What is Reality?

The Two Big Questions of Life on Which Everything Hangs.

If we cannot arrive at a universal understanding and appreciation of Reality, how can we ever make sensible claims about what we should, could or ought to be doing? And if we cannot do that, the way we are living our lives subscribing to our limited and flawed models of reality cannot ultimately be anything other than absurd.

Our species has triggered an unregulated acceleration into an escape velocity, which can sound exciting, but we do not properly understand what we are ‘escaping’ or where we are ‘escaping’ to. We have no coherent destination of meaning, and no means to temper our velocity, we have no effective guidance system and we do not have the understanding to define or adjust our trajectory.

That is not bold advance, it is suicidal abdication of a once-in-a-billion-year opportunity.

This essay stands on its own, but the real value of it is something that can emerge most meaningfully in the context of the other essays in the series about Reality and our relationship to it.

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Before we begin please note that you can listen to this post like a podcast by downloading the iOS app and if you find yourself struggling to process it all and stitch it together in your own understanding, normalise re-reading and re-listening. Also a TLDR exists as a comment to this post, which you can access via the app, or online,

Two fundamental questions fully encapsulate the human projects of philosophy, science and religion. These are the three minds through which we attempt to understand and relate to Reality.

The first question is What is Reality? What is most true and most real about the Universe and Life, and what does that tell us about ourselves and our place in it? What does that say about our relationship to it?

The second question then, is about what we should, or at least could be doing with that understanding. Can we determine our reality?

Nothing really matters more than these two questions.

How can we develop a model of reality that isn’t going to prove flawed over time, and that does not result in avoidable regret? How could we invest our energy and attention to determine what the best use of our energy and attention should be from here, what possible future we might help arrive if we can work that out and what it takes to get there?

Read that again, and make sure you appreciate what is being said.

How can we—individually, as couples and families and communities—develop a model of reality that does not leave us blind and ignorant to the kind of consequences we would regret the most if we knew better, how do we prioritise figuring that out, what possible future can expect if we do, and how do we organise the projects of our life—our personal practices and social collaborations—to foster and realise that possibility?

What is? And What is the Ought we can derive from that?

One of our biggest challenges is that through life, education and our careers we are inducted into one of three major schools of thought. These three schools of thought define rules and limits for how we explore that question and how we can validate the answers we encounter. The more deeply any person commits themself to those questions via one of these three schools of thought or the other, the more they become part of the gatekeeping culture of that school.

The rest of us have an addiction to comfort and a substance dependency on simplicity. We all like to think that we are open-minded, but that’s not the same as being open-hearted. We think we’re willing to understand something but we aren’t ready to face the discomfort of what it takes to understand something, for the room we have made in our existing understanding We are not ready to commit the the effort it takes to process and digest ideas, and to endure the aftertaste of disappointment and disillusionment follows when our existing beliefs about reality are tested.

Our reality is complex and not simple. Why should the way we might actually understand that complexity ever be anything different? The good news is that it is completely understandable. The bad news is that we cannot really afford that kind of excuse anymore and that it takes serious and committed investment to make real headway.

You need to decide whether the effort is worth it or not.

You need to decide whether you feel deeply called to be part of the solution or to remain part of the problem.

This post is in four parts:

1. The three ‘minds’ or contexts we use to define Reality and tackle the two big questions.

2. Understanding the complexity and nature of our Current Problem.

3. Understanding our Unfolding and Present Reality.

4. Conceiving of and Connecting with a fourth transcendent context by which to define reality without our current limits and contradictions, can help us explore the two big questions.

Our Three Paradigms

Science

Science was the second of three ‘minds’ that emerged in our collective human consciousness.

Science attempts to explain the first question in terms of physics and immutable laws of causes and effects. Our collective adoption of this mind, to this way of thinking and our commitment to its principles, are what yielded all our advancements in enlightenment, technology and medicine.

Science very deliberately prefers not to attempt the second question. Scientists as a professional habit, always stop short of saying what we ought to do.

