Real and Unreal
“Blue girl spin away your dreams –
A dance in fields of dream;
Cool water splashed upon your wrist
A golden ring of memory and future things;
Your heart a yearning crucible of possibles and maybe soon …
Perhaps indeed in fields of dream where real and unreal meet and kiss as light;
Brave compromise returns us to our feel and sight;
Perhaps then blue girl, spin away your dreams.”
Oliver, Winchester, summer 1967
This beautiful little poem was written for me by a young American man way way back in the first year that I started out in my young adulthood, looking to become then an archaeologist. It was the height of the Vietnam war and Britain became a haven for many young American men seeking to escape the notorious draft that would see so many of them condemned to die in such a pointless war. Britain then was evidently much easier to find refuge in than it is these days. It was my first introduction to real American people (men in reality as there were no women here) rather than the many Hollywood films of the cowboy, wild west or gangster genre I had watched on TV during my childhood. Hearing their accents, so alien to me then, I can recall feeling intimidated, but I didn’t let this stand in my way in volunteering for the local archaeological excavations in the nearby town Winchester. Here it was I was to meet the draft dodger brigade, for whom volunteering on the excavations gave them basic free board and lodging, and safety. It was an exciting time for me, opening up my world to so many possibilities and new ideas.
Oliver was an attractive, charismatic young man, possibly in some ways kindred to the Doors’ Jim Morrison, although he would have hated to have been seen this way I’m sure. The world of Sixties counterculture and Flower Power was most definitely not his scene, more because he was evidently very well able to spot the faux and the pseud that indeed continues to stalk our notion of reality down to the present. Probably inevitably I fell for him and we engaged in a brief, innocent romance before we went our separate ways. I was just seventeen. He wrote me this poem which I have always remembered, be it many years between the times when I have stumbled upon it again, stored deep in my memory banks. He was very perceptive and saw me very clearly, more than could see myself then. It yet reverberates in strange unexpected ways down even to today. Real and unreal, my Ever Quest. What do I mean by this?
“The unreal never is; the Real never is not. This truth indeed has been seen by those who can see the true” (Bhagavad Gita 2.16. See Ref 1).
But what is ‘real’?
It is not my intention here to embark upon a long treatise on the nature of Reality, which inevitably is, as we say in academic parlance ‘beyond the scope of this essay’. After all, this is the purview of philosophy, from foundational thinkers like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in the classical western traditions, whose ideas still shape our modern notions of the world, or of the ancient Vedic philosophies from the east; to say nothing of many others. Also of ontology, the metaphysics of the what constitutes ‘being’. Indigenous cosmologies in particular have very different ways, too, of understanding what ‘reality’ is. My aim here is to highlight what so many of us always take as a ‘given’ and never ever really question; unless of course some significant life event forces a reconsideration of understanding, values and so on. And how it is possible to carefully unravel many of one’s set ways of thinking and behaving to allow wider, more transcendent vistas to emerge upon the otherwise so constrained horizons of one’s life.
Fandom
Seemingly to digress widely now, a few months ago I wrote the second only fan letter I have ever written, the first being to Sir David Attenborough. I never regret writing the first, which I thought would be the only such letter I would ever write which, for 25 years, it was. Whilst I don’t exactly regret writing my second letter, calling it, as I did when I sent it, the second bookend of my life, I can see from this perspective several months later that it was probably about something very different. My letter to Sir David was graciously answered by him, whereas my Letter for Bernardo Kastrup wasn’t. This, by itself, is not a sufficient cause to regret sending such a letter, it came from a very honest place, but it did make me question the motives that went into it and therefore the purpose it really served.
The letter, an edited version of which is attached here, explains well enough the nature of the fandom in question, whilst my subset critique of several of his premises in the Analytical Idealism paradigm of reality which has become his personal ministry, is also explained well enough there too. Mainly I critique his concept of ‘God’ (‘Mind at Large’ – the transpersonal flow of consciousness which ‘Nature’ is understood as being in this context), in the context of ancient Vedic (Advaita Vedanta) metaphysics and ontology. There were other points as well, all equally redundant as the AI moderator of emails clearly consigned mine to the virtual slush pile anyway!
For many months I became ideologically subsumed in Bernardo’s paradigm, watching many of the online interviews conducted with all manner of interested parties, many specialists in their fields of physics, biology, neuroscience, philosophy etc. I never saw anyone get the better of him. As a double PhD in Computer Engineering and Philosophy (ontology and epistemology) his knowledge of western philosophy in particular is probably unrivalled and his capacity for logic and logical argument similarly so. I felt it was good for my intellect to engage with the ideas in these interviews, of widely differing levels and calibre, very much calibrated to the intellectual level and knowledge of the person interviewing him. But, as is ever my way, I never fully sign up to anything, or at least only in the trial period before taking what I have learned from it and leaving, to then see how well (or not) it fits with my own understandings of reality, my personal research across most of my life.
