This is a post that I keep on avoiding due to the fact that the subject is so difficult to communicate (or comprehend). I ask the reader to ignore my words and attempt to just see what they are pointing at.
Okay. Off to cloud cuckoo-land…
Everything in this reality is not the real thing. Everything you experience (see; hear; feel) is a symbol for something else. There is a higher, truer “realer” reality above the one we seem to be living in. Most people are somewhat aware of this and give voice to this intuition through art and religion.
Just as <insert your name> is not the real you, so the (apparent) world you see around you is not the true world. Your mind is aware of this beyond-world but cannot perceive it directly. It therefore places a symbolic “thing” in it’s place in an effort to make sense of it. A placeholder of sorts. As an example, we may use a sound as a symbol for something else as in the sound “dog”. We call this a “word”. The sound itself is not the animal referenced. We might also use a drawing or an image of this thing.
Like the word, the image is not the actual dog. Now what I am saying is that the sight, sound, and feel of the dog are also not the dog itself. The true dog lies hidden from you and is unknowable. Even if you could pierce the veil and join the dog, you would only experience the combination of yourself and the dog. The you+dog is also not the actual dog.
Think about how dimensions work. The one dimensional line; the two dimensional plane; the three dimensional cube; the four dimensional hyper-cube. We can keep this going mathematically but our minds are incapable of following experientially.
The idea that there exist places (and inhabitants) in dimensions we cannot see is unsettling for people who have enough problems dealing with just the basic three-plus-time. As a result of our being so embedded in what we think is reality, when we encounter something from outside of it, our mind slaps a more believable symbol over it. This is why so many reports of the paranormal include elements of the absurd. We are puzzled by the “high strangeness” elements because they seem so silly and contrived.
This is because they are.
By us.