The Monktastic Blog

Rational spirituality: transcending your metaphysics

It is impossible to prove that the past really happened. For all you know, you and the world popped into existence, fully formed, just now. Even stranger, it is not even rationally justified to say that a real past is more likely. Put another way, it is not meaningfully “unlikely” that the past is an illusion.

Similarly, it is not “likely” that the laws of physics will continue to operate five seconds from now. Even though the sun has come up millions of times before, we are not logically justified in believing that it is more likely to come over the horizon tomorrow than, say, a merry band of monkeys.

Go ahead and digest that for a moment.

Materialism is the philosophy that says that the world is fundamentally made of stuff, and idealism says that reality is mental (not unlike a dream). Like with time, it is not meaningful to call one possibility more “likely” than the other, without relying on untestable assumptions. It may feel more logical to believe in the past, future, space, and matter, but this is an illusion. The decision is pure preference.

Note that none of this ought to change with more science or better technology. If anything, our scientists and technologists are becoming more convinced that we’re in a simulation or the like.

It is obviously more practical to take time and matter seriously, and as a result we believe that we ought to take them literally. But something truly remarkable happens when you learn to separate these two modes of belief (the practical and the literal). I’ll try to communicate the faintest whiff of what that something is, recognizing that it will likely sound like nonsense from where you currently stand.

Notice the splendor of sights and sounds that presently surround you. They probably seem like nothing special. The reason they feel mundane is that deep down, you’re sure you can explain what’s causing them: photons, photoreceptors, neurotransmitters, etc. Even if you don’t know any of the science, you know that you have seen and heard stuff before, so there’s nothing very special about any of it happening now. What’s the big deal?

Now this next point is delicate to convey. Recall that, as far as you can ever know, none of that stuff is actually true – or even likely. There is a subtle but meaningful sense in which your experience is unexplainable, and if you could see it, you would be overcome with a profound awe, gratitude, wonder, joy, and love quite unlike anything that is possible from within your metaphysical strictures.

That statement is likely to strike a nerve. To call something “unexplainable” sounds like an invitation to religion. Certainly science offers enough meaning that we shouldn’t have to resort to celebrations of ignorance. But the species of insight provoked by the realization in question is entirely distinct from those offered by science, and worthwhile in its own right. It is uniquely transcendent, in that it transcends your whole worldview. And while it can, incidentally, offer a genuine glimpse into the essence of religion, it is possible (if difficult) to arrive there using nothing more than careful reasoning and profound honesty.

Again, recognize that you cannot know – with any certainty at all – what is causing the marvelous display before you; nor even that it has ever happened before. Now notice that regardless of how well you intellectually comprehend this, some part of your mind is dead certain anyway. When that aspect of your mind confronts its own profound disingenuity, and releases its unjustified stranglehold, something completely unexpected happens.

I’m not being coy on purpose. That “something unexpected” is very hard to put into words, which is why contemplatives across the ages have resorted to riddles and poetry. I’ll share one of my favorites, from Tibetan Buddhism:

So close you can’t see it

So deep you can’t fathom it

So simple you can’t believe it

So good you can’t accept it

The ability to undermine your metaphysics has another benefit. We’ve already seen that we cannot disprove the hypothesis that this is all a dream. But if it is a dream – and in particular, your dream – then perhaps there is a way to prove it.

The idea goes like this. If this is your dream, then in some way, your own mind is responsible for the remarkable internal consistency and stability of the apparent world. In other words, materialism is true because you make it true. But, as in a nighttime dream, the mental mechanisms that generate the world’s dynamics lie outside your normal conscious access. That is why you cannot simply will a million dollars into your bank account now, for example.

But it is possible to become lucid – that is, to wake up into the dream. This begins to reveal insights into its nature. With continued practice, it becomes possible to unravel the dream, discovering very precisely how (and why) every little detail and law is constructed. One can then “re-ravel” it in any way that one sees fit – perhaps choosing to make the dream character forget about the whole process. This allows the character to enjoy the dream with abandon, never even suspecting the astonishingly clever ruse.

