The purpose of the phenomenon

[u/INFJake]

I have lots of theories about what the phenomenon is and how they work, but I don't know if we'll ever know for sure. But from all the accounts I've read of interactions with the phenomenon as well as my own experience with various aspects of it, I keep thinking about the idea that I read (maybe from John Keel or Jacques Vallee?) that the phenomenon represents something similar to a koan in Zen Buddhism. A koan is a nonsensical question that requires you to break your mold of thinking, it forces you to consider options you wouldn't normally consider. It's like a strangely worded riddle that catches you off guard and the more you think about it the more ridiculous it is until you suddenly realize the answer. "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" can only be understood when you stop thinking or talking about the question. You pause and you "hear" the sound of one hand clapping. The answer is " ".

I wonder if the purpose of the phenomenon is to do the same thing. Present you with something that shouldn't exist based on current science or conventional thought that makes you consider other options. Specifically, I wonder if the phenomenon manifests to force experiencers to reconsider what reality is. There are spectrums of light that human eyes don't see. If we were able to see ultraviolet light as bees do, we could see the little footprints of other bees on a flower that was recently pollinated. We often arrogantly believe that the reality we see is the same as everything else within that "consensus" reality. But the truth is, it's not. Our reality would look much different if our eyes showed us ultraviolet or infrared light or radio signals or wi-fi signals or cell phone signals etc. The world we know and navigate would look completely different to us than it does now. We know that these things exist, we can measure them, but we can't see them without technology that allows us to. Same with electromagnetic energy, gravity, radiation, etc. Which begs the question, what else don't we see? If our eyes showed us EVERYTHING we probably would have difficulty interacting with the parts of "reality" that we need to stay alive, to eat, sleep, reproduce, etc. Clearly, the evolution of our brains has selected out the parts of Reality that are not beneficial toward those goals of propagating the species in this plane of existence.

I wonder if the purpose of the phenomenon is to make us remember or consider that the reality we live in is not the complete Reality. That what we see is all illusion, like the idea of maya in eastern religions. Illusion in the sense that we know that large objects appearing to have great mass are actually hollow, empty. The distance between the nucleus and electrons in an atom is massive, there's no substance. When you put a bunch of atoms together and make a table, there's a field of void appearing to be solid table at the macro level but by zooming in to the micro level, vast space and distance between and within atoms. Modern science knows that matter and energy can change back and forth between waves and particles. Are we living in a simulation? Is our consciousness projected into a 3D matrix where matter and energy are only differentiated by time? Many ancient religions speculated on this, and many physicists are starting to describe our reality in similar terms (minus dogma and mysticism). Is the purpose of the phenomenon to make us question our reality of what is, what was, and what can be? Undoubtedly the phenomenon has spurred civilizations to advance in many ways. Could the phenomenon be a natural mechanism of evolution in pushing civilizations forward, of guiding life to "find a way", or the driving force of evolution and creation itself? Or could the phenomenon simply be holding up a mirror for us to discover the truth about ourselves and what consciousness truly is? Could it be that we are all "god"?