The True Nature of Reality: What Should a Rational Person Believe?

We all want to know whether there is a God, whether our life has meaning and purpose, what happens when we die, how the universe begins, whether we have freewill; whether it matters how we behave, whether the space-time universe is truly real, how something comes from nothing, how mind, matter and consciousness are related and the answers to many other such questions.

Or so we usually think. If we reflect on the matter we might find reasons to be less enthusiastic. What if we learn that Materialism is true, God does not exist, consciousness is an artefact of matter and human life is meaningless? Imagine knowing this is the case! Would we really want to know? What if a wrathful God exists who constantly watches over us and judges our behaviour in every moment of our life? Would we want to know this?

An investigation of these questions requires a little courage, therefore, for we may not like what we discover. There are reasons to be optimistic, however, since those who claim to know the answers to these questions describe a world more surprising and wonderful than anyone would be able to imagine.          

If we really want to know the answers to such questions then there are just two methods available to us. We can try to work out their answers by the use of logic and reason, or we can follow the advice of the Oracle at Delphi to ‘Know thyself’. The former method is metaphysics, a science of logic, and the latter is mysticism, a science of consciousness. These are the only disciplines that study the ultimate or fundamental nature of reality, which is what we would need to understand in order to answer profound questions about God, freewill, origins, ethics, consciousness, life and death and so forth. All such questions boil down to one: What is the fundamental or true nature of reality? 

There is a limit to how well we can answer this question by thinking about it. Anybody who spends a little time trying to imagine the fundamental nature of reality will discover it is impossible to do so. This is not because human beings are unimaginative, but because the fundamental nature of reality is unimaginable. It has no form or appearance, being the origin of form and appearance. Any word, concept, idol, image, number or idea will misrepresent it. It lies beyond the categories of thought so cannot be thought. It is not a number or a set. It is prior to space and time. For an information theory it would be the undifferentiated information-space necessary for the relative and dependent existence of information. It is not just simpler than we tend to think, but simpler than we can think.     

This is a matter of logic noted by Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century, and largely ignored by philosophers ever since. It is the doctrine of the ancient Upanishads, the Buddha and Lao Tzu, again largely ignored by philosophers ever since. After all, what could we hope to gain from trying to think the unthinkable, imagine the unimaginable or conceive the inconceivable?

Oddly, and perhaps ironically, there would be everything to be gained. For the purposes of the analytical kind of philosophy that employs reason and logic to work out how the world works, it is not necessary to think, imagine or conceive ultimate reality. Much can be learned from trying to do so, but we cannot hope to succeed. For a philosophical investigation this does not matter. All we need to do is take this conceptually empty void that is the Origin of All as an axiom for a fundamental theory and rigorously derive its implications and predictions for metaphysical questions, the empirical sciences and the lives and deaths of human beings. By investigating and testing these implications and predictions we can begin to build a mental picture or model of the world, an extended global theory or ‘theory of everything’ that provides answers for all our questions. We cannot learn what is true by this method, but can learn what it would be most rational to believe.

One might reasonably expect that this would be a core part of the job for all philosophers, yet most philosophers do not attempt it. Such a project would seem too ‘mystical’ for them.  It is telling, therefore, that they can make no sense of metaphysics. Metaphysics and mysticism investigate the same unique explanandum, and to study one while ignoring the other cannot be considered rational behaviour. One reason commonly given by philosophers to explain their lack of interest in mysticism is that its doctrine is too vague to be amenable to analysis, so lies beyond the remit of analytical philosophy. From the perspective of a Perennialist philosopher this is a frank admission of how little interest they have in the subject. In metaphysics this doctrine is a precision instrument that cuts like a subtle knife through all dilemmas and antinomies.    

The Perennial philosophy, as the philosophy of the mystics has come to be known, endorses a neutral or ‘middle way’ metaphysical theory. This states that all the extreme or positive answers to metaphysical questions are wrong. To the question, ‘Does the universe begin with something or nothing?’ the answer would be neither. To the question, ‘Does the universe begin or not-begin?’ the answer would be no. On the face of it these answers may seem implausible if not paradoxical, yet if they are correct this would easily explain why philosophers cannot decide between the two extreme answers to any such question, and no other explanation is available.

All metaphysical questions ask us to decide between two extreme answers, and in all cases philosophers cannot decide between them because neither of the extreme answers survives critical analysis. According to logic and reason they are incorrect, just as the Perennial philosophy claims. This causes confusion in Western philosophy, but when we interpret this result of analysis as proving the truth of the Perennial philosophy the confusions entirely evaporates.  

Most philosophers do not endorse this interpretation, however, and this is the reason why most philosophers cannot understand metaphysics. Their polarised this or that questions have no plausible this or that answers. Philosophers who reject or do not study the Perennial philosophy will be unaware that there is any other kind of answer, so are regularly led to conclude that metaphysics is not merely incomprehensible to themselves but to everyone. This was an understandable conclusion prior to the internet, but in an information age it can only be a consequence of an absence of interest. The Perennial philosophy explains that these extreme answers never work because they are wrong. In this way all metaphysical problems are solved.

For the Perennialist philosopher there are no intractable metaphysical problems. The space-time world of objects and subjects that we normally call ‘me and my world’ may, as physicists speculate, be reduced to information. Information would not be truly real but have only a relative and dependent existence. Only the information-space would be truly real. This would be prior to the categories of thought, as Kant deduced, or ‘beyond the coincidence of contradictories’, as Nicolas de Cusa more poetically puts it in his Vision of God, and is ex hypothesis unthinkable. Reality would be ‘non-dual’ so cannot be described positively as this or that in any case. All metaphysical questions would have clear and logically systematic answers. To those who do not know the meaning of the phrase ‘non-dual’ these answers will seem paradoxical, but this is a misperception revealed as such by an analysis of the issues. In the Tao Te Ching Lao Tzu tells us ‘True words seem paradoxical’, not that they actually are. There would be just one ‘theory of everything’ that works and all the rest would be logically indefensible. This would explain the endless confusion that arises in metaphysics when it is studied in isolation from mysticism.     

If it explains metaphysics and solves all its problems, then why is the Perennial philosophy not endorsed by all philosophers, or at least studied by them as a matter of routine? In past times few would have had the chance to study it, but even today most philosophers reject it as an explanation of everything. There are a variety of reasons for this, but for the most part it appears to be a communication breakdown. It is, unfortunately, not an easy one to repair.

The problem is the difficulty of understanding what the phrase ‘non-dual’ means. Its meaning cannot be properly understood except in our own experience or even, so it is said, beyond our own experience. This difficulty cannot be completely overcome by any amount of thinking, but it need not prevent us from acquiring a theoretical understanding of non-duality sufficient to disentangle and make sense of metaphysics, solve its problems and answer its questions. We cannot know what is true by this method, but we can at least ensure that we have a rational, irrefutable and a logically sound basis for the further development of a world-view or ‘explanation of everything’, should we want to pursue these matters further.