Although commercial and ideological interests have subverted our practice of science, the very defining and essential spirit of which is devoted to principles of objectivity, scepticism, and an iterative pursuit of truth. At its heart, this spirit cares more for what is true, than how we feel about it and does not want to be wrong for a moment longer than it needs to. Science by practice needs to be very meticulous in granting what might be right and making irrevocable provisions for the possibility that it could be proven wrong later if further evidence or understanding comes to light.

Science's reluctance to address the second question stems from its foundational principle of staying descriptive rather than prescriptive. It seeks to tell us what is, not what ought to be, leaving the domain of ethics, meaning, and purpose to other disciplines or individual interpretations.

Religion

Religion was the first human ‘mind’ that cohered out of our beliefs and superstitions into elaborate scriptures that defined what reality is, and thereby shaped our psyche and consciousness more deeply than our earlier mythologies and animistic worldviews had before.

The birth of all religions is based on earlier beliefs and practices, and are in turn, based on a kind of Reason we call superstition. Our superstitions are our explanations, the beliefs and reverence we hold about supernatural influences and how they create good or bad fortune in our lives.

Religion makes definitive claims about the first question, and everything that it cannot explain it ascribes to the mysterious workings of God or gods. The first question for reference, was about what Reality is.

Religion is a paradigm that prescribes the model for how we should conduct ourselves in this life and some version of a why. Religions all define their claims along some version of a common framework:

1. Cosmogony. How The World (our Reality) was created. (This was the Christian Genesis.)

2. Cosmology. How the World (our Reality) is Ordered and Sustained, (this may become apparent only after key battles or revelations.)

   1. The Forces, Archetypes, Gods, Angels, and Spirits which uphold, decree or enable divine, natural, civil and moral order and their respective alignments of Good, Neutral and Evil to each other, in general, and their dispositions towards Mankind.

   2. The nature of time and space.

3. Who did it? Who’s Will presides over the Cosmos and therefore over us? What is its Nature and what is our obligation towards that Will?

4. How is power, influence and favour wielded and distributed according to the defined order and that divine will—from the very greatest supra-human, human and then all other living creatures? How are divine will and order arbitrated in our worldly reality? This last question is the foundation of the concept of divine hierarchy, human royalty, priesthood and social class.

5. Eschatology speaks to the question of What happens when we die? What decides our eternal Fate and What are our options? It is the aspect of theology that is concerned with death, judgement and the final destiny of the world and the individual souls within it.

Religion not only makes definitive claims about the first question but also makes definitive claims about the second question, that is what we ought to do, whereby the only way we can determine our reality is by complying with the will of God or gods. Christianity, Islam and Judaism define an ideal future state that is only accessible by submitting to the will of God and living in accordance with the rules and practices of that God and the undesired future state that awaits if we do not.

Humans codify this will as Morality.

Philosophy

Philosophy is the third human ‘mind’ that emerged in our attempts to straddle and broker the inevitable tension between the conflicting intuitions of Science and Religion. Philosophy is grounded in both, and then also brings its own science to the table: The Science of Reason. Philosophy literally means: Love of Wisdom.

Philosophy has many branches and stems of reasoning that have their roots and foundations in either science or theology and thereby do not all agree or align. Nevertheless, it has become useful to us as a third ‘mind’ to retreat to when we are troubled by questions that the minds of Science and Religion cannot adequately explain on their own.

The Mind of Philosophy, through the various branches and expressions, attempts to answer the first question about what Reality is fundamentally, and then the second, about what we ought to do with that understanding. It does this in two models of reasoning we call Epistemology and Ontology. Epistemology is the study of knowledge, whereas ontology is the study of existence.

Epistemology means the fundamental notions we can develop and settle on, around how knowledge can be gained and verified and what its scope and limits might be. Examples of epistemology are when things are deemed coherent, in other words, we can verify their existence by virtue that they are not self-contradictory or contradictory with everything else that seems to be true or real. It deals with functional pragmatism, in other words, it evaluates things through their relativity to everything else, not the claimed relationship between them, but their mutual relationship to universal cause and effects.

