It may seem strange to ask it, but one way to put the most important question for humanity right now is this: Can we learn to inhabit reality?

By implication, this question suggests we currently inhabit delusion. That’s what the wisdom traditions of the world—including many indigenous traditions—try to make rather clear to all of us living in, or infected by, the dominant culture.

This divergence from reality appears in many ways and in a variety of forms. One of the most crazy-making forms comes to us in the economic and political realm, when business and political “leaders” tell us that our need for a thriving and just world isn’t “realistic”. When it comes to justice and ecological health—on which our personal well-being depends—the “leaders” tell us that reality itself isn’t “realistic”. 

When reality itself becomes “unrealistic,” we face the potential for grave catastrophe—not to mention general unwellness. Sadly, we have become rather accustomed to thinking of reality as “unrealistic”.

The greatest experiment of our time will is the one to find out if inhabiting reality is possible for us, before it's too late.

The Greatest Experiment: Inhabiting Reality vs. Inhabiting Delusion

n. patedakis

Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.

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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into mystery and a gateway to the mind of Nature and the nature of mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

Today we will consider some of the issues that might come up when we consider the relationship between art and architecture, ecology, and the wisdom traditions. These reflections relate to the dialogue with Sarah Breen Lovett from our last episode.

Sarah and I reflected on what it means to inhabit interwovenness.

It may seem strange to ask it, but one way to put the most important question for humanity right now is this: Can we learn to inhabit reality?

By implication, this question suggests we currently inhabit delusion. That’s what the wisdom traditions of the world—including many indigenous traditions—try to make rather clear to all of us living in, or infected by, the dominant culture.

This divergence from reality appears in many ways and in a variety of forms. One of the most crazy-making forms comes to us in the economic and political realm, when business and political “leaders” tell us that our need for a thriving and just world isn’t “realistic”. When it comes to justice and ecological health—on which our personal well-being depends—the “leaders” tell us that reality itself isn’t “realistic”.

When reality itself becomes “unrealistic,” we face the potential for grave catastrophe—not to mention general unwellness. Sadly, we have become rather accustomed to thinking of reality as “unrealistic”.

Reality tells us we need clean water, clean air, and healthy soil. But, our “leaders” effectively tell us that it’s not “realistic” to think we can stop the collapse of our ecologies, stop the pollution of our air and water, and stop the degradation of our soil.

Reality tells us we all depend on each other, and that we succeed most profoundly by means of cooperation, collaboration, and mutuality. And reality tells us we can function on the basis of compassion, wisdom, and grace. But we get indoctrinated to see ourselves as atomized individuals who succeed by means of self-centeredness, competition, and even aggression. We get indoctrinated to see ourselves as homo economicus—a delusory being—rather than seeing ourselves as homo sapiens, a wisdom being. Seeing ourselves as homo economicus is “realistic,” while our real nature is “unrealistic”. Living in accord with our real nature also means living in accord with our philosophical, spiritual, and religious traditions. But we are taught to see those traditions as “unrealistic”.

We are also indoctrinated to believe it’s not “realistic” to expect real democracy—and certainly not “realistic” to expect democracy at work. It’s not “realistic” to think we don’t need billionaires, and totally “unrealistic” to think we should have a just economic and political system. A “realistic” “democracy” gets limited to voting and protesting, and seeing “the government” as something other than ourselves.

Meanwhile, the reality of democracy invites us into participation, dialogue, and the wonders of mutual illumination and mutual liberation. However, the vision of a democratic culture, and the vision of real liberation for ourselves, remains unrealistic.

We can go on and on, cataloguing how reality isn’t realistic in our present system of thought, the style of consciousness that characterizes the dominant culture.

This may sound a bit “philosophical” in the pejorative sense of that word—the sense of “philosophy” our “realistic” leaders want us to accept as final. Ironically, our “leaders” preach to us the most insane and unrealistic “philosophies” while getting us to think of real philosophy, real LoveWisdom, as “unrealistic,” “abstract,” and “idealistic”.

