”If reality is a shit show, we should bite the bullet”
On reasoning vs experience; conversations with Bernardo Kastrup and Angelo DiLullo
I re-listened to my almost 90-minute long Mind the Shift conversation with philosopher and former CERN scientist Bernardo Kastrup. It became even more obvious to me than it already was what a brilliant mind Kastrup is and why he enjoys such a high reputation in spiritual circles. I have a deep respect for the few brave and honest thinkers who have dared to swap a career in traditional western science for a dedication to reach a deeper understanding of what a human being is.
I will not go into detail about analytical idealism or how Bernardo Kastrup has honed this philosophy into his own model (and I probably wouldn’t get it sufficiently right anyway), but the basics is the following: Reality is at its core mental. We are all parts of the same, singular, overarching consciousness, mind-at-large (which some would simply interpret as God). We are thus in consciousness. A metaphor he often uses is that every human being is a whirlpool in a stream. The whirlpool is obviously an entity of its own, but it doesn’t consist of anything other than the stream in which it is whirling. The stream itself is mind-at-large. Seen this way, death happens when the whirlpool dissipates and ”returns” to the stream.
It was fascinating to hear Kastrup’s view on reincarnation. He mentioned the compelling studies made by researchers at the University of Virginia, which appear to confirm reincarnation, but he put them in a new light. What do they actually show? It certainly seems as if reincarnation is going on, but it could be that the localized ”whirlpool in the stream” picks up ripples from other whirlpools that happen to be in the spiritual vicinity, as it were.
This thinking — that things seem to be a certain way from a human perspective — also corresponds with what Kastrup said when I asked him about the Big Bang. The hypothesis about a singularity of nothing that suddenly exploded into everything 13.8 billion years ago is a useful description to us here and now. When we make calculations, It seems as if everything began in the Big Bang, but that doesn’t mean it is an absolute truth. It most probably isn’t, because, as Kastrup pointed out, consciousness can never have begun. The question of when consciousness arose is meaningless.
These new perspectives remind me that everything is in constant motion and change, not only in the outer world, but also within. My own spiritual truths and beliefs shift over time. But there is a core: the conviction that there is a non-physical reality.
Kastrup is one of a handful of people I have interviewed whose words have lingered in my mind for a long time afterwards and inspired new thoughts. And new questions. After my podcast talks, I normally don’t care much about questions that I ”should have’’ asked but forgot or didn’t have time to ask during the conversation. It becomes what it becomes, and not accepting what is can be a recipe for gloom, and all that. But with Bernardo K, my mind couldn’t let go. There is only one other interviewee who has had the same effect on me, Angelo DiLullo. I will get back to him.
I am not saying that the thoughts and questions that arose put me in a state of gloom — on the contrary. It was more like my pondering on what Kastrup had said (and written, of course — I have read some of it) lifted me a notch and compelled me to clarify what it is I am experiencing myself. It was spontaneous.
One thing that lingered was what he said about manifestation in the physical world. I asked Kastrup if he agreed with those who say that everything a human being can come up with, every idea, every invention, already exists on some energetic level or in some dimension. He said no. He said he thought humans have the capacity to conjure up things that are not analogous to any existing reality.
When I somewhat clumsily tried to clarify what i meant, I talked about the universe as basically consisting of vortices of energy, which are in fact potentialities. Kastrup picked up that ball and said that I was obviously referring to Schrödinger’s wave equation (the wave properties of a particle, indicating the probability of finding it at a given point). He explained that in his view, the wave function isn’t something that actually exists in the base reality, ”outside the dashboard”, it is just ”our way to model our knowledge of how the dials move”. (The cockpit dashboard is another of Kastrup’s metaphors of how we filter reality.)
That was undoubtedly a perfect follow-up comment and a kind rescuing operation by Kastrup. But was I referring to Schrödinger’s findings about the wave function (and Heisenberg’s subsequent uncertainty principle)? I am not sure. I am not well enough acquainted with quantum mechanics to be sure. But in non-scientific words, what I meant was that when we create, what we actually do is perhaps tap in to, pick up on, bring forth what the transpersonal consciousness is already thinking. In this sense, everything that ever will exist is already there. It just needs to become manifest on this planet, where time is a teaching function. Some people are better than others at the tapping in and picking up. In Bernardo K’s own metaphoric terms, this would mean that, say, Einstein and Tesla were extremely proficient at accessing mind-at-large. They didn’t make their groundbreaking discoveries ”themselves” within their individual whirlpools.
As far as I understand, this also ties in with Plato’s Ideal world, or world of Forms, where the perfect versions of all our visions dwell. And, by the way, with David Bohm’s implicate order.
The question arises whether there is such a thing as individual ideas at all. Could having a eureka moment and connecting with Source/God/mind-at-large be the same thing?
