It is made of matter. No. That's a very simplified answer. The 3-dimensional physical world most of us occupy most of the time is made of energy, consciousness and time. Is that the correct answer? What are the three dimensions and why aren't energy, consciousness and time also dimensions? Or how do we know that for example time doesn't have several dimensions?

What is essential to us people is what this world is to us. How do we perceive it and how do we experience it - and most of all how do we live in it from our birth to our death? We perceive the world surrounding us with our senses. We see, hear, feel, taste and smell. Each of these senses receives information from our environment with a different technique. The information is transported to our brains where it is finally interpreted into the form we experience it.

• Eyes receive a certain frequency range of electromagnetic radiation, which we call the "visible light", and converts the rays into something that can be further processed in our brains and perceived as colors.
  
• Ears receive a certain frequency range of air pressure waves, which we call "audible sound".
  
• Skin and many other parts of our body sense contact with objects and forces and pass information about them to be experiences as touch, pain, cold, hot etc.
  
• Nose receives small particles flying in the air coming from different sources. When the effect of these particles is strong enough, we experience it as smell.
  
• Tongue and lips react to the chemicals contained in food or objects and this is experiences as taste.

It is obvious that our senses are limited. From everything that is going on around us, we only perceive a very small part. We only react to five different phenomena and just to a portion of them. Then there are phenomena we don't perceive at all. Hence the reality we experience in our minds is something else than the actual reality that is around us. Also the way we experience these phenomena is something that is based on the mechanism of our senses and our brains. It happens to be that we react to radiation as colours and to pressure waves as sounds. Our body is a machine that receives information from its surroundings and transforms it to something that can be understand by our brains. But we could build a machine that would convert sounds into colours and vice versa. Looking through such a device would show us the world in a totally different way!

So what is reality? Apparently when it comes to our every day life, the reality is what we perceive. Yet we should not forget that this is just a way we see things. There is a more to "ALL THAT IS" than just the physical reality we see in our normal state of consciousness.

Martin Keitel, 1998