On the nature of reality and truth — Too simple to believe! :-)

Just too simple and ordinary to be true!

It really is 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's going on in our consciousness, and dismissing healers and anyone with broader outlooks*, such as myself, as nutters, cranks, 'schizotypals', or at least fundamentally mistaken or misguided. They speak with such conviction, and yet they've missed something amazingly simple and fundamental that's staring them right in the face — the nature of consciousness itself (including their very own consciousness), and indeed the very nature of 'experience'!

What I find easiest to describe as the materialist-reductionist belief system (also known as materialistic reductionism and reductionistic materialism) is the basic belief system espoused by Western cultures and to a fair extent other modern cultures too. It's rampant in Western science and medicine, including most disciplines of psychology. Variants of it are taught too by most of the organised religions, which have produced a particularly materialistic version of spirituality, which latter, however, as I make clear in Exit 'spirituality' — Enter clear-mindedness, is in itself intrinsically problematical for us in diverting us from the grounded and aware clear-mindedness that's the true natural state to which we need to be pointed.

Materialistic reductionism teaches us that there is an enduring 'physical' or 'concrete' reality that's outside ourselves. According to that belief system or doctrine, each of us is thus a transient 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 particular physical matter (i.e., what we call the brain).

If you experience things that appear not to be in the physical 'reality', they're discounted as imagination, dreams and so forth and assumed to be 'not real'. If there is a 'higher' reality (as taught in the religions), it's 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.

Now let's see what's wrong about all that…

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, in her various writings over the years, had 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 that of Mellen Thomas Benedict, of an apparent death-and-reincarnation-in-same-body experience.*

Now, in no way do I intend here to discredit Susan Blackmore for her specific individual errors; we all make errors, and errors are an essential part of learning — and I've certainly made my own share! But that's the point — we need to learn from our errors 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 hasn't moved on from her quite negative and restricted view.

I heard her on a BBC radio programme some years ago, 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'.

Blackmore said some very interesting things in that New Scientist article that I read. She'd 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, built up from all those incoming sensory signals.

But that's where she baulked 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'd 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' (so far, so good — an enlightened person would be doing that), because there was no other 'dimension' to 'reality' (which isn't a claim that would be made by an enlightened person, unless that person had particular interference from the garbage).

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!

For more about what near death experiences appear really to be, please see The true nature of 'the forces of darkness' and its interference and attacks. The same considerations also apply to the issue of hells (including 'night terrors'). The latter phenomena, when properly and awarely investigated, show masses of evidence of a non-physical aspect of reality, and, specifically, the operations of the extremely troublesome influence that I call the garbage. However, I'd go along with Blackmore on what people generally think of as 'higher realities' as being illusory and not 'real', because, so it appears, they're all illusions created in people's minds by the garbage.

The page on hells linked to above is prefaced by a section that I've written specifically for intransigently ignorant people like Susan Blackmore and all the other psychologists and psychiatrists who seek to explain human experience in terms of brain chemistry and 'the medical model', and who proclaim themselves as experts on the human 'mind' while being unwilling to do even the most basic things that would really gain them some understanding of 'mind'.

With regard to the true nature of 'mind' and human experience, psychologists and psychiatrists are among our most ignorant people, and the world would be a better place if those people were relieved of their current 'professions' and retrained to do something actually useful. Please see How all psychiatrists could begin genuinely to help their clients.

I really found Blackmore's article not only saddening but also very funny and breathtakingly bizarre, because she'd 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, enjoy taking 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 Blackmore 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 the very notion of sense organs and the brain, and indeed 'mind', is itself a construct of mind, or rather, of consciousness.

I invite you to stop and think about that and its implications for a moment before continuing…

So, no matter whether you're 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, so arrogantly proclaimed to be 'scientific', 'objective' and 'rational' as distinct from the supposedly irrational and unscientific viewpoints that don't see the physical 'reality' as the only or at least the primary aspect of 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, how might you demonstrate that that's 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 myself am not aware of any means by which anyone could establish the existence or non-existence 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 understanding brings us.

