Reality Beyond the Visible

This book, Reality Beyond the Visible, is the result of my endeavour to personally develop a better understanding of the multi-dimensional and complex nature of reality. The natural sciences and the scientific method are essential and effective tools to explore physical reality. However, as human beings, we encounter realities well beyond the visible world. We experience intangible phenomena in our lives that are distinctly different from physical reality. Science and the scientific method, with their strict adherence to sense perception as the only accepted approach to studying reality, are ill-equipped to explore such worlds.

It is against this background that I have written this book to explore all the dimensions of reality beyond the visible world. In particular, the book examines the concept of reality enshrined in the Writings of the Bahá'í Faith: namely, that there are forces and entities in the world of existence independent from physical reality. This is essentially the objective reality, through the expression of which in the material world, we can experience and observe other realities. This objective reality manifests itself in the world of existence as visible and invisible realities. The visible reality is the physical or material world, which is also known as the material or physical reality. The invisible reality, on the other hand, is intangible, and beyond direct human sensory perception. There are distinctively different types of invisible realities: intelligible reality, social reality and spiritual reality.

The contents of the book are organised into seven sections and structured into 37 chapters. The sections are "reality and investigation methods," "nature of reality," "creation," "visible reality," "spiritual reality," "social reality," and "human complex reality." The book is written in the form of a tutorial that simulates, as much as possible, the tutor-tutored relationship in a self-paced personal study scheme. The content is scaffolded and structured to foster easy assimilation and support effective learning.