Common Dreams
“I never could conceive the difference, except that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream.” — C. S. Lewis
Yes, if I can see it and you cannot, that would warrant your doubting my sanity, especially if others confirm for you that there is nothing there.
But there are other possible ontologies, other ways to interpret the basic fact of the world’s solidity, and the consistency of evidence for its history.
We are able to maintain this distinction between dream and reality because the no-man’s-land in between is so sparsely populated. There is so much that we agree on, you, me, and the postman. The universe of consensus reality is so very broad and so very rich that we may pass all of our waking hours immersed in it and never suspect that there is anything else. Indeed, this was the paradigm of materialism that nineteenth century science delivered to nineteenth century philosophy.
Put aside for a moment the finding of Solomon Asch that most people care too much for the acceptance of their peers to take a lone stand for Truth, and the implication that our reality testing in the age of mass media is vulnerable to manipulation by any institution that gains power over the largest of those media.
We still must grant the logical possibility of that stance taken by Berkeley and Kastrup, presaged by Zhuangzi and Pyrrho in our classical past. The individual mind has some small power to affect reality — no surprise to Robert Jahn or Uri Geller. And our minds collectively, when they resonate, have a more extensive power, a primitive power to create all that we perceive as “physical”.
Why is there regularity in the behavior of the world? The common view is that our brains were evolved to reason about regularities of the natural world because a consonance between our logic and the ways of the world has survival value. But, alternatively, we must allow for the possibility that we humans (human minds or possibly, the community of life, or the wider community of sentient beings) created the natural world in conformity to the expectations of our minds, or of the One Mind of which we all partake.
How might we ever know if this world of great and solid Things is, at its core, a common dream?
If this is true, then we may one day encounter a situation where the Rational Public is divided. The line between delusion and consensus reality will be impossible to draw, because so many rational people on both sides of the divide are in mutual agreement. There will be no way to say that one or the other group is delusional. If the Idealists are correct, then reality might bifurcate. If the belief systems of the two groups are sufficiently different, and if their worlds overlap significantly, we can expect both sides to experience anomalies at the boundary, phenomena that cannot be explained within their side’s paradigm.
Consider the fractured state of America today…
COVID was a devastating virus that jumped from bats to humans, and from which modern biomedicine rescued humanity. COVID was a laboratory bioweapon, created as an excuse to centralize control of the economy and human culture.
January 6 was an insurrection incited by a delusional narcissist who could not accept the plain fact that people voted him out. January 6 began as a political protest by people who don’t trust secret software to count their votes, and was directed toward unlawful behavior by agents provocateurs from the FBI.
LDL cholesterol is the proximate cause of heart disease and strokes. LDL cholesterol is a protective mechanism, negatively correlated with incidence of cardiovascular disease.
9/11 was a terrorist attack masterminded by Islamic fundamentalists. 9/11 was a false flag, created by the Deep State to justify steering the US toward a police state.
The United States is the Indispensable Nation, the greatest democracy in the history of the world. The United States was always a flawed and fragile democracy, and since November 22, 1963, voters no longer have any power over actions of the Federal Government that matter most.
If Trump wins in November, the US will be plunged into unabashed fascism. If Trump loses in November, the US will be plunged into unabashed fascism.
My personal opinion is that continental divides in the body politic are not evidence of an Idealist ontology, but rather the result of powerful financial and political interests that have, time and again, inserted their Big Lie into the Liberal Media on which so much of the educated public relies.
But I’m not discounting the possibility that reality is at core mental, and that some foundational features of reality will therefore be undecidable within any scientific framework.
In Zimbabwe in 1994, 62 school children saw a UFO and communicated telepathically with a creature who stepped out of it.
In Fátima, Portugal, in 1917, tens of thousands of people said that the sun danced around the sky for ten minutes.
John Mack documented dozens of cases in which seemingly sane people told stories of being abducted by aliens.
In 17th Century Italy (not so long ago, just a few years before Isaac Newton), many thousands of people witnessed Saint Joseph of Cupertino levitate and hover high above the ground, or near a Cathedral ceiling, on dozens of different occasions.
From 1972 to 1995, the US CIA funded Project Stargate out of Stanford Research Institute, in which remote viewers spied on the Soviet Union without ever leaving California. Several of their viewers reported realities that were later verified with uncanny accuracy. The most talented of all these was Pat Price, who died under suspicious circumstances shortly after he began working for Stargate.
In shared death experiences, people in the room with a dying person experience the same ghosts and visions that traditional psychologists dismiss as hallucinations when they are reported by dying people alone.
People I know have seen ghosts. I have not. I do not believe in ghosts. Is it because I have never seen a ghost that I do not believe in ghosts? Or is it because I do not believe in ghosts that I have never seen a ghost?
Such stories have inspired me to re-consider the reality of Biblical accounts of miracles, and Greek stories in which gods appeared in human guise. When I hear something that others in the room don’t hear, or see something that others don’t see, I doubt my perceptions. How sure am I that there are not realities accessible to some beings, some of the time?
It is said the people of the island called Hispaniola where Columbus first anchored in the New World could not see his ships on the horizon because they did not believe in the possibility of sailing ships. What things are we unable to see today because we do not believe them possible?