Our scientists have begun to take seriously something the philosopher Nietzsche first realized in relation to the theory of evolution. He related this realization in his book on The Joyful Science (usually translated as The Gay Science, and we're looking at section 110). Nietzsche had the brilliant idea that we need a scientific revolution that gives us a new style of science, one rooted in joy and able to help us create a vitalizing culture.

In that book, he proposed that evolution offers us no guarantee that beings would evolve to have increasing insight into the nature of reality. Quite the contrary, if delusion has any survival value, then beings could emerge with deeply entrenched ignorance. That seems to be the human predicament.

Nietzsche catalogues some of that ignorance:

That there are enduring things

That there are equal things

That there are things at all—substances, bodies, objects

That a thing is what it appears to be

That our will is free

That what is good for me is also good in itself

Our science and our wisdom traditions have raised profound objections to such ignorance. We can’t really call these “beliefs,” since “beliefs” usually submit to correction, even if it takes a long time to correct them.

In contrast, the ignorance expressed in the above propositions has to do with the way we constitute “reality”. We can’t just “change our mind” about the existence of “objects”. We automatically and unconsciously constitute our reality as if we are subjects in relation to pre-existing objects. We even take “reality” to mean something like that: How things would be even if no humans were around. But reality depends on humans in order to be what it is.

Nietzsche puts the problem in delightfully Nietzschean terms: He says that truth emerged very late in human development, and it emerged as, relatively speaking, the “weakest” form of knowledge human beings had access to.

In one sense, we can read Nietzsche as having conquest consciousness in mind. He tells us the biography of conquest consciousness. He thus offers us a diagnosis of our current crisis, which is a crisis of reality and knowledge. We currently can’t agree on how to properly know reality, how to properly know what to do, how to organize our societies, how to become happy, healthy, and wise. We lack a joyful science, and seem caught in a science of misery and delusion.

The situation is like this: We see that it is possible to live without truth, and even to appear to thrive on the basis of ignorance. Our perception and our “higher faculties” (reason, analysis, scientific investigation) work on the basis of these essential errors.

Nietzsche invites us to get very realistic about our ignorance. In accord with many wisdom traditions and the great sages of those traditions, Nietzsche wants to help us see that we have come to incorporate our ignorance. We are ignorance embodied, not merely ignorant as a matter of “belief”.

Our nature may be wisdom, love, and beauty, but that’s all abstraction. In practice, we embody ignorance. Liberation means learning to embody reality.

We have to come back to that. It’s central to the fundamental point.

But first, let’s acknowledge that Nietzsche directly pointed at the conflict we see today. He said that, any time life itself seems to conflict with human “knowledge,” we will call anyone who sides with life unrealistic. To side with truth, to side with reality, to side with life consistently gets denounced by anyone who prefers the ignorance humans put forward as “knowledge”.

This illustrates the nature of “knowledge” as endarkenment, as David Bohm put it. It’s the opposite of enlightenment. What we feel convinced that we know can sometimes stand as the greatest impediment to truth, to transformative insight and healing.

In our time, this also captures the function of what we may refer to as “progressives” or certain kinds of “educated” “thought leaders”. They function as weak mediators of reality and truth. They try to stop the most horrific forms of reality denial, even while they themselves remain mired in ignorance.

For instance, we can have two claims about “reality” that seem contradictory or somehow in conflict. This happens because both claims remain largely compatible with the basic errors we embody. “My body, my choice” seems contradictory to “As a former fetus, I oppose abortion”. Both reflect confusions we embody rather than merely “believe”.

We can think of Steven Pinker here as well. As a “educated” and perhaps “progressive” thinker, he tries to convince us that we have “enlightenment now,” as the title of one of his books puts it. But we have endarkenment now, and only the wisdom traditions—not “science,” not “intellectualism,” not “capitalism,” nor any of the “isms” the dominant culture likes to celebrate—only the wisdom traditions offer us the teachings to make enlightenment a robust possibility.