My personal interest is Indigenous cosmologies (ontology, epistemology) and shamanism in particular, predicated on my early years of specialising in pre-Columbian studies, drawn again from that early archaeological career which fairly quickly moved me from Britain to the epicentre of my subsequent life’s passion: South America (refer here back to the fan letter to Sir David who had first inspired the nascent five year old me into wanting to go there in the first place), but this isn’t the place, nor is there the space, to engage in a quasi auto biographical narrative about how I came to have the views I have now. Suffice to say that from being a committed Dawkins style atheistic materialist and naturalist (a person who subscribes to naturalism as a philosophical stance) I slowly moved into being someone with a profound spirituality, belief in a concept of Absolute Reality (aka ‘God’) and who embraced rather than dismissed their capacity for mysticism and mystical experiences. There are certainly those of my acquaintance who likely see me as some kind of apostate, someone who once knew the ‘true faith’ (scientism), but consciously turned their back on it to embrace mumbo jumbo instead.
Constructing Reality
Enter Bernardo Kastrup, who, in pioneering 21st century Analytical Idealism with all its modern revisions well grounded in current understandings of physics, particularly quantum physics, and neuroscience, has finally heralded the end of materialism and its naturalistic atheistic tenets. The old paradigm is dying, although there are unquestioningly still many adherents reluctant to switch off its life support system. High time too, because it is this Cartesian view underlying all modern western thinking which has produced the world we live in now with many of its attendant ills.
Scientism, physicalism, materialism, naturalism – the view that the world we inhabit, which we see all around us in the form of physical objects, has a separate exogenous existence of its own and that whatever is observed is essentially mechanistic – are simply belief systems anyway. Any belief system which adopts the view that it is the truth, not just a belief system and therefore beyond serious challenge in anyway is ideological and has become a fundamentalist dogma (there are many examples of these). Scientism has opposed itself principally to creationism, which it vehemently denounces (2). But proponents of any other philosophical stance that seek to challenge it are, as I have generally experienced, treated as though they might as well be creationism. I have rarely met with any interest in or capacity for acknowledgement of the validity of other forms of understanding reality from those espousing a devoutly scientism perspective. Everything that isn’t naturalist physicalism/materialism is dismissed as contemptuously as though it were creationism. In this it has very little difference to the religion it despises (3). And, too, the more you cleave to and embed yourself in a single perspective and focus all of your rationale, observational and analytical enquiries on it, then conceptually you become increasingly hard wired into being able to see ‘reality’ only in that way, and no other. I can well remember how I used to be myself, many years ago, until with time, rigorous self questioning, observation and enquiry, I was able to start opening my mind and capacity for perception in ways that allowed for alternative possibilities and paradigms to emerge. In this, the study of different Indigenous cosmologies and ontologies greatly helped me.
As a generality most people assume they know what is ‘real’ i.e., what reality is for them. But reality is always constructed from conceptual building blocks; it most certainly is not an a priori ‘given’. Children are born into the world pre-programmed to learn the conceptual realities of home, culture, environment and so on, and by the time a child is five or six years of age, this primary programming is largely done and hard to undo. It goes together with learning language, and so on. Any religion with its associated canon and rituals is generally also acquired at the same time. Although as a person grows up they may choose to challenge the world they live in, possibly take up with a new belief system or religion, it will always be superimposed upon the foundational formational strata that was acquired in infancy.
But if reality is constructed, it can be deconstructed too. One of the main objectives of Eastern theological yogic and Zen traditions is just this: to deconstruct your accepted world view within which you operate as the distinct personality you experience yourself as being, to allow you to see that it really is just a conditioned world, a sort of ‘club’ whose modus operandi we all subscribe to. This is more obvious for the social and cultural worlds that people construct, but it is harder for many people to see that the world of apparent material reality ‘out there’, experienced by the senses and measured and defined by our modern scientific methodologies, is, too, simply an illusion. This is understood in ancient Vedic parlance as being ‘maya‘ the illusion, or the appearance of things, that we experience ourselves living in a material world which in fact is not ‘real’ at all. It just seems that way; it has that appearance. The measurement systems employed to define it are drawn from our perceptual world of the senses, so notions of ‘objectivity’ in this sense can never apply. The models we make of it seem to work, fitting the world we experience. Yet a recent Nobel Prize for Physics award went to three researchers who proved through quantum entanglement theory that the universe as we perceive isn’t locally ‘real’ at all. Our models of ‘reality ‘are just a convenience that seem to fit with our experience and allow us movement within its framework. But they are not ‘real’ (4).
Paradigms of Reality
Analytic Idealism is one of several alternative paradigms for interpreting how our notions of ‘reality’ come about and testing these within strict logical frameworks of enquiry. There are others but again, here is not the space or the place to be reviewing them, but physicalism is far from being the only framework to understand the apparently material world we live in. In the end, as we are persuasively given to understand, it really is all ‘in the Mind’, given that reality, it seems, is in fact mental, not physical at all (5).
