Everybody has a different idea about what reality is really like. Religions, philosophies, mystical teachings, belief systems — the only thing universally agreed upon is that something is real.
Yet what if every experience of reality, including every conception of reality, leads us in a direction that isn't real?
Like many people, I have a fondness for "Holy fuck!!!" movies. (Example: The Sixth Sense)
I call them that because this is what I say when the ending is so shocking, so upside down from what has come before, so mind-blowing, that the cozy world of understanding that I've created inside my brain is blown to bits.
My bet — and naturally this is all it is, an intuitive hunch — is that if humans are capable of comprehending ultimate reality, the realization would turn out to be a lot more like a wild Holy fuck!!! than a calm As I suspected.
I termed this "something else entirely" in a "You're religious, but are you right?" post. Lots of belief systems assert that final truth is mysterious, ineffable, beyond words, incapable of being captured by human cognition.
Yet I don't get from them that disorienting, yet strangely exhilarating, feeling that a genuine something else entirely experience blasts into my psyche.
The following excerpt from Thomas Metzinger's "The Ego Tunnel" had that quality for me. Of course, I'm me and you're you. (Or so it seems…) So you might yawn at what elicits a Wow! from me.
This is good writing. And good philosophizing. Metzinger's eliminative phenomenalism seemingly is akin, if not identical, to other similar notions in Eastern and Western philosophies.
But the way he expressed himself here gave me a fresh Holy fuck!!! experience of the notion that pure consciousness is all there is.
Which means that Is could be what really is.
Read on.
23