The Great Liberation

Why so many of us get so confused and misled about the nature of reality is that we've been taught to look for it in the wrong direction. Materialistic reductionism and most of the organised religions have taught us that there is 'reality' outside ourselves. From that viewpoint we're 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. Non-physical influences on physical events are denied; 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 some disgusting dictator's henchmen, 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's 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's 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're 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 in what aspect of consciousness he / she / it apparently exists or doesn't exist. I can perceive that there are many aspects of my consciousness, even though as yet I can't 'see' anything within most of those.

One thing that becomes naturally evident when you become enlightened is that the mind itself is a greatly unhelpful illusion, and actually there appears to be NO SUCH THING as a 'mind'. You don't have a mind, but you are consciousness / awareness. I thus write of 'the mind' only as a convenient shorthand that enables me to communicate with people who otherwise wouldn't know what the hell I was talking about. What there is, is simply consciousness or awareness, which is like a sort of metaspace within which all experiences and phenomena (including the whole Universe) arise.

Consciousness can't meaningly be described as a 'thing' at all, and actually nobody in all of 'Existence' could ever understand what it is, because in order to do so you'd have to view it from a higher order of existence — but if you did that you'd at once have simply begged the same question for that higher order of existence, and so actually nothing would have been understood nor explained about it…

A warning about the astral — NOT a genuine reality!

Having got so far in pointing out where lies the 'real' reality that we can know, I have cause now to warn about a very widespread seriously harmful confusion that has caused no end of trouble, strife, grief and other almighty sufferings pretty well throughout the history of human-type beings through the whole of 'Existence', even through any prior universes that may have existed. The most horrendous error that human-type beings have made over and over has been to mistake the astral non-reality for an actual alternative reality. That's why I call it the astral non-reality rather than the astral anything-else!

It's really just a sort-of backwater of reality itself, with an 'official' purpose that's wholly benign and positive, but which has been usurped by human ignorance and greed for thrills and personal power.

According to my inner inquiry, what it really is in functional terms is a deeper-level and more extensive parallel of our conscious imagination, intended (by consciousness itself) to be used as a sort of scratchpad and working-out area for deeper, subconscious levels (only) of our awareness to use in support and augmentation of our creativity in the reality of 'What Is' — i.e., in practical terms, in the physical 'reality'.

It was never intended to be engaged with significantly by our conscious awareness ('minds') or indeed used as any sort of alternative reality in which we could entertain ourselves or use to give us 'special powers' or psychic perceptions, telepathy and all that, for those would all lead speedily into horrendous problems — which is exactly what's happened, including, as I understand it, the inadvertent creation of the garbage itself.

Most of us understand that more than a certain amount of conscious engagement with our imagination wouldn't be healthy, and that to regard our imagination as an actual alternative reality would put us in very serious problems pretty quickly (very likely including getting shunted into your local friendly psychiatric establishment)! Yet people are widely regarding the astral as an alternative reality and indeed playground, and their resultant engagements with it have been causing them and everyone else immense problems, even though most of those people are unaware of any problem about what they're doing, and would generally be closed to any suggestion that things are actually very different from how they believe them to be.

So, when I talk of the need to look within ourselves to find the basis of the reality we can know, it's essential that nobody interprets that as any sort of encouragement to engage with the astral non-reality, or indeed to put big emphasis on 'looking within' at all.

The non-physical underlying true nature of everything — the core of 'reality' or 'What Is' is NOTHING to do with the chaos of the astral non-reality, and everything to do with the constancy of the non-duality of fundamental consciousness itself. But even the looking inward in that latter nominally healthy direction would be very harmful if not very well balanced with the lion's share of one's attention being on our physical surroundings. If you happen to have read my little emergency guide Crisis emergency self-help — Life upturn the SMART way, you'll have noticed how I make a big issue about the need to get one's awareness better grounded as a top priority measure. I gave it that priority for good reason!

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 aspect of consciousness; you can't say that it has an absolute existence or truth outside that aspect 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 'reality' between the perceptions of each human is the similarities in make-up 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're overlooked, beings of any one 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 — but all these are only relative reality / truth, because they're experiences based on interpretations of 'What Is' — not based in any conscious manner on direct experience of 'What Is'.

