On the Nature of Reality and Truth

Just too simple and ordinary to be true!

It's really so incredibly simple! My mouth drops open in amazement as I hear yet another supposedly learned scientist or medic speak of what we call the physical universe as being 'reality', as opposed to what is going on in our consciousness, and dismissing healers and anyone with broader outlooks, such as myself, as nutters, cranks or at least fundamentally mistaken or misguided. They speak with such conviction, and yet they have missed something amazingly simple and fundamental which is staring them right in the face - the nature of their own consciousness!

What I find easiest to describe as the materialist-reductionist belief system is the basic belief system espoused by Western cultures and to a fair extent other modern cultures too. It is rampant in Western science and medicine, including most disciplines of psychology. Variants of it are taught too by most of the organized religions, which have produced a particularly materialistic version of "spirituality", which latter, however, as I make clear in the introduction to this site, is itself intrinsically problematical for us in diverting us from the aware clear-mindedness which is the true natural state to which we need to be pointed.

Materialism-reductionism teaches us that there is an enduring 'physical' or 'concrete' reality that is outside ourselves. Each of us is thus a bit of that physical reality, endowed with a mind or / and soul, and so, what we experience in our lives is simply the processes of the physical reality, which are based on what are quaintly called physical laws. Mind is, according to many, just a manifestation of particular very complex biochemical reactions and consequent electrical currents in physical matter. If you experience things that aren't in the physical dimension, they are discounted as imagination, dreams and so forth and assumed not to represent reality. If there is a higher reality (as taught in the religions), it is something outside both ourselves and the physical reality, and is something towards which we're supposed to strive. The highest or ultimate reality in that type of scenario is a being, called God or an equivalent name, who is like a glorified, omnipotent human being and in one way or another has created the physical reality, including ourselves.

I remember a revealing article in the New Scientist magazine quite a few years ago now, by a certain Susan Blackmore, a psychologist and science writer who had in her various writings over the years gained a certain reputation for posturing as very broad-minded while actually never managing to let go of the materialist-reductionist belief system completely. In particular, she gained herself quite a track record as a writer about near-death experiences and how they could allegedly be explained by certain processes in the brain as it becomes starved of oxygen and no doubt various toxins build up there, so that the experience was supposedly nothing but an illusion caused by biochemical processes in the physical 'reality'. This was particularly nonsensical in the face of accounts like this one of an actual death-and-reincarnation-in-same-body experience.

Now, in no way do I intend here to discredit her for her errors; we all make errors, and errors are an essential part of learning. But that is the point - we must learn and move on and not be stuck in a belief, consistently repeating our errors because we dare not let our minds really open and perceive directly the true nature of what we experience. So far Blackmore has not moved on from her quite negative and restricted view. I heard her on a recent BBC radio programme, and to me she gave off the 'vibes' of a religious evangelist, full of a belief system that she sought to spread to others. She was 'right', in that there was no reality beyond the physical, and any other view was 'mistaken'.

Subsequent note: I have come to have reason to think that Blackmore actually has a more open mind than she has been revealing in public. The signs to me are that she is, like many people, in considerable and uncomfortable conflict between, on the one hand, a real and sincere desire to be open to deep inner wisdom and to become enlightened, and on the other hand, her already established professional status, which has been gained publicly by her writings which have sought to examine broader understandings of the life experience within a materialist-reductionist framework - something which just produces confused writings that please the materialist-reductionists. To start declaring publicly that one's long sequence of publications, upon which much of one's high-profile professional and public status has been built, is seriously flawed, and to declare that the broader, truly clear-minded view (which actually embraces rather than excludes science) is the fundamentally correct one, would be an extremely bold step for people like her to take - seemingly every bit as intimidating as it is necessary!

Blackmore said some very interesting things in that New Scientist article that I read. She had been into some sort of Buddhism and expressed some of its teachings about the nature of reality. In particular she pointed out that everything we experience of the physical reality comes to us through signals to the brain sent from our sense organs. The brain then interprets all this data and produces the experiences that we have....

Okay, pause here a moment and think about the implications of that. Is it true? Is there any way a physical being could know about his / her physical surroundings except through the sense organs? ...For myself I certainly didn't and don't know of any other way. Neither did Blackmore.

