the patio, looking out to the horizon. With no record of the GPS coordinates, he would never be able to go to this presumed UFO base.

  The Simulation Hypothesis was incomplete, the elusive visitor said. With advancing technology, the theory will change in the next decades. Our consciousness and their world were not far apart, he said. Sam thought anyone could say this, the information content of these statements was zero.

  He shouldn’t have allowed himself to be taken for a ride. He should’ve heeded John Keel’s warning, and never communicated with this phenomenon. For all he knew, it could visit him again in the form of a ghost, or a demon. Now, they knew his frame of mind, and, most importantly, knew where he lived. It was a sickening revelation.

  He decided he would not talk to the elusive visitor if he appeared again. Hopefully, he would go away with all his lies and false theories. But somehow, Sam suspected he might not disappear, a very scary thought.

  He felt physically and mentally exhausted due to these thoughts that swirled like a hurricane in his skull. Life would never be the same again, here in his house. He didn’t feel safe anymore and couldn’t see a way out of this predicament. However, it was all in his mind, and surely, he was in control of it, he thought. He only needed to stop imaging it, and it would go away. He must stop thinking about it or the adventure of last night.

  As he sat on the patio looking at the horizon, he saw the slowly moving caravan against the thin line of the horizon. There again, this phenomenon manifested itself as yet another form of mirage. However, he decided he wasn’t going to fall for it.

  The afternoon was beautiful, clear blue skies, unlike his confused mind. The colourful terrain that lay in front of him did little to dampen his anxiety. Again, he began to doubt the reasons for coming out to the desert. He was hoping to clear his mind, but look at him now, totally confused, and disillusioned.

  The delivery driver arrived that afternoon on his weekly run to replenish the supplies. He was glad to see a human whom he could trust, not a liar who pretended to be a human. Of course, he would not tell the driver about the happenings of last night. He would appear to have lost it.

  He helped the driver move the stuff to the storeroom and the fridge. The driver had two letters from Sam’s letterbox, one from his wife and the other from his friend dating the fragments. He asked the driver to stay for coffee and some snacks, and they sat talking about life here in the desert and the latest news from the city.

  The driver said he envied Sam. He was far away from the non-ending and tiring hustle in the city. Rawa’s market had truffles in abundance, it had been a good year. After the coffee and chat, the driver went away, farewelled by Sam who was sorry to see the last human go, for at least a week.

  He opened the letter from Dr Khalifa first, for he wanted to save his wife’s for last. The letter confirmed what he said earlier that the bead was fairly recent. The fragments were much older, between 5000 and 7000 years. Further, the Archaeology Department was interested in this location if he could send them the GPS coordinates. Of course, he did since he came across the site again.

  He went about preparing his dinner, savouring his wife’s letter for later. Although the supplies arrival did help distract his mind, those feelings of uncertainty and anxiety returned soon after the lorry departed. What was he going to do?

  He stared at his wife’s letter a long time, unwilling to open it. Th
e expectation of reading it kept him relaxed, happy, perhaps more than actually reading it. He wanted to delay reading it as long as possible.

  The letter was affectionate, with a photo of their daughter enclosed. She said they missed him very much and looked forward to his return to them for good. She hoped he had now achieved the clarity of mind he desired. He wanted him back, but completely satisfied and content.

  He read and re-read the letter many times and put his daughter’s photo on the table next to his bed. He wished his wife framed it before sending; there were no farmers out here in the desert.

  His mind strayed back to the elusive visitor and his lies. He considered meeting with his cousin Salam, to invite him to join him on the next meeting with the elusive visitor. He wanted somebody to corroborate his story, and to give Salam the opportunity of discussing the Simulation Hypothesis with a being from another world. But he stopped. What if the elusive visitor did not come again? What would Salam think of him? Obviously, he would think Sam had lost it. His project in the desert was a bad idea, and that he needed to return to his family, and soon. Sam couldn’t face the shame of that.

  What the elusive guest intended in his explanation of ‘their world’ was to deter Sam from pursuing other theories of reality. But that was not what Sam wanted. He wanted to keep an open mind, to engage in a discussion with his inner self about the issue. He was convinced the elusive visitor was not giving the whole picture but enough to confuse the truth. Wasn’t that what this phenomenon had been doing over the millennia?

  That night was uneventful, and the next morning, he woke up to a burst of beautiful spring sunshine. The skies were clear except for the odd cloud here and there, even though Sam wasn’t sure they were real or in his imagination.

  As usual, he had his breakfast, his steaming cup of coffee on the patio, looking at the far horizon. The appearance of the elusive guest, and his presumed reality, had clouded Sam’s mind immensely. He could no longer look at another theory of reality without being muddled by this seemingly false premise made by the elusive guest. To distract his mind, Sam decided to work out his understanding from first principles. Forget the elusive guest, he could be no more than an illusion conjured up by his troubled mind.

  He remembered his discussion with Dr Talib. Matter, the universe, and everything, are made up, at the lowest sub-particles, of fields. There are no such things as particles, but fields. The particles are where the field represents the highest probability of that particle being there. These particles appear as waveforms of probability of where they could be, and behave as distinct particles when they are detected, some say by conscious beings.

  Our mind creates for us this world of solid objects, which is the biggest illusion of all. It is like a magician making us believe his tricks when he retrieves a rabbit from a hat. All know it was a trick, but a very believable one. People know the truth behind the trick, a rabbit hidden somewhere. In the illusion of our reality, however, no one knows what’s hidden. People are left with only one explanation, what all see is the only reality out there.