In simple terms, ontology seeks the classification and explanation of entities. Ontology is about the object of inquiry, the thing we examine, the set of concepts and categories in a subject area or domain that shows their properties and the relations between them.

For example: a comic book fan might browse a database of superheroes to learn about different characters, their powers and abilities, their classifications, and things that make them the same or different, or related in some way to each other. This would be an exercise in ontology.

Gathering and verifying this information can be tricky, because comic book writers reboot characters, are sometimes inconsistent, or deliberately rewrite abilities and origins to suit a story arc or the cultural appetite. The argument about which comic book episode is the most authoritative, and which movie adaptions are considered canon, would be an exercise in epistemology.

In philosophy, ontology would ask "Does God exist?", whereas epistemology would ask "How can we know if God exists?"

Similarly, ontology would ask "Do human beings have free will?", and epistemology would ask "Does free will actually exist or are we simply experiencing the illusion of free will?"

Being half rooted in science and half rooted in theology, one can imagine the problem—underneath all the epistemology and ontology we encounter unknowns that cannot be resolved, but then also we are compelled to keep trying because those two primary questions simply won’t go away.

If we take our analogy of an epic space voyage, we are saying that our crew is made up of three factions that don’t see eye to eye, which do not have the same way of judging what is worthwhile, what is necessary, we have no shared sense of what the journey mission is and no framework or context by which we can define that.

Our Current Problem

One key compounding problem is that none of those three ‘minds’, or paradigms, are complete on their own. There are questions about the reality of our universe and evolution that religion still tries to pretend do not exist. There are questions about the reality of the human experience and the meaning of life which Science professionally avoids. Philosophy is all questions and opinions with no ultimate way of arbitrating between any of them. This is one of the horns of our dilemma.

For a start, Science hit a wall when discovered there were smaller blocks than atoms and the physics that made that possible breaks the model of reality with it our ability to predict reality. Our technology and engineering capability rely on understanding the relationship between cause and effect and we encountered an undeniable aspect of reality where the relationship between cause and effect defies our logic and breaks our intuitions. This was of course Quantum Physics and the reality defined by that physics. Up until then every advance in science, even when it seemed to be a paradigm shift, was found to be a logical extension or amendment to what we had imagined was going on before.

Without even wasting energy and attention trying to debunk the daft foundational premise of each Religion, the simple fact that we have multiple instances that are by definition incompatible and by their essential natures resistant to any attempts to reconcile them with science or with each other. How can a human mind that is incoherent, provide us an understanding of what Reality is and how to navigate it?

If we cannot arrive at a universal understanding of Reality, how can we ever make sensible claims about what we should, could or ought to be doing?

Philosophy, as we have said before, represents a different but related challenge where the various branches do not and cannot reconcile and each lacks a fundamental keystone to hold the arch of its reasoning together. Everything is speculative, especially when we have only those three minds with which to verify or validate the assertions it proposes.

A second compounding problem is that Science, Religion and Philosophy are each compelling for reasons that do not overlap or adequately describe the whole of our human experience. Additionally, within the reality that we are exposed to, bad examples of their practice mean they each earn our mistrust in different but nevertheless persistent ways. This is the second horn of our dilemma.

You get what you incentivise. If any patron commissions a religious edict or scientific research, they do so expecting the outcome to suit their own interests. Knowing how pervasive this behaviour is, and how coercive the relationship between science and business is, between ideology, politics and power, it becomes fair and reasonable to mistrust religion or science.

When someone says they do not trust science, what they mean is that they have an experience of seeing it practised badly, specifically with misaligned intentions. A mistrust of the scientific method because of ‘feelings’ is more religious than trusting the scientific method because of Reason. Adjusting what we know about the world through our application of the scientific method is not heresy, it is more science. But questioning science without understanding the relationship between causes and effects, is not science, it is a logical fallacy.