She did pretty well, actually, for she then stated the inevitable and challenging conclusion - that everything that we experience, including everything about the external, physical reality, is a construct of the mind.

But that's where she balked at taking the next step. She went on to say that for years she'd been studying or following various spiritual disciplines and (if I remember correctly) examining alternative therapies, looking for verification of some higher reality to explain and make sense of our experiences, and at that point she had finally given up and was declaring that her having drawn various blanks proved to her that there was no higher reality than the physical, and that we were no more than bundles of physical processes. She then saw the Buddhist view that the life experience is illusory as being true in the most negative way - that there was only the physical reality. According to her we needed to live 'in the present' (which an enlightened person would be doing), because there was no other dimension to 'reality' (which is not a claim that would be made by an enlightened person). She also expounded yet again on how all the main elements of near-death experiences could be explained as hallucinations caused by sensory deprivation and an oxygen-starved brain, the rest simply being auto-suggestion, and there was no external reality apart from the physical one. In fact she could explain everything about the near-death experience except the experience itself - and more to the point, consciousness itself!

I really found her article not only saddening but also very funny and breathtakingly bizarre, because she had come within a gnat's whisker of exposing the most fundamental error in the whole of the materialist-reductionist belief system, and yet had failed to take the next and crucial step in her correct reasoning, and had consequently fallen into hopelessly confused and inaccurate conclusions.

So, what had Blackmore missed - a simple and obvious point that was staring her in the face?

STOP! Don't read further yet!

If you don't already know what I'm about to say, take a moment to think about what she'd missed and see if you can 'get' it yourself first.

---

The key that most 'intellectuals' miss...

What dear Susan and countless others in the supposedly learned scientific and medical fraternities - no matter what their title or number of letters after their names - have failed to notice is the following simple point: If the whole of our experience of 'reality' is a construct of mind gained through the sense organs and put together and interpreted in the brain, then, dear friends, the very notion of sense organs and the brain and indeed 'mind' is itself a construct of mind, or rather, of consciousness.

Stop and think about that and its implications for a moment before continuing...

So, no matter whether you are a professor or a street sweeper or a gay three-legged salamander, or are addressed as Sir, Madam, Your Royal Highness or Your Holiness, there is available to you a mind-bogglingly simple key to your beginning to grasp the true nature of reality, and in a stroke this simple key demolishes the basis of the materialist-reductionist belief system which is so arrogantly proclaimed to be 'scientific', 'objective' and 'rational' as distinct from the supposedly irrational and unscientific viewpoints that do not see the physical dimension as the only or at least the primary reality.

If you think I'm talking twaddle, just stop and do a quick re-run. Ask yourself:

1. How does your mind know about and experience physical reality?

2. Are there any means to do so other than from input to the brain from the sense organs?

3. If you can't accept that the brain and sense organs are themselves constructs of mind and you believe that they really do belong to an enduring 'external' reality, then how might you demonstrate that that is the case?

4. If everything that you experience really is just a construct of mind, is there any means at all by which you could ever know of an enduring reality 'out there', outside yourself?

Well, I'm not personally aware of any means by which anyone could establish the existence or nonexistence of some external reality. But before we all throw up our hands in horror at such a seemingly claustrophobic and nihilistic scenario, let's look at the great liberation that this simple realization brings us.

The Great Liberation

Why so many of us get so confused and misled about the nature of reality is that we have been taught to look for it in the wrong direction. Materialism-reductionism and most of the organized religions have taught us that there is 'reality' outside ourselves. From that viewpoint we are small and imperfect beings in a larger reality, and the usual religious claim is that any perfection is outside ourselves and has to be striven towards. The concept of karma is dismissed because events and situations are not seen to all have intrinsic causal relationships with each other; if you have a happy upbringing and apparently happy and successful life overall, that has simply 'just happened' that way as a result of an array of chance processes. If you'd been tortured to death by Saddam Hussein's crew, your being in the right time and place for that merry fate to happen to you 'just happened' or was 'bad luck' through a particular configuration of chance circumstances. Scientists and mathematicians talk of 'chance' and 'randomness', with no real understanding of what these mean except in terms of statistical analysis.

Now that we see that there is an intrinsic reason why we can never know of any reality outside our own consciousness, we need to look in the other direction - that is, inwards, into consciousness itself, for that is the only reality that we can ever know. It therefore becomes nonsensical to try and discriminate between real and non-real in the way that we've been doing.

