More about our encapsulation

Think of - visualize - the area around your home that you've traveled through, but never set foot in. All (?) of such 'places' are, in this visualization, zones or regions, almost always identical with some stretch of street, alley, freeway, state or interstate highway, even freeway and highway interchanges, given that we are visualizing those places we've seen but never set foot in. Which means we've driven through, or flown over.

Visualize several such stretches, in some detail - what you can see at each corner of an intersection, or the front of a gated community, a high-rise apartment or office building. Remember - only places/stretches that you've traveled through or over but never set foot in.

'Never set foot in.' You've seen these stretches of houses or bars or gas stations or grocery stores or elementary schools, or the business district 5,000 feet below, but never walked that stretch of sidewalk, or on that patch of grass or under the boughs of those trees. Maybe never even smelled the air there. You've (maybe) never even looked around 360 degrees in that spot. You've never touched any of those door handles, or swiped your card through the reader on the gas pump, or punched in the security code on the gate of that condominium complex. You've never smelled the taco house kitchen right over there, or heard the ding ding honk honk of the light rail train at the station there.

You've never heard that boy over there talk. You've never seen the day-old beard on that man, or touched the hand of that woman. You've never seen that industrial building from ground level looking horizontally. All of these are almost completely images - objects of sight.

None of those areas or places - none of those people, none of those cars or buildings or trees - none are solid, so far as you, your experience, your skin, is concerned.

This is a glimpse of the varying thickness or hardness of perceived reality.

Now visualize, in the same ways, what the astronauts perceived as they traveled to and landed on the moon. Visualize what they smelled, tasted, touched, heard, saw - walking to the rocket at the launch site. Inside the command module headed to the moon. Inside the space suit on the surface of the moon.

Now visualize a space probe, heading to Pluto.

Then, an astronomer looking through a refracting telescope with bare eyes.

Then, an astronomer 'reading' the output from a computer-controlled radio telescope.