Sort of like blind spot ⬈, the gaps in material reality exist right in front of you, but your brain is really good at paving them over and filling them in, and as a result, you never quite notice them.
The way I like to think of it is as though it forms a sort of veil that covers your eyes (or your senses, in general), and changes the way you see the world. Like wearing sunglasses for a long enough time, I'd become accustomed to seeing the world through a veil, and I'd compensated in such a way that it became easy to believe that there was nothing clouding my vision.
The first step to peeling it back was just to accept the possibility, however remote, that maybe there was more to reality than just the what physics allows. As I become more open to this possibility, I started to notice the small ways in which my mind was "filling in" the gaps. To bring it back to my puzzle analogy →, I would sometimes find puzzle pieces that weren't made of matter, and when my mind "filled them in", it did so by cleverly discarding them. All I had to do was just stop discarding them out-of-hand.
It's far easier said than done. After all, I'd spent years doing just that, and had all the theory and cognition to support it. The switch was by no means quick. Rather instead of tossing out the ridiculous, I threw it in the corner. As time went by, these piles of garbled debris grew great enough that I realized I couldn't just keep on blissfully ignoring them. Once the elephant in the room is big enough, it starts to seem more delusional to ignore it than to accept its implications.
In the same way that the steady accumulation of knowledge once lead me to think that reality was all made of matter, the Katamari ball has started picking up all kinds of immaterial knowledge, and what was once trivia has become increasingly meaningful as it all gloms together.
If you haven't already guessed from the title and the arc, this essay is about what's beyond the veil, what's beyond the edge of material reality. It's intended audience is the materialist, the person who thinks that everything is made of matter, like I used to. Depending on where you are in your own personal journey, what follows from here may strike you to anywhere from magical nonesense to credulous squinting to slapping yourself on the forehead.
As we are often fond of saying: "you should keep your mind open, but not so open that it falls out". My goal here isn't to convince you of anything in particular; I will talk about a number of topics often described as "woo", but they're brought up as possible examples, not convincing proofs. Instead, my goal is to try to get you to stop discarding the immaterial evidence you come across, to gather it and reason about it on your own accord. Or to put it in another sense, I'm not trying to pull back the veil (only you can do that), rather I just want to make you pause and think that maybe such a veil exists.
My general plan is to, across a variety of examples:
Observe some "puzzle pieces" of potentially immaterial makeup.
Present the material explanation I used to use to fill those gaps.
Consider the reasons I stopped finding that explanation satisfactory.
IMPORTANT: Prepare to stretch you mind a little bit. I suggest taking a minute or two to completely empty your brain of thoughts and look at a cloud (if possible). If you find yourself constantly coming up with counter-arguments as you read this, feel free to set it down.
Without further ado, please direct your attention to dream messages →, seeing ghosts →, hearing voices →, out-of-body experiences →, and historical miracles →.