Another answer I got from Bernardo Kastrup that I pondered a lot afterwards concerned the brain as a filter, a metaphor that was used already by William James in the 1890s (and corresponds to modern variants such as a computer). That consciousness is not produced in the brain is a no-brainer for an idealist like Kastrup. Research and documented experiences show that the brain rather gets in the way of deeper experiences of reality.
But to see it as a filter, Kastrup claimed, implies duality, which creates all kinds of problems for a model of reality.
”After all, you can’t make coffee filters from coffee.”
But does it really imply duality more than any other description of a function in our illusory dashboard world? I can well understand the concept that behind the scenes, as it were, everything is mental processes. But why couldn’t the dashboard dials that we perceive as the brain be filtering mind-at-large information in the same way the dashboard dials that we perceive as the liver and the kidneys (or, for that matter, the body as a whole) filter what we eat and drink? Okay, so everything I just mentioned is in actuality one sole kind of mental activity. Sure, but if that is the answer to every description of a function in what we think of as the physical, what is then the point of differing between functions in the body at all? What is the point of a brain at all?
Most of us obviously cannot gain immediate access to the totality of the information in mind-at large, right? So even if we are speaking of ripples and whirlpools made from the same stuff, these ripples and pools seem to be able to separate information; thus filter. After all, coffee filters and coffee are different ripples in the same stream.
I am very possibly missing some crucial point here. But as you can see, this theme also made me stretch my cognitive abilities.
The two examples above have been very interesting and educative mental exercises for me. However, Kastrup made one comment that I instinctively rejected. I didn’t say so during our conversation, but I remembered my reaction and returned to his words to investigate why I felt resistance.
We were talking about the materialist view of consciousness, and I said that the very idea that the essence of what one is should be produced inside one’s skull immediately creates a claustrophobic feeling.
”True”, Kastrup replied, ”but I don’t think that would be a reason to discard the hypothesis.”
”If reality is a shit show, then we should bite the bullet.”
As we know, Kastrup’s deep and long reasoning about these matters has made him reject materialism as ”baloney”, but he really wanted to make the point that truth must be the beacon that shows the way, regardless of where it takes us.
It is hard not to agree. But I see it this way: If the brain actually produced consciousness, i.e. if we were in fact purely material beings, this notion would never be perceived as a shit show. It would make perfect sense and feel completely natural (whatever ”feel” would entail in a materialist reality). In my opinion, the very fact that the thought of being only matter — a biological robot — creates a sense of angst and claustrophobia indicates that there is an inner knowledge that tells you that the material idea is wrong.
Enter Angelo DiLullo. This fascinating man is in many ways a philosopher like Kastrup, but in the world of formal labels he works as a doctor. What makes him deeply interesting is his experience of awakening, or realization, as he mostly calls this profound shift. He has described life before awakening as being in an almost constant state of agony. Afterwards, all his suffering ceased. DiLullo’s story resembles Eckhart Tolle’s.
DiLullo didn’t speak publicly about his awakening for many years. It isn’t really possible to convey through language, only by experience. But gradually his insights spread among colleagues and friends, and people began asking for advice. To his own surprise, he found that he, living in the present moment as he now did, spontaneously said precisely the words people needed to hear. A couple of years ago, he published a book entitled Awake — It’s Your Turn, where he describes this profound yet self-evident perceptual shift in a non-religious, almost non-spiritual fashion. He wanted it that way. Awakening to ”unfiltered reality” (yes, he is also in the filter business) is such a natural human thing that using an overly spiritual lingo would be an unnecessary disservice to the many people who don’t resonate with that.
What DiLullo writes and says is definitely worth a separate essay. Perhaps one day I will do one. (Until then, check out his website and his growing number of videos on Youtube.)
Now, what would Angelo DiLullo say about even raising the possibility that reality is a shit show? I suspect he would say something like: ”Listen, I was in the shit show for 25 years. Then I realized the show was just an illusion.”
There is a fundamental difference between mentally understanding the nature of reality and experiencing it, i.e. knowing it. Even if the latter is a final goal, the former is also important. Bernardo K touched on this when he said that although spirituality should be taken just as seriously as science, it is important to keep science, spirituality and philosophy apart. They are three different avenues to describing reality. If the lines are blurred, clarity suffers. As an example, scientists could cheat by employing spiritual terminology to salvage failing hypotheses.
I perceive both Bernardo Kastrup and Angelo DiLullo as cerebral persons. They probably disagree on much, but to somebody who learns about a reality beyond the material for the first time, it likely appears as if they have reached more or less the same conclusion — one by thinking, the other by experiencing.
Kastrup has used his intelligence to reasoning deeper than most would be capable of, in order to understand what he is.
DiLullo has used his intelligence to peel away all reasoning and experience what actually lies in there, behind and beyond.
