What Is Really Real?

There are two straightforward observations about human existence that seem difficult to deny.

The first comes from science and technology. We can figure things out. Not completely, and not correctly every time, but there is genuine progress. We develop explanations of the world, discover errors in them, replace them with better explanations, and use what we learn to solve problems. Diseases that once killed us can be treated. Natural phenomena that once seemed mysterious can be understood and predicted. Our knowledge remains fallible and incomplete, yet understanding grows, and that growth allows us to reduce suffering.

The second observation concerns mental suffering. Imagine that all the requirements for bodily comfort and survival have been met. We have food, shelter, safety, health care and material comfort. Suffering does not disappear. The mind continues to crave what it does not have and resist what it does not want. There is craving and hatred. When a desire is satisfied, there is temporary contentment. The wanting subsides. Yet before long another desire arises, another circumstance becomes unacceptable, and craving or hatred swells up again. Accepting what is does not come naturally to us.

These are two relatively straightforward observations. We can acquire knowledge, although it remains fallible. And we can satisfy desires, although the resulting contentment remains temporary.

A Not So Straightforward Reality

What these observations ultimately mean is much less straightforward because experience is not always a reliable guide to what is fundamentally real.

The Sun appears to travel across the sky while we remain stationary. A deeper understanding reveals that the Earth is rotating. Sometimes an appearance is not simply wrong but real at one level and not fundamental at another. There really is an image of a lion on my computer monitor. Yet look more closely and there are only pixels arranged in a particular pattern. The lion is real as an image; the pixels provide a deeper description of what is happening.

It therefore seems reasonable to ask the same question about our own experience. Given our experience of fallible knowledge and perennial suffering, what is really real?

There is another perplexing feature of reality: the apparent duality between matter and mind.

Everything we know about matter appears to us through the mind. The concept of matter itself appears in mind. Stars, atoms, brains and scientific instruments are all known through perception and thought. In that sense, mind seems more fundamental than matter.

Yet our scientific picture points in the opposite direction. The brain appears to instantiate the mind. Change the brain and the mind changes. From this perspective, matter seems more fundamental than mind.

We therefore arrive at a peculiar circle: we know matter only through mind, while we explain mind through matter.

Perhaps the difficulty comes from assuming that either matter or mind must be fundamental.

A Possible Resolution

Suppose instead that fundamental reality is a matter-mind meld: one Being capable of manifesting as matter, mind, and everything in between. Through its creative powers, it manifests in innumerable forms, and we are among those manifestations.

Because we are manifestations of that one Being, reality can know itself through us. This may explain our curiosity for knowledge and truth. But we know from a particular body, mind, place and time, so our perspective is limited. Knowledge is therefore possible, yet necessarily incomplete and fallible. Our curiosity pulls us toward truth while our limitation ensures that we never possess the whole of it.

That same limitation may explain suffering. Although the underlying Being is limitless, we experience ourselves as finite. This creates a yearning for limitlessness and bliss, which we seek through limited things: pleasure, possessions, achievement, relationships, recognition and control. When a desire is satisfied, the yearning temporarily subsides and we experience contentment. But another limitation eventually appears, and craving returns.

The problem is not with the things themselves. It is that the limited cannot provide the limitless.

Thus fallible knowledge and perennial suffering may have the same source: the limitless reality experiencing itself through limited perspectives. Its curiosity seeks truth; its yearning seeks bliss.

And the apparent conflict between matter and mind dissolves if both are manifestations of the same underlying Being.

Ethics

If someone subscribes to this theory, its consequences cannot remain merely metaphysical.

If there is fundamentally one Being manifesting as everything, then everything, including oneself, participates in that same underlying reality. In that sense, everything is divine. The differences between us are real at the level at which we live, but they are not fundamental differences in what we ultimately are.

An ethic follows from this:

Give other beings their space for self-expression.

If the one Being manifests not merely as me but also as everything else, my particular manifestation has no privileged claim to dominate the others simply because their interests differ from mine. Other manifestations should, as far as possible, have the space to express what they are.

But freedom cannot be unlimited because manifestations coexist. My freedom intersects with the freedom of others. A world containing many manifestations therefore also contains relationships, responsibilities and roles.

I too have a role to play. This is my duty.

What that duty actually is, however, is not always obvious. There is no simple formula that tells us what our duty is in every circumstance. Our roles can conflict. Consequences are uncertain. Our understanding is fallible. Determining what is ours to do is itself something we have to figure out, using the best knowledge and judgment available to us, while remaining willing to discover that we were wrong.

There is, however, an important clue about what duty is not. Duty is not self-aggrandizement. It is not an excuse to enlarge the ego, accumulate status, impose oneself upon others, or declare that whatever one happens to desire must therefore be one's purpose.

Duty points in the opposite direction.

Duty is service.

If I am one manifestation among innumerable manifestations of the same Being, my role is not to make this particular manifestation as large and important as possible. It is to allow whatever abilities, opportunities and responsibilities have come through me to serve something beyond the enlargement of myself. In religious language, one might say that the individual becomes a conduit for the divine: the whole acting through this particular form.

This also means restricting one's own freedom when necessary. I may want to do one thing while my responsibilities require another. To perform my role well, I sometimes have to place limits upon my own desires.

The ethics of this philosophy therefore has two complementary movements:

Give others space for their self-expression.

Figure out what is yours to do, and put your freedom in service of doing it well.

The first follows from recognizing the underlying unity of existence. The second follows from recognizing that each manifestation has a role within its diversity. Neither gives the ego privileged status.

Liberation

Knowing this philosophy intellectually does not suddenly eliminate the world of limits. There is still space and time. There are still separate bodies and minds. There are still responsibilities, problems, desires, pain and uncertainty.

This is our lived experience.

But the philosophy proposes that this limited perspective is not the deepest description of what we are. Just as the lion remains visible even after we understand the pixels, the world of multiplicity does not have to disappear for us to understand something deeper about it.

The promise of the philosophy is that complete understanding changes our relationship with limitation.

If the underlying Being is already limitless, nothing needs to be acquired to complete it. We can enjoy the things of the world without asking them to provide permanent contentment. Knowledge can continue to grow. Problems can continue to be solved. Duties can continue to demand action. Other beings can continue their own expressions of existence.

What disappears is the demand that reality must become something else before we can be content.

The destination is not omniscience, endless pleasure, freedom from responsibility, or a world without problems. We continue to learn because our perspective is limited. We continue to figure out and perform our duty because we occupy a particular role. We continue to give others room for their own expression because they are manifestations of the same reality.

But beneath all of it is the recognition that the underlying reality lacks nothing.

The promise of this philosophy is to be happy and content with what is, every moment.