Does any of this really matter? Across much of my life I have juggled with these questions, but lately I have come to a point when it must be admitted that I don’t really care that much any more anyway. This isn’t just cynicism or, worse, creeping onset of dementia in older years, but more I believe the fruits of my long enquiries which allowed me to see – finally – that there is no a priori reality and that we really do construct it from an infinite soup of potentialities according to our sensory and psychological programmings. Every creature will do this too, having its own experience of its own world: its own reality, although unlike people, it will simply accept it and live with it, and not subject it to all these questions as we people do. And the model given by those ancient Vedic sages over two thousand years ago is pretty much the way that Quantum Field theory now understands how the world is; that ‘Reality’ is simply a projection of consciousness. The only thing that is real is just that: consciousness, in ancient Indian theology understood as being ‘the Light’ – prakāśa.
I feel increasingly that, like ignorant children, we have subjected something precious to our insatiable enquiries and pulled it apart to see how it works, never to be able to put it back together again. And have devised ever increasingly destructive means of enquiry that have allowed us to asset strip our world – the earth, our mother – leaving no place or space for its many other legitimate inhabitants and little but toxic waste behind.
Bernardo is excellent at defending his paradigm, although there are certainly those who object to his statement that Analytical Idealism is the 21st Century’s only plausible metaphysics (6). I think (as indeed I said in my letter to him) that, as is the way with any paradigm of reality, it will have its time before being displaced by another more plausible, and another, and yet another ad infinitum. He himself likely agrees with this too from what I have ever understood from the interviews with him I have watched.
In this I am minded of what Ultimate Reality (aka ‘God’) gave the famous 14th-15th century English mystic Julian of Norwich to understand as she struggled to make sense of the series of mystical revelations she had experienced in her youth:
“From the time these things were first revealed I had often wanted to know what was our Lord’s meaning. It was more than fifteen years after [the revelations she had experienced] that I was answered in my spirit’s understanding. ‘You would know our Lord’s meaning in this thing? Know it well. Love was His meaning. Who showed it to you? Love. What did He show you? Love. Why did He show it? For love. Hold on to this and you will know and understand love more and more. But you will not know or learn anything else — ever” (emphasis added).
(Julian of Norwich. Revelations of Divine Love).
For me, whilst hesitating from subscribing to Analytical Idealism completely, I am nevertheless willing to accept much of its thesis. As much as anything, I applaud the arrival of a new paradigm which is logical enough, and ‘real’ enough, well grounded as it is in latest understandings of quantum theory and consciousness studies, to have the power to challenge the arid, simplistic unidimensional scientism which, rather unsurprisingly given its myopic, materialist, reductionist vision, reduces us all to being nothing more than ‘lumbering robots’ (7).
“…Where real and unreal meet and kiss as light;
Brave compromise returns us to our feel and sight.”
Real and unreal kissing as Light – prakāśa – in the imaginal realm (8) is evocatively beautiful, although I can’t speak for what ‘brave compromises’ might have been required to return us to our feel and sight – that is, our normal mundane reality constructed through our perceptual senses and psychological conditionings. Perhaps just the circumstances of our lives then that guaranteed our eventual parting, never to meet again!
And did I spin away my dreams? What are dreams anyway, if not the subject perhaps of another essay! What is real anyway? Little did you know Oliver, when you wrote that sweet poem to me so long ago, how it would form the basis for this brief treatise on reality by the me I eventually became!
Featured Image: River Itchen at Winchester from:
https://www.fishingbreaks.co.uk/chalkstream/itchen.htm
I remember going for a long walk with Oliver along the River Itchen one summer afternoon, looking much as the photo here shows, and I suspect some of the ideas and imagery he used in the poem came from here, hence my using it for the Featured Image. It is an immense irony for me that I am having to use photos of Winchester taken from the web, given it was my home town for many years during my youth, and place I have visited and photographed many times over my life, particularly of the River Itchen and water meadows in summer. The last time was indeed just a few years ago. My reason is that as part of the Pilgrimage renunciation of 2019-2021, I gave up or otherwise allowed to become redundant most of my photographic archives, which are now no longer retrievable. Those that I use (of my own archive) are mainly taken from my travels in India in the last five years.
1. The Bhagavad Gita. 1962; 2003. Chapter 2 V. 16. Penguin Books. Translation by Juan Mascaro.
2. e.g., Richard Dawkins. 2008. The God Delusion. Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston.
3. Readers are recommended to read critiques of scientific fundamentalism in, for example, Bernardo Kastrup 2015. Chapter 4: On Skepticism and Science In: Brief Peeks Beyond. Critical essays on metaphysics, neuroscience, free will, skepticism and culture. Iff Books, Winchester, U.K., and Washington, U.S.A.
4. Nothing is Locally Real. The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics. Medium. October 2024 https://shorturl.at/3jY0X
5. Readers are recommended to check out the many books written by Bernardo Kastrup, or to refer to the different videos and articles available through the Essentia Foundation, but see for example: Bernardo Kastrup 2024. Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A straightforward summary of the 21st century’s only plausible metaphysics. Iff Books. London, UK; Washington, DC, USA.
6. For example Rupert Sheldrake: https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2024/11/response-to-rupert-sheldrakes.html
7. Richard Dawkins. 2006. The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
8. e.g., Patrick Harpur. 2009. The Philosophers’ Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination. Squeeze Press.
The Imaginal World is actually a concept devised by C.G. Jung and discussed in many of his works. See, for example https://appliedjung.com/mundus-imaginalis/