By contrast, absolute truth is what is beyond all concepts and can only be experienced. It's sometimes described as the truth of experience itself — the very underlying nature of 'What Is'.

The moment you start saying or thinking Yes, this is it, or This exists or That isn't true or I'm like this and you're like that, you're focused into conceptual aspects of truth, which are all aspects of relative truth, not any sort of absolute truth. At the 'level' of absolute truth it's no longer meaningful to perceive 'this' as differing from 'that', 'I' from 'other' or indeed 'existent' from 'nonexistent'*. This is what's 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 (what I call fundamental consciousness), and it can't be described directly — it can only be experienced. While it's the underlying true nature of each of us and is staring us in the face the whole time, it's 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 enlightenment — what the actually highly problematical Dzogchen teachings of Buddhism refer to as recognition of the nature of mind, but what I'm now more precisely calling gaining of fundamental clarity [or awareness]. You can't find it through scholarship, nor through philosophizing.

Interestingly and significantly, the god of ALL 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. Buddhism has actually recognised fundamental consciousness ('the Absolute' as far as anyone can tell), which there has gained names such as Dharmakaya and Rigpa — BUT the teachings have in general twined around the very simple reality a huge amount of esotericism and misinformation that has all come from the garbage to lead people astray, into illusory realities and serious trouble for themselves.

You can read more about this in The true nature of 'the forces of darkness' and its interference and attacks, where you can also read about the true, unedifying nature of the 'God' of any and all religions and spiritual traditions.

"You are what you think you are" — and You create your own reality

There are individuals who believe that they have some sort of advanced 'spiritual' state (supposedly enlightenment or self-realization / self-actualization) who repeat one or both of those statements at people almost as if they were mantras. Let's look at them and see what the 'reality' (sic) is.

You are what you think you are — Is that true?

No, it isn't! The reality is that you are what you are (whatever that is)!

What you seem to be, or what you think you are, is most unlikely in the extreme to be exactly what you are, because nobody can absolutely know anything, and thus nobody can know what one is. One can only make assumptions about what one is — which may be helpful or unhelpful, but which don't reveal what you actually are! Therefore, if you become attached to a notion of what you are, and hold that as a belief, you're creating for yourself an illusory reality, which might subjectively seem to be just fine because it appears to you to be 'How Things Are', but nonetheless it's part of the garbage's strategy for ensnaring you, and so is actually worth dropping like a hot brick, in favour of having a completely open view as to what you are.

You create your own reality — Is that true?

No, it isn't! The 'reality' (sic) is that reality is simply 'What Is', and if you create an apparent reality of your own, it's bound to be an illusory reality, not the 'real' reality!

In my own experience, people who said one or other of those quoted statements had considerable awareness limitations, and used those statements typically to people who were more deeply aware than them, in order to try to convince them that they've got things wrong about the way they experience life. What those statements do NOT show is that the people who repeat them really 'know the score' about enlightenment or deep knowledge or indeed plain common sense.

Indeed, it's the reverse. People who use such statements show that they don't properly understand what they're saying, and aren't thinking clearly, and, in short, aren't being genuine and authentic. Also, they're making fools of themselves through making out to be some sort of expert on what they're demonstrating they really don't understand at all.

Now that I've said that much in order to make an important point, I can add that of course in certain respects the statement appears to be true, though actually its 'true' aspects of meaning are generally not what people have in mind when they use that statement.

As far as anyone can tell, fundamental consciousness, which is our very deepest aspect, in some manner 'creates' the underlying reality of 'What Is' (albeit not in any way envisaged by the religions or spiritual traditions), and so in that respect you could be said to create your own reality — but that doesn't allow for the phenomenon of garbage interference that diverts us all into the creation of illusory realities, which are intrinsically subjective, which distort our perception of the underlying reality of 'What Is'.

Also, you can in many ways change the nature of your life experience, for greater freedom / happiness or for more restriction / unhappiness and pain. So, in that sense you can be said loosely to create your own reality. But that doesn't explain the various apparently external factors such as garbage influences and indeed other people's interactions with you, which can't fully be controlled by you.