Once we are thus looking inwards we can get a whole new perspective on the meaning of 'reality' and existence. Instead of deciding whether or not a person or object exists or is real in any absolute sense, for example, we need instead to see at what level of consciousness he / she / it exists or apparently doesn't exist. I can perceive that there are many levels to my consciousness, even though as yet I can't see anything within most of those.

Physalia Gorgon does exist!

If the above all sounds very confusing, no cause for alarm. Let's take a simple case. I've written some stories and novels. Let's take one of my characters, supposedly a 'monster' but actually one of the most endearing and 'human' beings in a particular satirical novel (The Awful Destiny of Physalia Gorgon), with the unedifying name of - surprise, surprise! - Physalia Gorgon. Now, according to the materialist-reductionist belief system Physalia Gorgon doesn't exist. You can carry out any amount of scientific research and study, and almost certainly you will find no evidence of such a character in what you are calling the 'real' world. Therefore on that basis you would say that Physalia Gorgon doesn't exist and is just an imaginary character who a certain Philip Goddard, an author of dubious sanity, has written into a novel.

But we have already seen that we have been making a fundamental error in regarding the physical dimension as an external and more enduring reality than our consciousness; the physical dimension is actually nothing other than a particular level of experience within a vastly multi-level manifestation of experiences that manifests as 'mind'. So, if we now look at experience in this way we discover something really quite wonderful about our friend Physalia Gorgon - he does exist!!! He really, truly does exist! Not in what we're calling the physical dimension of course, but in a certain level of consciousness. And because at certain higher levels of consciousness we are not separate beings as we are in the physical dimension, Physalia Gorgon and all that he represents in my novel is in the human psyche and can be accessed by anyone whose awareness can open at the appropriate level.

By the same token, when I compose a new work of music I get the powerful impression that I have not created it at all but have merely uncovered something which was already composed and had existed over the aeons. Many artists report a similar experience, and this points to our task as artists to manifest in the physical dimension certain areas of experience that already exist in deep layers of the consciousness where we are not separate beings, and to which most people are as yet more or less closed.

Of course here we're tying up with the increasingly accepted notion of the so-called 'common unconscious' - except that it isn't intrinsically unconscious at all; any of us with the right mental practices can increasingly open to it or indeed to any area of consciousness.

Take another example. You have a dream in which an elephant carved totally out of ivory is dancing on top of an imposing tower of gleaming marble some 200 metres high among resplendent shining palaces. Suddenly you hear very strange organ music playing in the distance and wonder where the particular church or cathedral is. The elephant is now your partner, with whom you have an argument about what you are going to have for evening meal, and you wake up with a banal image of the two of you trundling a supermarket trolley down a very dull and tatty shopping street.

You had the dream, but did all that actually happen? From the level of the 'physical' dimension you could certainly say it didn't happen, just as Physalia Gorgon doesn't exist, and there was no such elephant or marble tower - even though some aspects of the dream creatively reflected elements (or maybe elephants) in the physical world. On the other hand, from the viewpoint of the consciousness level of the dream, all that really did happen. Not only that, but from the dreaming level of consciousness all waking-life experience is unreal - well, except possibly in the case of 'lucid' dreams. On the other hand, from the higher perspective there is nothing more real about the waking-life experience than there is about the dream experience. They are equally real, but simply in different levels or dimensions of experience.

Excuse me, Your Holiness, but your Truth is only relative, you know...

This brings us to the distinction made in the Buddhist teachings, between relative and absolute truth. All our everyday, conceptual experience is in the realm of relative truth. Something can be said to exist or be true only in relation to a particular viewpoint and level of consciousness; you cannot say that it has an absolute existence or truth outside that level of consciousness, or indeed transcending the viewpoint of an individual person. The reason why there appears to be a sameness of experience of the world and physical dimension between the perceptions of each human is the similarities in makeup of each human individual. The differences in the world and the Universe between each individual's perceptions thus tend to be small and subtle so that they are overlooked, beings of each species sharing a roughly common set of perceptions. On the other hand more different types of beings will have markedly different perceptions of any apparent external reality. A whale or an ichneumon wasp will have extremely different experiences and perceptions, which will be 'reality' just as much as a human's view of the cosmos.