We have every reason to trust the verified results and conclusions derived from testing, conducted under the rubric of the scientific method. Any challenge has to be held to the same standards as the currently accepted theory. This is the most misunderstood aspect of science and doing one’s own research.

If you fly in aeroplanes, if you follow the Maps on your phone to reach a destination, if you warm a bowl of soup up in a microwave, you trust science. The answer to bad science is not no science, it is better science.

To summarise, simply put, these three problems exist and have a compounding effect on each other:

1. We have three paradigms by which we attempt to understand Reality.

2. The models of reality, those three paradigms each define, are incomplete and can never be completed using the same paradigm that established it.

3. They each hold pieces of the puzzle but are compromised by incoherence or contradiction, being that they are fundamentally incompatible with each other because of their defining limits.

4. We did not arrive at our mistrusts and scepticisms dishonestly.

These four problems have a compounding and exacerbating effect on each other. Each of the ‘minds’ or paradigms through which we describe reality has its own personality. Our collective mind has a multiple personality disorder.

• Science cannot bring itself to say what we ought to do with any real conviction without losing its precious non-partisan standing, because everything it is trying to advocate for is now seen exclusively through the polarised lens of politics and evaluated and judged via that warped and emotionally rabid sensibility.

• Religion is predicated on the fundamental belief that this entire life is just an elaborate sorting process for the more real next one, and it does not matter in the end what happens to the world or people in this life because God is going to square the books off anyway, and it will all get put to rights in the ‘next place’. Religion expects us to believe that our present and evident reality is just a proving ground. Who is to say the calamity and existential crisis we are facing isn’t just evidence that the day of judgement is approaching, therefore inevitable and ultimately the will of God?

• Philosophy has become high on the smell of its own farts. Why not Nihilism? Maybe God doesn’t exist and then who is to say anything matters anyway? Or Stoicism perhaps? Just be virtuous on your own square and don’t be so foolish as to attempt to change what you cannot or so presumptuous as to think you have the wisdom to make calls that are going to affect others.

It takes a coherent mind to grasp the complexity and enormity of reality. Not only are we blind to the whole of reality, but we are blind to that very blindness and therefore blind to the scale and severity of the impending existential problem that has already crossed our threshold of being able to easily understand and therefore affect.

Again, if we cannot arrive at a universal understanding of Reality, how can we ever make sensible claims about what we should, could or ought to be doing? And if we cannot do that, the way we are living our lives subscribing to our limited and flawed models of reality are ultimately absurd.

This is the synopsis of our current problem:

Having three discrete minds running on the same platform of the human consciousness and psyche, gets us precisely the confusion and overwhelming reality of the modern world we are struggling to parse. Science enabled the necessary acceleration of technological advancement, which has now achieved its own unregulated escape velocity, a rate of progress and change that is not sufficiently constrained by ethics or wisdom, but incentivised by commercial interest. The ‘mind” of Science, by design, can operate agnostic of ethical constraints and existential prudence. Our escape velocity can sound exciting, but we do not properly understand what we are escaping or where we are escaping to. We have no coherent destination of meaning, and no means to temper our velocity, we have no effective guidance system and we do not have the understanding to define or adjust our trajectory.

That is not bold advance, that is suicidal abdication of a once-in-a-billion-year opportunity. This is not exploration, this is mass nihilism.

The result is a degree of complexity and change that is now self-perpetuating and accelerating. Each of us is trying to hold the impossible conflicts and incompatibilities of those three paradigms in our own consciousness, in our own psyche. The ‘reality’ we are subscribed to and helped create can only feel like burnout and overwhelm, and can only appear as incoherence and insanity.

If we extend our analogy of an epic space voyage, we are saying that the passengers and crew are drawn across multiple factions in different ways, and that our ways navigating the emergent reality we are moving through and inviting is defined by an ignorance of the broader existential context, the larger process it is engaged in.

So What Now?

