Over the last weeks, I have presented some of the larger topics from yogic metaphysics to clarify common misunderstandings and demonstrate how they relate to meditative practice.
Already we’ve covered karma and reincarnation. Today we’ll confront one of the most fundamental questions to which all systems of spiritual philosophy must offer a response: Is the world real?
What Is Real or Unreal?
It sounds like a strange question, but if you are interested in the fundamental nature of reality, and especially if you spend enough time with Eastern spirituality, you will have to face it sooner or later.
Logically, there are only two possible answers. Either:
- The world is real, or,
- The world is not real.
To this, we could also add some less-intuitive options:
- The world is simultaneously real and unreal, like you’ve been swallowed by Schrödinger’s cat, or,
- The world is real in relation to the Real and unreal in relation to the unreal.
Before going further, we should establish a foundation for our inquiry.
- What is “the world?”
We can define “the world” as everything in manifestation, so all that which can be perceived either externally (by the senses) or internally (by the mind). This includes all physical objects, energies, and mental phenomena.
- What is “real?”
Already, things are starting to get thorny. According to Merriam Webster Dictionary, “real” is defined as: “having objective independent existence; not artificial, fraudulent, or illusory; occurring or existing in actuality.”
To put this is something close to Buddhist terms, let’s say that we can call something “real” if it is stable, self-existent, and externally verifiable—its existence does not depend on any observer’s perception of it, and multiple independent observers can equally perceive it.
Such a starting definition of “real” might sound straightforward enough, but with closer examination, the lines break down almost immediately.
Physical objects seem as real as anything, but they are inherently impermanent. Anything that exists is constantly changing, albeit often at a rate that is too slow for us to perceive directly.
Even more puzzling, our good, solid physical objects are made out of subatomic particles that are (by our starting definition) of questionable reality, flitting in and out of existence according to probability rather than pure causality, and influenced by the presence of an observer.
Objective reality is very difficult to establish. It works on paper, but in, well, reality, the gray areas are overwhelming.
Are the senses real?
Are dreams real?
Are your memories real? What about your emotions?
What about your moment-to-moment experience, a fluctuating cocktail of sense perceptions, mental concepts and images, and emotional reactions?
When two people perceive the same event differently, which version is the “real” one?
What’s more, once we start defining “real” as exclusively that which is physical and externally verifiable, we cut a raw bleeding line through vast swaths of the human experience, excising much of what makes human life beautiful and meaningful, not to mention sacred.
Plato banished poets from his ideal Republic because they speak falsehoods, and on the surface, he was right. Art is illusion. It is subjective, just one person’s peculiar idea and their compulsion to share. But it is an illusion that tells a more profound truth. It speaks to us on the level where we actually experience life and allows us to experience the world more intimately.
Stories touch us more deeply than facts, and the great stories of the world, which are born and reborn in every generation, which live underneath the waking mind of every human being, open to us the seething mythopoeic substratum of human consciousness.
Dreams and the Waking Mind
Is a dream real?
Usually, we would say no—it’s “just a dream,” after all. It is fleeting, unstable, and externally imperceptible. It exists only within your internal subjective reality.
But how it makes you feel is real—sometimes the emotion disappears as soon as you wake up and realize it was a dream, but sometimes it lingers and gives a particular flavor to your waking life for hours after.
Sometimes a dream ends up as real. It appears hours or years later in your waking life, either from some form of prophecy or your power of manifestation.
Sometimes dreams connect to a wider subconscious world, a subjective reality not limited to your personal mental sphere but belonging to all of humanity.
It’s fruitful to examine the real-unreal quality of dreams since our ordinary reality is so often described as dreamlike by the great yogis and sages.
When you are dreaming, unless you are having a lucid dream, you believe that your dream is real. It has its own consistent inner logic, not the same as the logic of the waking world but a logic nonetheless. As long as you’re immersed in it, you go along with the flow of events. Only once you wake up do you realize how absurd the elements of the dream and your actions in it might have been.
However, our waking reality is not so different! Mostly we follow the flow without questioning, and our senses conveniently filter out many elements that don’t fit our expectations. We are immersed in an essentially dreamlike world of thought—in fact, our thoughts are a constant daydream, percolating like bubbles out of the dream-layer of the mind. They are not consciously directed but lead one into another, looping around in circles or spiraling out from your initial point of focus until they very quickly land you in a completely unrelated domain.
Watch your mind for a while and see. You are dreaming.
In the words of Adi Shankaracharya, the great preceptor of Advaita Vedanta, “The world, like a dream full of attachments and aversions seems real until the awakening.”
Tantra, Vedanta, and the Soap Bubble World
The spiritual philosophies of India have historically had a great deal to say about the question of the world’s reality or lack thereof.
Generally, over the last 2000-odd years, we can trace two parallel (and often intersecting) lines of understanding: Vedanta and Tantra. (This is a gross oversimplification for didactic purposes. Please forgive me.)