By contrast, absolute truth is what is beyond all concepts and can only be experienced. The moment you start saying or thinking "Yes, this is it", or "This exists" or "That isn't true" or "I am like this and you are like that", you have abandoned absolute truth and are in the conceptual level of relative truth. At the level of absolute truth it is no longer meaningful to perceive 'this' as differing from 'that', 'I' from 'other' or indeed 'existent' from 'nonexistent'. This is what is often referred to as non-duality, and it would seem strange and even loony to most ordinary people, who are unaware of anything but mundane, dualistic, conceptually-based experience. Even the majority of philosophers are stuck at that level so that their reams of writings and convolutions of conceptual thought are largely futile beatings about the bush.

Absolute truth is effectively the ultimate level of consciousness, and it cannot be described directly - it can only be experienced. While it is part of each of us and is staring us in the face the whole time, it is very subtle and had been widely thought to require a lot of mental discipline and meditation practice*, normally over many lifetimes, to open and still the mind enough to 'tune in' to it and, in so doing, to cross the threshold of spiritual enlightenment - what the Dzogchen teachings of Buddhism refer to as recognition of the nature of mind, but what I am now more precisely calling gaining of the foundation clarity [or awareness]. You cannot find it through scholarship or philosophizing.

* Actually the truth is far from that. Many people could get themselves speedily to that point by diligent use of a combination of the affirmations and insights in The Guide to Complete Self Realization and appropriate methods given in Healing - The Safest and Quickest Way.

Interestingly and significantly, the personal god of most organized religions, including Christianity, Judaism and Islam, is thus clearly in the realm of relative truth, and is far from being the Absolute. This points again to the limited and actually quite materialistic view of such religions. However, it doesn't mean that people shouldn't be practising in them. For many people those particular viewpoints and levels of awareness represent a step forward in their own evolution. Where these religions err is in proclaiming their relative truth as being absolute truth and therefore something that everybody should accept as belief, and that nobody should look or go beyond.

Buddhism, despite the sectarianism you may find in the odd places, overall has a much more accurate and comprehensive approach, which intrinsically allows and encourages tolerance of different viewpoints. It embraces the whole gamut of spiritual practices and ways of life through renunciative monasticism, a bewildering array of deity worshipping and meditation practices, right through to the ultimate, Dzogchen 'non-meditation', where all conceptually based practices and viewpoints or even identification with any religion become redundant. 

The Buddhist teachings fully recognise that the various Buddhist sects or 'schools' are not presentations of absolute truth but are merely particular sets of mental practices and guidelines to take appropriate people through to a higher level, where they would then follow different practices and work with different perceptions, until eventually they reach enlightenment. The ultimate goal is enlightenment and not belief or 'holiness'. In my view one of the errors that does get into Buddhist communities is that they haven't fully let go of the 'holiness' angle. That is really a culturally based tradition and has no valid basis in spiritual practice. The Dalai Lama, I'm sure, would be delighted not to be called His Holiness! ...But I've digressed a little here. Let's restore our focus....

Later note (August 2007) - My understanding now is actually that ALL religions and religious beliefs are SERIOUSLY harmful because of the long term results of one's effectively creating illusory realities for oneself, which can manifest after death. You can read more about this in Astral Entities - Interference and Attacks from 'The Dark Side'.

Cause and effect, and karma

From our understanding that consciousness itself is the primary experience out of which all levels of 'reality' arise, we can now see how the supposed randomness and chance happenings within the relative truth of the physical dimension are actually part of the unimaginably complex fabric of cause-effect relationships that permeate and direct the whole dance of energy that manifests as experience in all its levels. Apparent randomness in the physical dimension is actually driven by all manner of things that are going on and have occurred within all levels of consciousness. Thus the particular configuration of 'chance' circumstances that, for example got me burnt at the stake as a 'witch' some centuries ago was 'just chance' only from the narrow viewpoint of the physical dimension. When you take a step back and look at the overall reality of consciousness you see that the chance processes were actually a myriad cause and effect relationships which in part were directed by my own previous actions, words and thoughts over countless lifetimes and the particular learning experiences that I needed to go through in order to evolve spiritually and serve my higher purpose for Humanity.