If we are going to navigate the accelerating complexity of the modern world, we will have to move beyond the fragmented paradigms of our Science, Religion, and Philosophy, integrating their strengths while addressing their limitations.

This requires a new paradigm, one capable of reconciling the objective, subjective, and transcendent dimensions of our existence into a coherent whole, a Universal Theory of Everything.

Without such integration, we remain blind not only to the full scope of Reality but also to the extent of our own blindness. To avoid perpetuating the absurdity of living by incomplete and flawed models, we will have to prioritise cultivating a unified approach—one that balances knowledge with wisdom, progress with prudence, and innovation with ethical responsibility. Only then can we begin to make meaningful claims about what we should, could, or ought to be doing in a world teetering on the edge of its own understanding.

What we need then is a reality check.

That is what an apocalypse is really, when you strip back all the mythical tropes and theological drama.

Apocalypse and Deluge are two mythic devices by which we make sense of moments of radical and sudden change to our reality.

The word “overwhelm” comes from the Old English overhwælman, meaning “to cover over,” often evoking the image of being engulfed or submerged, like by water. This connects it to the archetype of a “deluge,” symbolizing forces beyond our control that threaten to compromise or unmake our reality. Interestingly, since “overwhelm” means “to cover over,” it contrasts with the word “apocalypse,” which comes from the Greek apokalyptein, meaning “to uncover, disclose, or reveal.” If Deluge is the descent of reality from order into chaos, apocalypse is the reality check.

Overwhelm is the symptom of pending deluge.

Ancient myths often feature a deluge, a divine flood sent to wipe the slate clean, punishing an errant humanity for its wickedness and foolishness, and resetting the stage for a new genesis. Deluge is a common motif found in all the mythology and folklore from every part of the world and reflects both the end of an era and the dawn of new beginnings, a reminder that destruction often heralds creation.

Overwhelm as a state can be defined as a coherence problem. The solution to incoherence is coherence. The method to achieve coherence is regulation, integration and alignment. This is true for any crashing system. The parts need to be aligned to reality, regulated in their demands and operation on the system and integrated into a sustainable whole.

To squeeze even more sense-making out of our epic space voyage analogy, we can say that our ability to influence our trajectory and velocity is increasing, while our awareness of the consequences we are courting, and our ability to do so are both reducing. And furthermore our dominant games of power, cleverness and social concern all operate in a state that ignorant and unaware of the opportunity cost and the mounting tragedy of it all, and disinterested in the case for improving that.

Understanding Reality

To align with reality, we need to understand reality, and to do that we need a new paradigm, a new mind that can transcend the limitations of our three existing minds without losing the meaning they represent.

It is a delicate thing migrating your sense of Reason to a footing you cannot see while being asked to step off the footing you already have, however shaky it happens to already be.

The only way we can make that leap is if we are desperate enough and we have no other choice, through blind faith, or through Reason. Faith is a kind of reason where you believe in the existence of a reality beyond the one you can confirm via your senses, beyond the one you can experience.

As a rule, we don’t want to be attempting progress through a mindset of pure desperation and we certainly don’t want to compromise our sanity.

Our sanity is how we subscribe to reason and how our experience confirms our understanding of ourselves, the rest of the world and the relationship that exists between them. Sanity is the way our psyche and consciousness coheres. That coherence requires models of understanding by which complexity can be arranged into order instead of chaos, and by which we can inhabit and interact with Reality.

What this is saying in simple terms is that to evolve our understanding, we have to embrace a paradigm, a framing of Reason expansive enough to bridge what we know with what we do not know, without losing the coherence that keeps us sane.

We have one other way of making such leaps. Genius and inspiration can give wings to the mind, as Arthur Schopenhauer pointed out, “Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.” The language of genius.

We experience insanity when the reality that we are experiencing clashes with our understanding and sense of meaning. Sanity is a coherence of understanding and meaning. This is what we call order.

The crux, the essence, the fundament of order is Reason.