According to Advaita Vedanta, the world is an illusion superimposed on the Self, Brahman. The Self is the only thing that is real. Everything that appears within the relative domain is merely a kind of optical illusion, a misperception, like seeing a coiled-up rope on the ground and mistaking it for a snake.
At the moment of seeing a snake, the jolt of fear (for those of us who do not enjoy snakes) seems real enough. But when you realize it’s just a rope and has no fangs, the fear dissolves instantly, like a soap bubble popping.
The Buddha described the world in the Diamond Sutra:
“So you should view this fleeting world —
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.”
As Ramana Maharshi explained in Who Am I, it is not necessary to understand the world of forms in order to realize the Self:
Q. Is it necessary for one who longs for release to inquire into the nature of categories (tattvas)?
- Just as one who wants to throw away garbage has no need to analyze it and see what it is, so one who wants to know the Self has no need to count the number of categories or inquire into their characteristics; what he has to do is to reject altogether the categories that hide the Self. The world should be considered like a dream.
Although it might strike us as harsh, this perspective is the backbone of a significant number of traditions and apparently quite effective for realizing the Absolute. It clearly demonstrates how all suffering stems from a fundamental misperception of reality. However, it is not the only option.
Enter Tantra, a movement that arose somewhere around the 3rd-6th centuries.
As elegant as Vedanta is, it contains a rather sizeable metaphysical hole: if everything is the Self and the Self is all-knowing, how does it misperceive?
When everything is Consciousness, where does ignorance come from?
The tantric response is that the world is not merely an illusion but a manifestation of the Self and never entirely separate from its source. It is Shakti, God’s creative power, taking form as a canvas on which pure Consciousness can meet itself.
Since everything comes from God, you can trace your way back to God through the world and the many energies that are readily available to us as human beings.
Still, even in the tantric perspective, there is a fundamental ignorance that causes all suffering: we do not see that all these forms come from God and rely on God for existence. We perceive them as independently existing objects rather than appearances rising in and out of the limitless ocean of Consciousness.
Do We Perceive the World as It Is?
In a nutshell, the world is real, but how we perceive it is unreal.
This was taught in Tantra for many centuries, yet it falls surprisingly close to the revelations of modern Western science.
We just go around assuming that the senses are giving us a neutral representation of the world, like a window, but they are more like a camera with Instagram filters on. We receive a set of data that are in themselves meaningless, and our sensory apparatus interprets those data into a form that is comprehensible to “us”—that is, to that mysterious subjective perceiver.
You don’t see with the eyes but with the brain, which is a survival machine—you see what you expect to see or what is immediately relevant.
If we consciously perceived all the information our senses could receive, we would be unable to function. Instead, our sense organs are tuned to specific frequencies, and our sense-processing faculties filter out everything but what is deemed important at that moment.
This highly processed, highly selective image appears to be “the world as it is.”
As humans, we think the world is how we see it, but if we had the eyes of a mantis shrimp, the nose of a dog, the ears of a bat, or the taste-sensitive tentacles of an octopus, the whole thing would appear radically different.
And if you mess with the brain even a little bit, things get very weird, very quickly. For examples, open any Oliver Sacks book.
I could go on. Scientific investigation of the senses goes very quickly to bizarre and fascinating places, which the philosophy of science has not yet caught up with, but I’ll leave that to the scientists and philosophers of science.
The Reality of the Pure “I Am”
We’ve found that a lot of our everyday experience is, in many ways, unreal. It is subjective, limited, and in constant fluctuation, more similar than not to the flow of appearances in a dream.
Still, it seems very much like something there is real.
The perceptions themselves might be unreal, but someone is there to perceive them. Things are happening, precisely because they are happening to someone.
If you look deep enough within yourself, you will find one thing that fits our starting definition of real.
A sense of “I am.” A still background to the fluctuations of senses and mind. A feeling of being present, being aware, of existing here and now.
This is always there, whenever you take the time to look for it, and it is not affected by external events. It doesn’t change; only sometimes you are more or less aware of it. It has been there for your entire life.
You have always been you.
You are real, and so your experiences are real as they happen to you. This is a relative reality—they are not real to anyone else, at least not in the way you experience them—in connection with your individual consciousness, your individual soul.
But is there any universal reality to the world of forms?
The Vaishnava tradition teaches that the world is real only in its relationship to Krishna, the Absolute, who is seated in the heart of all beings as Paramatma (the Supreme Self).
If you perceive things as separate from Krishna, they take you deeper into illusion. The senses and objects of the senses draw you away from your innermost self. Desires draw you into a realm of separation, where the true nature of reality is concealed. You no longer perceive yourself and other beings as divine.
However, if you perceive all things as a part of Krishna, as manifestations of pure Consciousness, they connect you again to that divine Source. The world becomes transparent, and its underlying unity is revealed while the artistic dance of manifestation continues.
Naveen is a Hridaya teacher and a frequent contributor to our blog. You can read all of her posts here.
