Go here and look at the upside down pictures of George Bush. They appear to a casual observer to be pretty much identical, but they're very different as you quickly see if you click on the image.
What is it about the brain that causes it to process upside down images differently than the same image right side up? How much of the world do we fail to see because our brains simply don't recognize it? How much different is reality from what we perceive it to be?
Perhaps the world in which we live and move is to the ultimately real world like the world of actors in a movie projected onto a screen is to the three dimensional world of the audience in the theater. Perhaps the ultimately real is comprised of additional dimensions in which we are embedded that our brains are simply unable to process and to which we are oblivious.
If so, the ultimately real could surround us and yet be impossible for us to imagine. We could no more conceptualize it than a blind man could conceptualize the color red. Trying to imagine it would be like a man born deaf and blind trying to imagine what he feels and smells as he sits on a crowded seashore is really like.
Among our philosophical prejudices is the prejudice that the world is pretty much as we experience it. This was the conviction of the prisoner chained in Plato's cave until he was able to break free and climb out of his prison and behold the world in the light of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True.
Perhaps reality is in fact something like it is portrayed in this parable titled Plato's Cave for Modern Man.
RLC