We don’t want to compromise our subjectivity, because the subjective truth is the basis of our subjective experience and subjective experience is what defines meaning for us. We need to find a way for subjective truths to co-exist without clashing.

We need the safety rails of that answer to make the leap.

The most fundamental Reality is a state of relationship that exists between two things and the principles that underwrite that relationship. The paradigm of transcendent reality that we are looking for, by definition cannot be something that can be fully captured or enclosed within a conceptual framework, because any such framework or model, by its nature, is finite and limited, while reality itself is infinite and emergent.

The paradigm of reality we are looking for then, and the one that I am proposing, is a set of principles by which any model can cohere at all in the first place. This approach allows for subjective truths to co-exist without contradiction, enabling integration instead of fragmentation.

Next up in this series, A new paradigm of Reality: A Universal Theory of Everything in which I am making the following claim:

By subscribing to this Paradigm of Reality, you will gain the capacity to progressively answer the two big questions—What is Reality? and What ought we to do?—in a way that is coherent, actionable, and adaptive.

This paradigm will provide you with the tools and principles to:

• Perceive reality more clearly—free from the blind spots that lead to regret and misalignment.

• Navigate consequences with wisdom, ensuring that your actions align with a deeper understanding of cause and effect.

• Prioritize what truly matters, allowing you to direct your energy and attention toward the most meaningful pursuits.

• Cultivate better futures, both personally and collectively, by engaging in practices and collaborations that foster actualization.

• Organize your life as a coherent project, integrating knowledge, relationships, and purpose into a dynamic process of stable mutual actualization.

The cumulative implication is that it will be provable and self-evident. This is nothing less than the systematic and self-directed evolution of one’s own Consciousness. Among other things, this paradigm explains Free Will.

Subscribing to this paradigm again requires Zero fantastical claims, nothing proposed needs to be taken on faith, but then also our appetite for connection and meaning—that which we call spiritual—is not only well catered to but can be profoundly deepened.

Implicit to this paradigm, in a way that becomes very illogical to argue with, is a quality of intentionality to existence, and to life, The Great So That.

The prospect on offer is Actualisation—true fulfilment—of meaning and purpose. What might happen if many of us subscribed to this paradigm, transcended the limits of the clashing operating system we are subscribed to at the moment, and found a collective sense of determination?

In our epic space voyage analogy, this would be akin to taking real ownership of the voyage and the endeavour. Instead of being complicit in a potential existential crisis, we can become complicit in the pursuit of the worthiest of legacies.

We are so incredibly empowered right now.

We need to remember that what is at stake is not just our own personal and immediate future and prospects, but the landscape of possibility we create—not just for ourselves, but for every future version of ourselves, and for our descendants who might one day step into a future unburdened by the cynical indifference of our time.

It is also about our thread of meaning, the continuity between past, present, and future—the connection between ourselves and our ancestors, and everything that came before. Because if life has meaning, as this paradigm implies, then that meaning is something we either preserve and extend, or sever and squander.

If there is a Great So That, then what greater tragedy could there be than for the entire arc of human meaning to be severed here, in our time, because we failed to evolve our consciousness and steward it forward?

And on the other side—what greater triumph could there be than knowing that we belonged to the generation that held the thread, stabilized it, and extended it—that we played our part in ensuring that all the suffering we caused, all the damage—that all of that and all the folly the missteps we made, could be made worth it in the end. What greater sense of purpose, what greater expression of leadership can there be to become worthy of the profound legacy we inherit, and the arc of Meaning we can enable to continue on forever?

If you are interested in learning more, stay tuned for the next post: A New Paradigm of Reality: A Universal Theory of Everything.

Rocco.

I don’t just want to speak to an audience I want to belong to a community.

I don’t just want to express my ideas, I want us to dream new ones together.

You can help support my meaningful work by liking, sharing this post, and commenting—anything you can think of that is meaningful—and you can make a fuss of these ideas with your social circles. And of course as always, by subscribing and inviting others.