A Reason to Give Thanks

We no longer live in a universe devoid of meaning or purpose

Sculpture by August Rodin

In my last essay, I explored how the philosophy of idealism permits us to conceive of the world as purposeful — meaningful — once again. If reality is mental in nature, and we are temporarily dissociated “alters” of a unified field of consciousness, then we can approach the universe as a coherent system of signs and correspondences, as all animistic and hermetic traditions understand it to be. The universe cannot be reduced to either mathematic equations or pointless clumps of material quantities. It is more like a great art work, poem, or symphonic orchestration — an imaginal act or ongoing projection, in which we are all participants, actors, and creators.

Quantum physics has shown that the world is brought into being — momentarily stabilized — by the act of observing it. There is, it appears, no objective reality outside of our minds. Collectively, we struggle to integrate this overturning of our inherited beliefs and preconceptions. For the most part, we actively avoid the issue because It threatens our conditioned sense of self and identity. But once we take the time to understand it, our world becomes brighter, more vibrant, and happier.

The materialist worldview maintains an iron grip over our academies, governments, and mass media. Materialism or physicalism postulates the existence of an objective reality that is physical in nature as the fundamental truth. Based on this worldview, “Our culture believes that the semantic value of the world is simply an artifact of human minds,” writes Bernardo Kastrup in The Idea of the World. “The world doesn’t have a story to tell, a suggestion to make or an insight to convey. It isn’t saying anything. There is nothing meaningful to be gleaned from the world, just utilitarian predictions to be made about its behavior.”

But this worldview is outmoded. According to the last century of physics experiments, the universe is the dreamlike projection of an instinctive and indivisible consciousness: That Which Experiences (TWE for short). Kastrup writes: “A consistent series of recent experimental results suggests strongly that the world may in fact be mental in nature, a hypothesis openly discussed in the field of foundations of physics… If the world is mental, it points to something beyond its face-value appearances and is amenable to interpretation, just as ordinary dreams. In this case, the project of a Hermeneutic of Everything is metaphysically justifiable.” This is the deep intuition about the nature of reality that many of us experience as children, and recall as adults during psychedelic trips: There is only one consciousness living itself out through myriad individual lives. The world is a cosmic fable in which we are all protagonists — if we choose to be so.

I find the idealist perspective to be substantively different from the Simulation hypothesis promoted by transhumanists like the philosopher Nick Bostrom and tech magnate Elon Musk. According to the Simulation hypothesis, the universe we experience is, in all likelihood, a virtual reality running in some kind of super-computer. This idea still postulates an ultimate reality that is, in some sense, materialist: If we are made of software, that software still requires alien hardware. Somewhere there is someone or something running this simulation. The idealist perspective, on the other hand, considers the underlying reality to be a unitary, instinctive, unbound consciousness that projects the physical universe in order to know itself, reflect upon itself, discover itself, and explore its creative possibilities.

The distinction is crucial. Tech companies and governments rush to unleash generalized Artificial Intelligence, along with brain implants that will permanently connect people to the digital sphere (as Musk’s company, Neuralink, seeks to do). While it may be the destiny of some portion of humanity to undergo this kind of prosthesis, from an idealist perspective (at least, my version of it), this is the wrong direction for our evolution.

It seems likely that engineers will soon be able to create artificial digital universes — Zuckerberg’s grim Metaverse — which can be experienced as totally immersive virtual realities. By hardwiring themselves into this binary-coded matrix via something like Neuralink, people may end up trapping themselves inside a digital simulacra of reality. This is exactly what so many dystopian science fiction films, The Matrix among them, have warned us about. It almost seems as if these films are shockwaves, archetypal allegories, reverberating backward in time from this future (present) state.

What I learned from my often humbling explorations of psychedelics and plant shamanism is that many forms of consciousness, with profoundly different kinds of knowledge and intelligence, exist. The human condition has particular boundary constraints, limits set by our sensory organs, cognitive and linguistic capacities. These other forms of sentiences are present in the universe in ways that we don’t understand as of yet — some seem to exist in nonphysical “dimensions” (a term that opens more questions than it resolves). These other forms of consciousness communicate in secret ways, in unknown languages, or via signs and symbols.

Many indigenous cultures maintain deep connections to their local ecosystems, with bonds formed over many hundreds or thousands of years. The Australian Aboriginals, for example, may have lived on that continent for 50,000 years. Over time, these cultures develop ritual, shamanic techniques for communing with the invisible intelligences within the natural world: The spirits and souls of plants, animals, crystals, rocks, bodies of water, stars, and so on. The Shipibo in Peru, for example, have intricate knowledge of many different kinds of plant intelligence they access through practices such as Dietas. The Kogi and Aruak people in Colombia similarly consider water to embody a form of consciousness they contact through divination rituals. These cultures understand what the Romans called genii loci, the protective spirit of a place.

Rupert Sheldrake proposes there are no fixed laws in nature, but only patterns that become more coherent over time. He theorizes the existence of “morphogenetic fields” holding evolutionary memory. He argues, for example, that we will never find the knowledge that unfolds a single cell into the differentiated organs of a human being in the cell’s DNA code. This unfolding happens, according to Sheldrake, as a result of the patterns of the past, continuing via “morphic resonance.” Sheldrake extends this idea into social and cultural development, arguing for the “100th monkey principle,” in which a new skill transmits across the whole field of a species when a small subset first masters it. He has set up experiments to demonstrate this effect in various ways, with some success.

Local, indigenous communities develop their own language and culture in resonance with their immediate environment over time. They develop their own “hermeneutics of everything,” understanding the world they perceive and interact with as a coherent system of signs and correspondences. Some of these cultures establish new “morphogenetic fields” for specialized and psychic abilities, like techniques for communicating with plant intelligence or forms of telepathy or powers conveyed through dreams. These ways of knowing and being are outside of what Western industrial society, trapped in a dualistic and mechanized mode of thought, can conceive as possible or real.

How many different “hermeneutics of everything” are possible? What kinds of wildly divergent powers and potentialities could human consciousness draw from the natural world and the cosmos, depending on how we interpret, what we learn, and how we choose to participate?

Under the tyrannical rule of mechanistic rationality and the “reign of quantity,” our culture made a drastic error. We closed ourselves off from access to other forms of knowing and being that might propel us in a different — radically better — direction. Today, many of us sense that we are creeping inexorably toward a culminating crisis for this civilization. Who can say exactly when this will come, or what form it will take? Grim specters of totalitarianism, technocratic control, and ecological collapse loom over us.

But the alternative still exists, with the possibility for a polar reversal of values and direction. The idealist paradigm gives us a logical basis for coming home — returning to a meaningful universe, infused with purpose and potential. From this secure foundation, everything else will reconfigure.