Rather than You create your own reality, I'd be inclined to say "You can be in a fair degree of command over your life experience". You can't be in full command over it, without having absolute control over every single person and indeed phenomenon. The notion of total individual freedom is thus a myth; the most that can be attained is a state of maximal freedom of all people — which necessarily also contains constraints on each person's freedom in order to maximize the overall freedom of people generally.

Transience / impermanence

Whereas the materialist-reductionist belief system sees each person as being a transient one-off within an enduring external reality, the liberated view sees consciousness as having neither beginning nor end (as far as anyone can tell), with each lifetime being simply a particular sequence of experiences that arise and pass, which can be followed by further such sequences (incarnations)*. Similarly everything observed or experienced in the physical 'reality' arises and passes, so is transient — even this and any other universes.

And finally…

It's important, then, to remember that from the more liberated viewpoint that I've expounded in this article, you're not a small, imperfect being within a vast 'external' reality, but instead are consciousness itself — the 'metaspace' within which arise all experiences and possibilities. The physical 'reality', far from being the external, true reality, is merely one particular aspect of experience, albeit a particularly important one, that arises within the 'metaspace' that is consciousness itself and thus indeed you. From the enlightened or truly liberated viewpoint, each one of us is fundamental consciousness (aka universal consciousness), and is thus 'All There Is' and 'What Is'.

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

Some implications…

Once we see that consciousness itself is the underlying reality — at least as far as anyone could possibly ascertain — we can see the insane crassness of the so-called 'scientific' (i.e., materialist-reductionist) view of life and of reality. Scientists and mathematicians often refer to 'randomness' and 'random' events, implying (and indeed often overtly stating) that things can happen without a cause.

While there's no way to prove that some things can happen without causes, actually that doesn't make sense when you have the deeper, liberated view of reality. Materialistic reductionism puts a person's blinkers on, and raises the old chestnut of 'randomness' or 'no cause' wherever sufficient causality for some event can't be established purely within their own 'physical only' model of 'reality'. It's laughably considered to be more 'rational' to ignore (and indeed to categorically deny) all aspects of causality that arise in aspects of reality (consciousness) other than the physical 'reality'.

How can you possibly know that an event — even a specific atomic decay — has no specific cause, just because that type of decay occurs within a mathematical pattern that's generally known as 'randomness'? — You can't!

And similarly, if you claim that it's 'just chance' (i.e., with no specific cause) that you are who you are, with your particular skin and hair colour, gender, sexual orientation (etc), and were born to the particular parents who you had, in the particular place where you were born, and then had specific life experiences, and that there was no particular cause of any of that, simply demonstrates your unawareness and ignorance, and your inability / unwillingness to open your mind to the whole picture. Indeed, on the basis of my own findings about what appears really to be our broader context*, you'd very likely be absolutely horrified if you properly understood what, through your compulsive ignorance, you've been allowing to progressively happen to you.

Is it really 'just chance' that a fair proportion of very young children (from the age of two) suffer the most horrendous night hells (aka night terrors)? The materialist-reductionists seek to evade the challenge of that by invoking the old bogey of 'mental illness' or 'brain malfunction', which supposedly can be 'treated' — though it's not much of a treat for the unfortunate people who get such 'treatment', for that does them nothing but harm, and diverts attention away from doing anything effective towards addressing the fundamental cause of the problem, which just happens to be a non-physical influence — the garbage, which, so far, the scientific and psychological / psychiatric / medical Establishment, especially here in the West, has resolutely shied away from countenancing as anything 'real'.

Thus, sad to say, overall, Western-style 'science', which is claimed by its practitioners to be 'rational', is neither rational nor scientific, except in a narrow and limited way. True science would always take into account the limitations of its own terms of reference in studying or investigating any phenomenon or issue. With few exceptions, our own 'scientists' don't do that, at least to any worthwhile extent.

The problem isn't science, but the materialist-reductionist belief system of the vast majority of the scientists, doctors and so on. Nobody in the whole of 'Existence' has found genuine truth, nor any bit of it, by means of belief — even a materialist-reductionist belief!