We all hold a philosophy.  We cannot avoid it.  Even if we’re not quite sure how to put it in words, we all look at the world from a particular direction, through a certain window, from a certain set of assumptions about reality.  

Many of us, perhaps most of us, don’t give our philosophy much thought, let alone identify it with a name.  Our beliefs about reality have been with us too long; we don’t notice those parts of us that were formed long before our ability to remember.

Yet our lack of awareness does not mean our philosophy is incidental. On the contrary, it literally determines the meaning we give our lives. It determines how we interpret the events that happen to us, it determines the actions we choose to undertake, it even determines how we feel about our own thoughts.

It is no exaggeration to say that our philosophy is the most important element of our mental lives.

Windows on the world

There are generally three ways of looking at the world, and all philosophies are embellished varieties of these basic three. 

The first way is called dualism, based on the principle of a dual reality, God (Spirit) above and the world (matter) below.  Dualism usually says that the only way of looking at the world is through the window provided by Bible and religion. 

The second way is called materialism, based on the certainty that matter is all there is.  This philosophy insists the only way of looking at the world is through the window provided by the scientific method of empirical proof.

Here in the Western hemisphere, we learn the first at church, the second at school, and although these two views may be miles apart in their approach, they are surprisingly compatible.  Although fundamentalists may stay firmly entrenched in one view or the other, most Westerners learn to switch back and forth and accept each to varying degrees, depending on whether they are at work or at school, or what’s going on in their lives at the time.

Both worldviews are also in accord in their distrust of the self, the small slippery self caught up in its own experience.  Both remove the self from the quest for knowledge and direct us instead to defer to others, whether it be long-dead prophets raving in the desert or a group of physicists in white lab coats. 

The third way, the traditional way of the East -- as well as the way of the New Age -- is idealism, based on the understanding that Spirit is all there is.  Idealism says that in order to truly see the world, one must look through many windows and learn to understand how each impacts what we see.  It also says that since all seeing is dependent upon a self who sees, there can be no knowledge of the world without knowledge of the self.  It says we must not blindly follow paths forged by others, but must follow the path that pushes up beneath our own two feet. 

The perfect idea

The word “idealism” comes from Plato’s theory of eternal Ideas, the changeless entities he believed to give form to all matter. According to Plato, everything we experience, from truth or beauty to a bed or a horse, is an inferior copy of a perfect Idea that exists independent of reality.

The world we experience, said Plato, is but a pale reflection of the greater spiritual reality of Ideas.

Today, we might use more sophisticated terms to describe the concept. Buckminster Fuller, for example, called the Idea a “pattern integrity.” He was reportedly fond of lifting a hand during his lectures and asking students what they were seeing.  He would then point out that since all the cells of his hand would be dead in a year or so, replaced by new cells, then his hand could not be an actual thing with any permanence. “My hand is actually a ‘pattern integrity,” he would say, “the universe’s capability to create hands.”

Such a pattern integrity, or Idea, is clearly a mental abstraction -- something intangible, yet completely real.  Indeed, for the idealist, every part of the universe is the manifestation of an abstract pattern, a phenomenon of Mind, or Consciousness, or Spirit. (In the German language, Mind and Spirit are the same word, Geist).

This doesn’t mean that matter does not exist; it means only that matter is an expression of spirit.  In other words, spirit is the essence of matter, and the physical objects that make up the universe are literally made up of the immaterial substance of spiritual energy.  

Spirit is reality, and no matter how you slice it, reality is Spirit.

Seeing the light

Unless you grew up in a Buddhist household, or had hippie parents that once traveled to India to find enlightenment – then, like me, you were never exposed to the idealistic worldview growing up.

But then again, many of us reared in the Western philosophies of materialism and dualism also grew up with a nagging feeling of something “not quite right” about what we were being told about reality. 

Maybe you found yourself holding an opinion with no logical basis in the traditional worldview, or maybe you felt or saw something that the traditional worldview said we were not supposed to feel or see.  Or maybe you had a conversation with an open-minded teacher, or saw a movie based in a different reality, or ran across a eye-opening book in a library.

But no matter how it happened, for many of us, that first moment of crossing paths with idealism hits us like an epiphany. That nagging feeling of things not making sense falls away all at once, and the new view of reality we see finally matches what we have intuitively felt all along.

Indeed, once that window shade snaps open, once you “see the light” from another point of view, you can’t turn back. Once you glimpse the possibility that reality might be other than what it appears to be, you can never deny that sense of possibility again. As the great idealist Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “Every materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materialist.”

For me, the most wonderful part of looking through the window of idealism was the discovery of answers to questions – philosophical dilemmas -- that had been unsatisfactorily answered most of my life. 

Stars may burn out and continents may drift, but the experience of being human eternally presents us with the same intractable problems. We wonder where we came from and how we got here. We wonder about the world around us, and how it got here. We wonder why the environment that sustains us can so suddenly forsake us.

Philosophy takes our wonder and turns it into a number of questions known as the “problems” of philosophy.  How do we know what is most true?  What is the nature of reality?  Is there a God?  What is the nature of man?  Why are we here?  Do we have free will?  Do we come into the world with moral obligations?

Every philosophy -– idealistic, materialistic, or dualistic -- has worked out its own answers to each problem.  The pages in the Philosophy Section of this Web site take up these problems, one by one, and delve into the answers suggested by all three philosophies in general, and by New Age philosophy in particular.

It has been these ideas that have made common sense to me.  It is these ideas that have illuminated my way, and made the journey of my life an adventure I relish each day.  I hope they do the same for you.

Go to Truth & Knowledge.