Reality As Medium of Communication

I am a philosophical idealist. This means that I believe that the Universe is primarily of a mental nature and that this belief is stronger than the physical laws of nature. Of course this doesn’t mean that physical nature doesn’t exist, but it does beg the question: What is reality? As I wrote that materialism is an illusion, I reject the idea that reality is merely a product of the material world, for the simple reason that the material world doesn’t exist without a mental one.

The ideas behind philosophical idealism are about as old as philosophy and religion themselves, and they open the door towards more spiritual thinking. Unfortunately, idealism seems to have fallen out of favour in parts of the Western science-oriented world.

Recently, I wrote somewhere that “science is the cold comfort for those who are too afraid to look beyond”. Science is great, and it brings us many good things, but it’s a human invention and impossibly suited to answering the great questions about where humans and their consciousness themselves come from. The problem is that when we do look beyond science, we enter a realm where personal experience and interpretation are leading. We can try to make rational sense of our experiences and we can try to make our interpretations logically consistent, but without the ability of scientific proof and reproducibility, we lose the ability to reason about matters of truth with any sense of authority.

But here’s the thing: Why would we care about authority when it comes to spiritual truth? The problem of authority is why I previously said that science is today’s democratic religion, and the free mind is free to reject predefined lines of thinking. Each of us is allowed their own personal subjective truth. And without relying on any authority, it is totally fine to believe in both science and spirituality while recognising the overlap between them has its limits.

Science tells us a lot about the reality that surrounds us, while spirituality explains things about the mental reality that we live in. But that only confuses the original question: What is reality? Is there a difference between physical reality and mental reality?

Reality is the shared world that we live in. But there’s a simple reason for this that might be easily overlooked: We live in a shared reality, because we want to live in a world that we share with others. Because you may have as much subjective truth as you like, if you cannot share it without anyone else, that truth becomes a very lonesome one. Some people may feel they are better off alone, but I certainly know I like to live together with others that I respect and love. There is nothing scientific about this, yet it’s a simple emotional fact for me.

This is also where the Philosophy of Balance comes back into play. As you see, we don’t want only subjective truth, we want objective truth. We want truth that we can share, deliberate on, and collaborate with. But neither do we want only objective truth, because that would ultimately eliminate our free will and every sense of privacy. We want a balance between them, and we want to align them.

Science helps us find this balance. It takes our subjective truths and builds an objective one on the basis of the facts that we can agree on.

The facts that we can universally agree on are based on observation. Observation of a reality that we share, which we call the physical world. But what is that reality? How did it come to be?

Scientists follow mathematical models to explain that the physical world originated from a Big Bang, while assuming that physical laws of matter would be the same almost 14 billion years ago, well before the theoretical advent of life, as they are today. Meanwhile, they ignore that physical matter ceases to exist in its physical form, even today, when unobserved. Needless to say, there are some serious gaps in the Big Bang theory, but unless someone can come up with something better, we run with it.

Personally, I have no authority to go against the ideas of these scientists, nor do I wish to do so. But spiritually, I do have my own interpretation, where I see the Big Bang more as a birth or an awakening of consciousness. It means that life was always there, even if it may not have been life in its biological form yet. But rationally, I feel there must’ve been some form of life, because without life, there is no consciousness and thus no observation, and therefore no physical reality either.

Now, I wouldn’t have made up these views unless I felt a compelling need to. Scientifically, it’s full of holes, of course, but then again, so are the leading scientific theories themselves. And thankfully, plenty of scientists will happily admit as much. But my need stemmed from personal experiences that defy rational explanations, and I’ve since come to realise that many people have such experiences. Heck, life itself is still a mystery to us, and that’s totally okay. Not everything needs to fit in a rational framework. Some things just are.

This very obvious aspect of reality eluded me for a long time, probably because I come from a pretty bad religiously messed-up background where I was never taught how to open up emotionally. This led me to flee towards science as a last resort of understanding the world, but of course that’s a misappropriation of what science was meant to do. Science can do many things, but teaching emotional maturity is not really one of them.

Of course I am also not the only one who struggled with their emotions. So if there’s any purpose to this blog, it’s also to teach others how to come to terms with your inner insecurities and how to achieve inner balance, as you learn to accept that the spiritual and emotional realities are as real as the physical one.

For me, the key was acceptance, and opening up to the people around me. Accepting the ugly parts about myself and learning that everyone has their ugly parts. Parts that become less ugly, and more human, when you discuss them with others. Parts that become understandable when you learn to talk openly about them without fear of judgement.

Reality is a mirror, a boomerang, and an amplifier. If you keep yourself bottled up, reality will act as a force that will try to open up that bottle, smashing it if it has to. This is an inevitability, because we cannot outrun the fears we keep inside. We must overcome our fears.

We must open up, so that we can align ourselves with the reality around us. So that we can learn to live in harmony with it. To balance our own needs with the ones of those around us. That’s when we discover that reality, ultimately, is a medium. It allows us to connect with others, to communicate with them, to share ideas, feelings, or even just our common state of being. To appreciate one another and to find comfort with one another. With people, with nature, and with the world.

Reality is a two-way street. We create it, but we also experience it. We shape it, but it also shapes us. And if we can accept reality for what it truly is, even if we don’t fully understand it, then that same reality can connect us with those who accept us for whoever we are.