I can and do change matter-stuff all the time. I put on different clothes to go to a party. I trade in an old car for a new one. I paint the bedroom with EMF blocking iron oxide.
On the other hand, I grew up fearing spiders and here I am a mature adult and I still fear them. From my father I got many wonderful things, but I also got the idea that ‘life’s a bitch and then you die.’ From time to time I still catch myself believing that is so. I have always tended to feel self-conscious and insecure around women. I still do.
Notice that the latter three items are invisible. They belong to the realm of thoughts, feelings and ingrained habits, attitudes and beliefs. Yet, paradoxically, they are more substantial and persistent than the first three items that pertain to the outer realm of things and events. We label outer stuff substantial and real. Yet, ironically, it’s the inner, invisible, intangible elements that prove so implacable and unchangeable, as to cause Heraclitus, for one, to declare, “Character is destiny.” Sure, there are outer world 'physical' things that hang around for billions of years, like large asteroids and such, but notice how things that hang around that long are all basically what we classify as 'dead'.
If the doctrine of reincarnation is true, then the invisible thought-feeling-belief complex must be substantively more real than outer physical plane stuff, for what else would it be that reincarnates? Surely not the worm food corpse under the stone near the church.
Some eastern philosophies declare that thoughts and feelings do not survive death; that the only thing that does survive is the Atman, the essential soul or spiritual self. This would only further support the weird point I’m trying to make here, for now we have it that the most invisible aspect of ourselves is precisely the most enduring and thus substantial facet of our being.
The unfathomable Atman is not an object. It is called “the knower of the field” and, as such, is beyond form. If it resembles anything we can point a finger at, it would be space itself.
You know space, that completely empty, non-substantial nothingness that alone makes it possible for any and all things to appear. Space that never changes, never goes away, never interferes with anything. Just like awareness.