To put this in somewhat strange terms, Nietzsche essentially tells us that evolutionary theory tells us we evolved on the basis of a will to survival, not a will to truth. What matters is what helps us survive, not what helps us know ultimate reality. Recent work in cognitive science has tried to show the value of thinking about our situation this way. Although I disagree with him in fundamental ways, we can acknowledge Donald Hoffman for trying to work with these suggestions in a serious way.

What matters most for us today is what Nietzsche himself saw as the most important question: To what extent can truth be incorporated? In yet another instance of his prescience and excellence as a philosophical diagnostician, Nietzsche rightly saw all other questions as subordinate to this one.

In the midst of all manner of denials of reality, we have come to the most dire need to stop—to pause all our insanity and ask,

Can truth be embodied?

We have embodied so much ignorance that now the consequences of that ignorance have also come to take up residence in our bodies. Because we embodied ignorance, we now have plastic and Teflon in our blood, lead in our bones, iron and mercury in our brains.

We have embodied so much ignorance that we no longer inhabit reality. Instead, we live in our own world of delusion, one in which we can keep degrading the conditions of life and extending the conditions of injustice.

Can we change that? Can truth be inhabited?

Thich Nhat Hanh offers a delightful invitation: “Our own life is the instrument with which we experiment with truth.” We experiment and embody. If we experiment with care, we can begin to break free from delusion and start to inhabit truth.

Asking how we can inhabit truth comes to asking, How can we inhabit interwovenness?

This grand experiment proposed by the likes of Nietzsche and Thich Nhat Hanh (two fairly distinct philosophers) has become incredibly urgent, because we can see that, especially for a planet of almost 8 billion humans (perhaps 9 or more before who knows what), we must also ask,

“To what extent can we endure, can life as we know it endure, if we fail to better incorporate truth?”

This has nothing to do with absolutes, but comes as a question of the skillfulness or unskillfulness of our whole way of life, which we cannot ever untangle from our way of knowing and being, living and loving.

Philosophy has to do with knowing better by living better, and living better by knowing better. Philosophy and spirituality teach us the altogether shift into better ways of knowing and being, living and loving—thus liberating in us our fullest capacity to cultivate the whole of life onward, to positively evolve life in our World.

Science and art (like all human endeavors, including architecture, knitting, cooking, playing) must ultimately be in service to life, not in service to any typical human agenda (what Gregory Bateson referred to as “conscious human purpose”), and philosophy helps all of us take up that fundamental act of service, which amounts to a “higher” purpose, which we need not conceive in any dogmatically “religious” sense, but which we can all of us—theist and atheist alike—see as the meaning of life.

So when we speak of embodying it or inhabiting it—inhabiting or embodying interwovenness and flux, because that seems like reality, and thus necessity of a spiritual kind—we should immediately sense a paradox, because everything we know tells us that interwovenness and dynamic fluidity is how things are. If we look at our cutting-edge science, and if we look at the wisdom traditions, they seem to tell us precisely this: Everything is totally interwoven, and, practically speaking, in flux.

And we seem too quick to leap in and think we understand this intellectually because we have gotten so very clever about our “knowledge”. We get PhDs and we do very complicated mathematics or linguistic analysis or other calculative, instrumental thought, and then we fancy we have understood. Or we build very complicated things like particle accelerators, rocketships, fancy buildings, and so on, and we think we understand the World.

But, it seems we don’t really understand (or wonderstand) interwovenness and flux, or else we wouldn’t suffer. The philosophical meaning of suffering includes a sense of pattern, such that we get pulled into a pattern of suffering that arises from an active misknowing of reality—that automatic embodiment of our delusion.

Part of our misknowing relates to our failure to directly and intimately sense the mutuality of self and World. It leads us to miss the ways we have to become artists of life.

The great photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, reflecting on the nature of art, wrote that,

“. . . through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us, which can mold us, but which can also be affected by us . . . As the result of a constant reciprocal process, both these worlds [inner and outer] come to form a single one. And it is this world that we must communicate.”

