Bernardo Kastrup

We have become lost in a dense fog of unreal suppositions, taken for granted without critical thought. It is time we woke up to what is truly real: to our immediate experience of reality. It is time we realized that the models of physics inform us not about a reality ‘out there,’ but about ourselves; about how our deeper mind – our collective, shared, non-egoic mind – flows according to certain patterns and regularities

Now, notice that solipsism entails the acknowledgement of statement 1 of the previous section and the rejection of statements 2, 3, and 4. Therefore, it is not idealism. Idealism grants reality to statement 2. ‘Why?’ I hear you ask. After all, if we are already following this road of radical skepticism anyway, why grant reality to statement 2? Because believing in statement 2 is the simplest explanation for observations. As discussed earlier, I can explain much of my own external behavior to myself by the fact that I am conscious, and so can you.

When I say that everything is in mind I am saying that things exist only insofar as they play themselves out in the mind of a conscious observer. For instance, when you dream at night, everything in your dream exists only insofar as it is in your mind. The stuff in your dreams clearly does not have an independent existence outside your mind.

Idealism entails that, like a dream, reality exists only insofar as it is in mind, but not that everything in it is conscious and has an inner life of its own. For instance, while acknowledging that other living entities are conscious – that is, while granting validity to statement 2 discussed earlier – I do not subscribe to the notion that rocks, windmills, home thermostats, or computers are conscious and have their own subjective points-of-view.

Instead, what idealism is saying is precisely that there is no stuff. There is only subjective perception. The word ‘stuff’ is just a way to describe certain modalities and regularities of perception. When one asks about the ‘stuff’ of mind one is ‘subconsciously’ falling back into realist assumptions; into thinking that reality is ‘out there,’ even mind itself

The substrate of mind itself is not stuff: it is the subject, not an object. It is the medium from which perceptions arise, but is itself not perceivable for exactly the same reason that the eye that sees cannot see itself without a mirror; or – as Alan Watts put it – that you can’t bite your own teeth.96 As such, the substrate of mind cannot be measured, detected, or analyzed like some kind of stuff, because it is that which measures, detects, and analyzes in the first place. The substrate of mind is not a material, but that which imagines all materials.

Another common misunderstanding of idealism is reflected on this question: if everything is in mind, why can’t we influence reality at will, just like we can influence our own thoughts and fantasies at will? The misunderstanding here – a very forgivable one – is to equate mind at large with that particular, limited, small part of mind that we call the ego. The ego can even be defined as the part of mind that we ordinarily identify with and feel we can control. But there is nothing in my formulation of idealism restricting mind to the ego; on the contrary.
Whatever you ordinarily think of as your own mind should be looked upon, in the context of my hypothesis, as a very small segment of the broader medium of mind. How this small segment shapes itself to create the egoic illusion of separateness is something we will tackle in and 6. For now, consider this example: you probably accept that other people also are conscious. Therefore, you must accept that their entire inner lives take place in other segments of mind that are external to your ego and which you have no control over.

Now, imagine that there are even more segments of the medium of mind that transcend what we would associate with any biological, embodied entity within space-time. Those segments, too, are not excluded from my formulation of idealism. Mind itself is unfathomably larger than any one of our individual egos. Therefore, that the broader medium of mind can operate in a way that feels external to, and outside the sphere of influence of, your ego should come as no surprise at all to you. To say that everything is in mind does not imply that everything falls within the scope and whims of your or my egoic will.

Similarly, neuroses and psychoses – such as some obsessions, phobias, and schizophrenic visions – all seem to arise from a part of mind that we do not at all identify with; a part of mind that feels entirely alien, external to the ego

The sequence of abstract images in the figure clearly does not represent anything in an outside world. They are not ‘copies’ of anything, but realities in their own right. The advantage of using such abstract images is that they help by-pass all of your cultural programming, since you won’t be able to find any recognizable pattern in them that your mind already assumes to represent an external object