As already described, on one fine day it was seen that ‘reality’, whatever that may be — but certainly, the source of everything that is in appearance — is one, and whole. It’s whole, or integral.
Thus, everything in appearance adds up to the one whole, or Universe. In appearance of course that whole is discriminated – or dis-integrated – or refracted1 – into apparently separate and distinct elements. But because there is one whole, it is seen that there can be no two discriminated elements that are identical. This is true in human experience: no two people, or animals, or plants, or days, or items are actually indistinguishable.
Humans attempt to manufacture in manufacturies items that are identical and indistinguishable – except for their serial number or sales ID. They aren’t. Nothing is identical to anything else…
But.
Any physicists reading this (hello, all one of you) will know that there are (apparently) indistinguishable elements in our (apparent) reality, even if they are not visible to the human eye. Sub-atomic ‘particles’ – electrons, protons, neutrons, for example – are indistinguishable from apparent others of their class.
The Princeton physicist Wheeler theorised light-heartedly (or apparently light-heartedly) that the problem of the identity of all such versions of one ‘particle’ – the electron – could readily be explained by there only existing one electron which travelled back and forth through time to appear at all possible positions that an electron could appear at, thus giving rise to the appearance. When travelling in one direction, the electron appears as itself, the fundamental unit of (arbitrarily) ‘negative’ electric charge. When travelling in the opposite direction in time, it appears as the positron, with the charge reversed to an arbitrary ‘positive’ (this is anti-matter).
Non- physicists might think this an absurd proposal (and would be horrified by much that is taken for granted in the physicists’ current model of the universe!) but there is nothing in physics to render it implausible: ‘time’ is not something that appears in fundamental equations except as a direction.
The main objection physicists raised to this proposal is that if it were true, then an equal number of forward travelling electrons and reverse travelling electrons, aka positrons, are needed to cancel each other out – and this is not observed, at least here and now.
However, I would propose that the reason we observe less positrons than electrons is because the viewpoint we have is apparently moving in a ‘forward’ direction in time, this causing the asymmetry observed and also the imbalance between apparently-observed quantities of matter (lots of it) and anti-matter (not much). Whether this is mathematically feasible is beyond my capacity to investigate, and so my proposal is assuredly absurd nonsense.
Interestingly Wheeler, who was deeply engaged in the development of the current view that physics holds, came up with another conventionally-‘bizarre’ proposal, the ‘Participatory Anthropic Principle’, a statement that the apparent world is created by the presence of the Observer. To which I can only say, ‘Yes’.
Implicitly…
Equally, anything that has ever apparently existed is a reflection/projection/refraction of something unique and permanent in the permanent reality that lies behind.
As such, nothing real — that is, in its uniqueness — that has ever existed can really die, as it is a part of the timeless reality…