We can compare those reflections with this analysis of the ecology of perception, by psychologist J.J. Gibson:

“To perceive the world is to coperceive oneself ... The optical information to specify the self... accompanies the optical information to specify the environment... The one could not exist without the other... The supposedly separate realms of the subjective and the objective are actually only poles of attention. The dualism of observer and environment is unnecessary. The information for the perception of “here” is of the same kind as the information for the perception of “there,” and a continuous layout of surfaces extends from the one to the other.”

In other words, as the cognitive scientist Francisco Varela put it: World and perceiver specify each other.

But maybe the clearest expression comes from the Dalai Lama. In his book, A Call for Revolution, he tells us,

Here the Dalai Lama makes it clear to us that we are talking about our own suffering. To heal that suffering we have to become artists of life. We co-create our World, with countless sentient beings, and they depend on us to activate our imagination in the most powerful ways possible, which our wisdom traditions teach us.

We haven’t made those teachings central to our culture, and, as a consequence, our creation of the world has gone awry. Instead of creating the World in the image of wisdom, love, and beauty, we let our vision get clouded by ignorance and the endarkenment of human “knowledge”. And we can call this misdirected creativity the active misknowing of ourselves, each other, our World, and the Cosmos itself.

This active misknowing means our suffering pulls the “countless silken ties of love and thought” that constitute our World, such that other beings suffer because of our ignorance. That leads to loss of friendships, breakdowns of partnerships, degradation of ecologies, shocking injustice and inequality, and all the rest. It all goes together, all arises together. The dynamic interwovenness of the World arises as a well-put-togetherness that can manifest either as bondage or liberation, either as vitality or catastrophe.

Our contemporary scientists, particularly our ecologists, have made it clear to us that we don’t perceive (at all, or at least not clearly) the subtle and profound interwovenness and fluidity of all things. And so we trample this relationality instead of embodying it.

In order to embody reality, we need to receive our responsibility. We don’t, so to speak, just get to “embody reality” in any abstract sense or in accord with ordinary human purpose. Concretely speaking, we can’t “embody” the mystery we already are. That should seem paradoxical, because it is.

How do we embody what we already are? It’s like the ridiculous notion of, “Just be yourself.” What does that mean? The meaning seems like confusion, because most of the time we are “doing” ourselves rather than being ourselves, so we would have to stop all the doing in order to embody what we already are.

And the relationality itself contributes essentially to the paradox, because it means that we can’t embody reality without taking responsibility—in mutuality. We have to accept what we would call ontological responsibilities, a fancy way of saying we have a kind of obligation to the nature of reality. It means we have to accept simultaneously ecological and Cosmic level responsibilities. We have to have the sense of valuing something that transcends our ego because the World depends on us to do it.

We have to at least begin to have some sense that the World depends on us and that we depend on the World—totally. We depend on countless sentient beings, and we depend on a vast mystery, a sacred, creative order (largely hidden or implicit) that can never become an “object” of “knowledge”.

We need this sense of our dependence on everything, and somehow there’s no way for us to “embody” it, for that would emerge as if we were trying to isolate ourselves. In other words, the paradox could express itself in this question: Who will embody it?

Here we have to recognize again with Nietzsche that, first of all, we have incorporated falsehood. All of us have. We embody ignorance, which means we are fake or deluded about what we are, what we believe, what things annoy us, what things don’t, what things we’re going to have to give up in order for the World to become healed and rejuvenated in mutuality with us. We’re all a bunch of fakers about it all.

And we have a bunch of stories we tell, which are mostly ideology or spiritual materialism, and which go together with this fakery and this active misknowing of self and World. Together with this, we now have a culture obsessed with “story” and “changing the story”—sometimes with lovely intentions, and sometimes with rather nefarious intentions. We have, “What’s your story” and, “Everybody’s got a story,” and, “Tell your story,” and all the rest, but we don’t want to confront how much ideology pervades all these stories. Good stories heal. But that doesn’t mean our approach to the narratives of our lives and our culture have gotten free of the delusions we embody.

