Realms

[+Invocation]

I don't understand the realms much. Why is everything backwards? Why beads, of all things? Is it like that everywhere or just Roshar? Please someone explain as much as possible about the realms to me. I need help.

Note: I would keep reading to find out more, but I've just spent my book budget for an entire year getting both Mistborn eras, Elantris, and the first three Stormlights. I borrowed Arcanum Unbounded a while back from a library, but they didn't have any others, and to be honest, I do not remember much of it.

Edited June 16, 2018 by Invocation

[RShara she/her]

The realms are really complicated and we don't understand all of them, or even a small part.

Everything starts from the Spiritual Realm. Think of it like the sun. It's the source of (most) magic, and where your spiritweb or SDNA is. It's location and time independent, so you can instantly move from any place to any other place, and you can see the future and the past.

The next "layer" is the Cognitive Realm, known as Shadesmar colloquially. It's the realm of thought and living ideas, and is shaped by thought. My theory on why the land and sea are inverted is because when people look at things on land, they see all the different objects--rocks and pebbles and tables and boxes and houses and dried leaves, and all the things. So all of them manifest separately in the CR. When people look and think of the ocean or a river, they don't think of individual water molecules. They think, "Water," or "river." So since they think of it as a singular item, it's solid.

Shadesmar is flat, and the space between planets isn't thought about, so is compressed. And that lets people walk between planets with relatively little difficulty.

Last is the Physical Realm, the realm of every day, see-and-touch objects.

Magic, or investiture, originates (mostly) in the Spiritual Realm, is filtered by Cognitive thought, and manifests in the Physical Realm.

Does that help?

[+Invocation]

@RShara  Thank you, that helps a bunch, but raises a few more questions.

What happens in the Cognitive Realm? Does time pass the same way? Spren can be hurt but not killed, does that apply to people too? Are people immortal in the "can't grow old and die from it" way there? 

[RShara she/her]

Yeah, time in the CR passes mostly the same as in the PR. People seem to have learned how to manipulate it somehow, though. Or are using a lot of cadmium. Because there are people who are using some sort of time-dialation techniques to be able to live "longer". We have no idea how yet.

Since spren have substance in the CR, yeah they could probably be hurt and killed there.

[Weltall]

On the question of why beads and if it's that way everywhere, the answers are 'We don't know for sure' and 'No'. There is a connection between the Physical world and how that world appears in the Cognitive Realm but Brandon has said that at times it works in odd ways and he RAFO'd a question about why Roshar's Cognitive zone manifests as the glass beads. We've also seen what Scadrial looks like in the Cognitive and while it has the same inversion of solid land/water that Roshar does, instead of beads you see mists. Brandon has also implied that the solid/fluid inversion is not a universal thing and there are places where it may not happen.

So yeah, there's a lot we don't understand about the Cognitive Realm. No doubt it will all make sense to us in, oh... about twenty years or so. xD

10 hours ago, Invocation said:

Does time pass the same way? Spren can be hurt but not killed, does that apply to people too? Are people immortal in the "can't grow old and die from it" way there? 

For humans who have entered the Cognitive Realm, time apparently passes normally. There's a city that exists entirely in the Cognitive Realm called Silverlight (we've never seen it and almost everything we know comes from things Brandon has told us outside the books) and that people are born, can live their whole lives and die there. So clearly, people still age. We do know there are ways to extend your lifespan and a lot of people who are known to live (or at least spend a lot of time in) Silverlight use it, but we don't know exactly how they do it yet.

Spren are normally unkillable in the conventional sense (Syl remarks at one point that to her, humans are weird because of how they die).though this isn't because they're so connected to the Cognitive Realm per se but because they're Investiture (the technical term for all the 'magic' in the Cosmere) that has become sapient and that's eternal by definition. Spren and other forms of sapient Investiture can have their personalities destroyed in certain ways but they're very hard to truly kill. That said, we have evidence that it's possible, just very difficult and not something that most people are going to be able to do.