According to various contemplative traditions, that is basically where you find yourself now. And there is a way to verify this, unlike with materialism, where you must forever remain suspicious about whether you are in a dream or simulation. Of course, this dream is far more intricate than the kind you have at night, but the mechanism behind its operation is fundamentally the same.

Waiting for others to prove this, or for external verification, is futile. If you really want to test the possibility that this world is your dream, you will have to profoundly undermine the deep layers that give rise to its dynamics and see what happens. As you may have already guessed, one way to do this is to powerfully confront the illogic of your metaphysical assumptions. This can interrupt the processes that use those assumptions to generate your mundane, well-behaved world.

This also offers insight into why it’s so hard to subvert your metaphysics: if this actually were your dream, would you really want to know it?

If this all sounds crazy, it is for good reason. If you were to see too much, too soon, you may indeed go crazy. The main risk is in misunderstanding whose dream, exactly, this is. We’ve already said it is your dream, but there’s a subtlety here.

Consider a nighttime dream, where your character may have very little in common with your waking self. If she were told the dream came from her mind, she would rightly object. But in another sense it’s true: what is “looking out her eyes” is you, the dreamer. So it is her dream, but not in the way she might expect.

In a similar way, although this is your dream, “you” does not refer to the dream character you normally identify with. Yet if you were to turn precisely inward, toward the seeming void from which your thoughts arise – in the direction you know instinctively as “I” – you might indeed discover That which dreams realities into existence. Or rather, it might rediscover itself.

You are the Buddha, trying to wake up. Other names people have used across the ages are God; the primordial life force; or unconditional, universal love. It’s hard to describe without sounding nutty. But whatever you call it (or not, since we’re trying to avoid metaphysical baggage), it points to something meaningful and worth discovering for yourself.

The Buddha – what you fundamentally are – is not a person or entity. This part is the hardest to communicate, so I’ll only give a brief sketch.

Notice that what you call “the world” is entirely your own mind. It is easy to understand this intellectually, but that’s not very impactful while part of your mind is still certain that there’s also a “real world” that’s the cause of this mental world. As before, you don’t have to believe that there’s not, but something interesting happens when you stop pretending to know that there is.

As described in the above-linked piece, there is nobody sitting inside your head looking out at the dream. Instead, the dream is experiencing itself. The process of awakening is not about you waking up. It is about the luminosity waking up from the illusion of being a separate self. “Buddha” is the very self-aware “fabric” that conjures itself into the shape you call “reality.”

I told you it would be hard to describe. I’m not sure I can do any better here.

What about other people? How do they fit into all this?

The question of intersubjectivity is hardest to answer. What’s been written so far sounds like solipsism (the form of idealism that says this is all your personal dream), but it’s not quite.

The closest analogy I can find is the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. In it (or at least, in one formulation of it), when you encounter the result of an experiment that has more than one potential outcome, all of the outcomes happen. In a sense, you split into multiple copies, each inhabiting a distinct world (corresponding to the possible outcomes).

From your perspective, this “splitting” only happens with you, personally; you are the sole “observer” in your world, in a way that is physically verifiable in principle. Yet there’s no reason to believe that the same isn’t happening for other people or objects, too, from their own perspective. In this way, the world you experience is particular to you, and yet this doesn’t imply that you are the only observer in the multiverse, as it were. Put another way: what you call “the world” is entirely your dream, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t others.

I’m not trying to suggest that QM should be used to support any of what I’ve written above, but the analogy may be useful.

You may be thinking that all of the above can be perfectly well accommodated by the materialist framework – except, perhaps, for the suggestion that the very “laws of nature” are malleable (which you quite reasonably regard as nonsense). And nothing I say can (or should) convince you otherwise.

Yet even if you don’t take any of it seriously, you are still left with the conundrum mentioned at the beginning of this piece. If you are honest with yourself, you will discover that you have no reason to take your metaphysical beliefs literally, and yet part of you can’t seem to help it. This really ought to prompt you to discover what happens when you confront this discrepancy with every ounce of sincerity you have. Don’t settle for “I can’t help it.”

The Buddha more or less claims – and I’m inclined to agree – that when you finally do this, you will discover all of the above, and infinitely more.

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