Thus it shouldn’t surprise us to find a lot of fakery, confusion, and basic ignorance in the dominant culture. We basically live in a culture of ignorance, a culture that encourages us to incorporate and embody its favored forms of delusion.

It’s not that we can’t be sincere. It’s not that it’s impossible. It’s not that it never happens. It’s that we are shot through with active misknowing that we have embodied—we have embodied missknowing of ourselves, our World, each other, all beings.

We don’t directly perceive the dynamic interwovenness we are. That’s extraordinary. And it means we both cannot not embody it, and yet we somehow need to learn how to embody it skillfully.

Perhaps the first thing we should do is stop. If we already are It (reality, the great mystery, the divine, the sacred), the most important thing to do would be to stop trying to embody It.

Spiritual practice means stopping. And it also means learning how to move again, to move gracefully.

We could just completely come to a stop. In practice, it’s nigh impossible. But, if we really did come to a stop, if we really did stop all the faking and doing, then the natural reality would be “there,” so to speak.

No one’s going to do that. We could put down all our delusions in one go. But no one will do that—or at least almost no one. Not only does our insanity have tremendous momentum, but total enlightenment—perfect wisdom, compassion, and grace—is not very easy to realize.

Therefore, we need to have practices that help us, and that’s okay. It will take time for us to stop inhabiting and embodying ignorance, and to get better and better at inhabiting and embodying wisdom, love, and beauty. And it will take even longer to firmly establish a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty, in which people grow up with an orientation toward reality rather than delusion.

Inhabiting thus also brings up habit and learning. In some sense, we’ve got to have the new habit before we can think the new thoughts. We can’t think our way into a new inhabiting, because—in an important sense—inhabiting comes first, and thought comes afterward.

So—How do we think we’ll manage to inhabit dynamic interwovenness? We’re chock full of habits now. We inhabit fragmentation, delusion, and incoherence. We inhabit that. And now we think we can just start inhabiting the truth?

We have to let the truth inhabit us.

However, as of now, we’re too full. We’re rather fully inhabited with delusion.

How can anything inhabit us? How can Earth inhabit us? How can other sentient beings inhabit us?

If we want to skillfully inhabit Earth, we must allow Earth to inhabit us. That’s the meaning of “inhabiting interwovenness” or “inhabiting reality”.

It’s the same as when people—and we may not believe a story like this—but, if we were single, and we said, “I would really love to be in a relationship,” and someone said, “Well, how is this possible? You work 16-hour days. I come to your house sometimes, and I can see: There’s no space in it. It’s full of your stuff. There’s no space here for anybody else. There’s no space in your schedule. There’s no space in your life for someone else. And, frankly, I’m not sure you’d be that good at it. I think after the passion phase, after the limerence, it would crash and burn, because you’re very self-centered, and you mainly have time for your own interests. How will you let someone else inhabit your mind and heart?”

And so that somebody might invite us to understand that we are symbolic beings. And they may say, “You need to clear out some of this clutter, and you need to clear out some of your schedule and start to make space for someone else to be able to come into your life. You can’t go look for them, because—already—you have the habit of not wanting them in your life. That’s how your life has become organized. Moreover, you need to start practicing care, compassion, patience, generosity, peace, and so on. You need to practice love in order to get good at it, and practice spaciousness of heart. That way, when someone comes into your life, they find a real welcome in your heart, mind, and body, in your awareness and your being. They will have space, and they can live in your heart.”

Reality needs us to make space for it, to make a home for it. Countless sentient beings—human and non-human—need us to make space for them, to become a refuge for them. The Earth, the divine, the great mystery, and sacredness itself need us to make space in our hearts, minds, and bodies so that they can inhabit us, and so that we can inhabit them, dwelling peacefully and joyfully as we co-create new possibilities, and cultivate the whole of life onward.

If you have questions, reflections, or stories to share about the practice and realization of the interwovenness and fluidity of our World, get in touch through dangerouswisdom.org We might be able to bring some of them into a future contemplation.

Until next time, this is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, reminding you that your soul and the soul of the World are not two things—take good care of them.