Time to master the new metaphysics

‘We’re spies for the mind of nature.’ Bernardo Kastrup

Consciousness is the only carrier of reality that we can know for certain, with all things capable of being explained as excitations of consciousness as a non-local field phenomenon.

Thus reality consists of a transpersonal flow of experiences, while our personal awareness is a localisation of this flow — in philosopher-scientist Bernardo Kastrup’s telling analogy, ‘a whirlpool in the stream’. So the body-brain system doesn’t generate consciousness any more than a whirlpool generates water.

Metaphysical, or monistic or analystic, idealism, the philosophy that reality is experiential, grounded in a transpersonal consciousness, becomes more persuasive if we accept that all things, including ourselves as living beings, are essentially ‘energy events’, as quantum science tells us.

Kastrup‘s metaphysical interpretation of reality, while underlining graphically the failures of physicalism, seeks to usher in a new philosophical and scientific paradigm for the 21st century, proclaiming that only through the understanding our own inner nature can we understand the nature of the world.

His argument is that, unlike that of physicalism or panpsychism (which actually safeguards aspects of physicalism), consciousness is causal and…