So, from this more liberated viewpoint we can see that there must be underlying causes for the nature of every person's life and position in the world. Karma manifests as the backlog of learning opportunities that each of us needs in order to learn certain lessons that must be learnt before he can progress further towards spiritual enlightenment. As you learn and gain wisdom you progressively clear karma, but where you fail to learn, and keep repeating the same errors, you unawarely are creating new karma - the causes and conditions for further, often difficult, experiences which will present themselves, whether in the same or future lifetimes, in order to give you further opportunities to learn what is necessary. It isn't a matter of moralistic judgement, although people who are carrying judgemental habits will often perceive it as such.

Because anything that occurs in consciousness can direct the course of events in the physical dimension through its supposedly random processes, even each thought in your mind has an effect on that. This is why most teachings about karma emphasize that it is not only your actions and what you say that create or indeed clear karma, but your thoughts too. This is not mumbo-jumbo but a natural conclusion deriving from the simple recognition that reality is based in consciousness, not some external enduring 'reality' that is independent of yourself. If you are wishing ill towards another human being, you are creating karma relating to that, no matter that perhaps you are carefully concealing those thoughts and sentiments. On the other hand, if you allow your mind to be like a beacon of light, shining light, love and compassion upon all other beings, then even without doing anything specific in the physical dimension you would be a powerful healing force, not only for individuals but for Humanity and the world in general.

Transience / impermanence

Whereas the materialist-reductionist belief system sees each human as being transient within an enduring external reality, the liberated view sees consciousness as having neither beginning nor end, with each lifetime being simply a particular sequence of experiences which arise and pass, which can be followed by further such sequences (incarnations). Similarly everything which is observed or experienced in the physical dimension arises and passes, so is transient - even each universe.

And finally...

Please remember that from the more liberated viewpoint that I have expounded in this article, you are not a small, imperfect being within a vast 'external' reality, but instead are consciousness itself - a space within which arise all experiences and possibilities. The physical dimension, far from being the external, true reality, is merely one particular level of experience, albeit an important one, that arises within the multi-level, multidimensional space that is consciousness and indeed you. In an important sense therefore, each one of us is the Creator consciousness (or God, if you like), because we are each manifestations of the play of consciousness which creates the various universes, dimensions and levels of experience.

Okay, now let's go and enjoy some healthy herbal tea. In the relative truth of the physical dimension it does appear to exist, and tastes good...

---

Postscript

Once in a while I get somebody or other approach me because they find a lot of overlap between my own viewpoint on 'reality' and that of some other teacher who they think very highly of, and they want me to get enthusiastic about and swallow the teachings of that other being (usually a well-known guru or a channelled higher being). They do this in the mistaken notion that the particular teachings that they personally resonate with or are attached to represent 'reality', whereas other teachers (including myself) fall short of it at every point where there is a difference in phraseology or detail.

In all kindness I have to point out that they are just repeating the problematical behaviour of most of the religions - not fully understanding that every description of 'reality', however compelling it may seem, is only one viewpoint out of a multitude, none of which represents absolute truth, which latter is beyond concepts and therefore can only be experienced, not described. Therefore instead of trying to convert others to one's own view of reality, we need to become fully accepting and learn to rejoice in the common ground and indeed the differences.

It's important to understand that nobody - even channelled higher beings, and including Jesus and Buddha - could or can directly describe absolute reality to us. Thus whatever communications we do receive on that subject are always an attempt to reduce the higher reality into concepts and language that we can grasp, and so they always bear the distortion of being an interpretation from a specific viewpoint.

People who are attached to a particular description of 'reality' and who try to convince others such as myself of it are actually looking for the elephant's footprints in the forest, oblivious of the fact that they're keeping the elephant locked in their very own basement. If you really want to find ultimate truth, you won't find it by chasing after other people's words, however compelling they may sound, but by looking within yourself - your own consciousness. You can become a great believer, researcher, scholar, sage, philosopher, psychic - but none of that in itself brings you close to enlightenment. And when you do cross the enlightenment threshold and become 'awakened', you then discover that from your new viewpoint all the diverse descriptions of reality have their own validity and usefulness for particular people and particular situations, but none describes what you can then perceive directly as the ultimate nature of everything, which indeed you too cannot describe directly to anyone.