  This illusion is because, apparently, it is the prime mover in evolution. If consciousness makes the waveforms of probability of position collapse into particles, there must be a way to verify this. Alas, this has not been proven possible so far.

  There are a few experiments proposed, but they are still in the realm of science fiction. Sam wondered, could he himself run an experiment to verify this?

  He had an advantage; he was in the middle of nowhere. There are areas within the desert that have not been observed by a conscious entity, unlike the city that is rife with conscious beings everywhere. Those areas in the wide expanse of the desert must still be acting as waveforms of position probability because they haven’t been observed.

  Sam, however, was there looking at the terrain from where he was. Those particles constituting the terrain must be already observed, and thus act like particles. But surely, at the level of little stones and gravel, which he could not see from far, must be still in the superposition, or at many places at the same time, condition i.e. without a defined location.

  If he placed a camera near such places and saved the images on a memory stick, for example, rather than looking at the image directly, then the saved images represent undefined scenes, those arising for particles still undecided. Of course, he would be the influencer, or the conscious detector, affecting the outcome. However, if he managed to position cameras without him being present at the locations, then an area in the desert, far from all kinds of conscious entities, would provide a way of recording reality in its undecided form. But how could he achieve this?

  How about using a drone? He could release the drone to land many kilometres away, with cameras that record on a USB stick only, and no screen to show the images. The drone could then be flown back to him, and he would have in his possession a stick containing images of the unobserved reality.

  It sounded an interesting idea to Sam, but he was no physicist and could be too wild in his imagination. If he ever wanted to watch these images, the time eraser principle might kick in. Somehow, the particles move back in time to create images as though they were observed by a conscious entity at the beginning. His memory stick would show real images because the photons that created those images had travelled back in time and created the actual images.

  The time eraser experiment has been repeated multiple times and is proven to be conclusively right. As soon as a particle is detected, it behaves as though it has been a particle all the time.

  His drone/memory tick experiment faced a dead end. The time erasing capability of subatomic particles would defeat the intentions of his experiment.

  His mind came to a seizure, and he no longer pursued this idea. The time erasing capability upsets the authenticity of his experiment. But how? How can a particle move back in time to change its history? It also happens instantaneously.

  Where is the maximum speed limit Einstein talked about in his Relativity Theory? Speed of light in a vacuum is the absolute maximum speed in the universe, or so says the theory.

  Instantaneous travel appears in more than one scenario in nature. In addition to the time erasing above, there are at least two other cases. One is what happens in entanglement. When the state of one of two entangled sub-particles is measured, the state of the other assumes the opposite value instantaneously. Take the electron for example, if the spin is found to be clockwise in an electron, the spin of the other entangled electron would be counterclockwise. The information transfer between the two entangled electrons, even when they light-years apart, is instantaneous. Speed of light is obviously violated.

  Another case is when the electron moves from one energy level in the atom to the next, whether lower or higher in energy. This jump is instantaneous. For example, when a high energy photon impacts the atom and gets absorbed by it, an electron jumps to a higher energy level instantaneously. There are no mid-levels between the two levels of the jump. The electron seems to disappear from the lower level and re-appear at the higher levels exactly at the same time. The same happens when the atom releases a photon and one of its electrons jumps from a higher level to a lower level.

  Science has no explanation for this behaviour, at least one that the majority of scientists believe in. It contradicts the proven findings of the Relativity Theory.

  Sam thought maybe his experience with the elusive guest, when he jumped inside the tunnel and when he exited, happened instantaneously, too. However, he wasn’t even sure whether it happened or was in his imagination, in his mind. His entire adventure took no time, and his watch remained motionless. He couldn’t consider this as proof, as he wasn’t sure if the adventure actually took place.

  Enough of physics that morning, Sam decided. He wanted to plan the activities for the day. Staying at the house would drive him insane. He decided to drive to the site where he found the fragments, which he recorded its GPS coordinates last time. He wanted to make sure it was there before he
sent these coordinates to Dr Khalifa, to pass on to the Archaeology Department. He wanted to make sure it was real, not planted in his mind by his nemesis, the elusive visitor. He also wanted to check the pickup’s GPS for his drive last night. Was it recorded?

  He prepared sandwiches, took a couple of bottles of water, and went to the pickup. He checked the GPS, and as he suspected there was no record of a journey last night. It must’ve been in his imagination, he concluded. Anyway, his portable GPS device had a record of the GPS coordinates of the fragment location, so he drove to it. It was about one hour drive from his house, and indeed it was as he saw it before. He felt at ease that he could now tell Dr Khalifa, without appearing stupid.

  He spent the next couple of hours at the site, looking for more fragments. He scoured the site but couldn’t find but a shell of a sea creature that did not seem to belong here. What was a sea creature doing out here in the desert? Either it lived here millions of years ago or was brought by the humans who lived here. If the creature lived here, it meant this whole area was under the sea at one stage, an amazing discovery, he thought. He pocketed the shell to send to Dr Khalifa, too.

  If it was an ancient human habitation, some excavation might be needed. This was a job for the archaeologists, he decided.

  He drove back home, still thinking about his drone experiment. If he could trick nature into a situation where it couldn’t decide one way or another, then he would have his proof. Others had thought about this and postulated experiments that relied upon entanglement at the elementary sub particle levels, at the photo or electron levels. They based their ideas on entanglement that was doable with current technology. But, here in the desert house, he didn’t have the means of carrying out experiments at that level of sophistication, which only specialized labs could perform.