The Myth of Direct Experience

No One Gets Behind the Veil, Though Many Sell Tickets

Two hundred years ago, Hegel pointed out that perceiving sensation or “reality” directly is impossible. Perception always occurs within a conceptual frame. There’s no pure contact—only interpretation filtered through language, memory, and cultural context.

And it matters. Especially when someone insists they’ve had a “direct experience” of truth. If you take Hegel seriously, you see the problem immediately: to turn a feeling, an intuition, or a passing event into proof of Oneness is not direct knowing but a mistake of perception. Not a higher knowing, but blindness to how perception actually works.

I know this goes against the tide. But I see the belief in “Oneness” as a cul-de-sac. The idea of a single universal consciousness—one essence behind all appearances—is metaphysical theory, not a fact. And there’s no evidence for it. There can’t be. If we take Hegel’s critique seriously, the very structure of perception rules it out.

Once someone adopts Advaita as “Truth,” and claims to have “realized” it, confirmation bias can lock that posture in place. From then on, every perception is filtered through the presumption of unity. What might otherwise have been seen as ordinary experience gets re-labeled as proof.

Antara: “From Hegel’s statement and your further explication, where does the ‘outside world’ fit into this? I know you don’t consider it illusion in the sense that it doesn’t really exist, but it could be considered illusion in the sense that we can only see it through our own context and perceptions, right? I would love to hear you talk more about this, Robert. I love the clarity that you presented in this post.”

Thank you, Antara.

Yes—exactly. I don’t consider the world illusory in the Vedantic sense—as a projection of consciousness or “maya.” But I do consider it illusory in this sense: we never encounter the world directly. We encounter only what our perceptual apparatus and conceptual framework allow us to construct. What appears is not “reality” at all—only a species-specific simulation.

That’s why I reject philosophical idealism—the claim that “only consciousness exists.” That’s not based on observation. It can’t be. It’s theology, an old inheritance from the Upanishads, later formalized as Advaita. To call it “truth” is to mistake inheritance for insight.

Naturalism says awareness is emergent—something that arises under certain complex conditions, like a human brain. In this view, awareness doesn’t precede the cosmos. It arose within it. No one can prove this beyond doubt, but as a working stance, it fits ordinary observation.

No one perceives the world “as it is.” What we call seeing or knowing is a reconstruction—filtered by evolution, memory, language, and culture. Our every thought is biased, shaped by grammar we learned before we could reason. Subject-object syntax, for example, encodes the illusion of a seer apart from the seen.

So yes, the illusion is not in the world itself, but in how we process and interpret it. A bat perceives space through sound. A dog through scent. Their worlds are not our world. And even among humans, no two nervous systems construct quite the same simulation.

The Buddha’s teaching cuts in at exactly this point. He didn’t say the self is unreal. He said it lacks fixed essence. The self isn’t a thing. It’s a bundle: form, feeling, perception, thought, awareness. Five skandhas, loosely associated. And awareness belongs to that bundle—not sovereign, not outside, not free-standing. No hidden observer behind them. Just the recursive illusion of one.

Renee: “So, Robert, everything is really a belief about what ‘I’ am experiencing? A made-up construct? I got into a discussion with a fellow Buddhist teacher, but I can’t really accept it because I can see the dogma of Buddhism, which says it is absolutely true that everything is one. That is the truth of Buddhism. Now I’ve had that experience of the ‘oneness and connection of everything,’ but isn’t that just my mind interpreting what I experienced?”

Hi, Renee.

I’m not sure that “all is one” is the truth of Buddhism. You may have that mistaken.

The early teachings center on impermanence, suffering, and no-self, not oneness. The structural doctrine is dependent origination: things arise in relation to conditions, not from a single underlying substance.

Later Mahāyāna thought emphasizes emptiness—that phenomena lack inherent essence. That again is not the same as “oneness.”

Some later traditions and teachers use terms like tathatā or buddha-nature, which can be interpreted as a concept of unity. But that reading often owes more to Vedanta than to early Buddhist analysis.

So the idea that “everything is one” is a metaphysical claim. Buddhism, at its root, is diagnostic. It’s psychological, not metaphysical. It points to the contingent, constructed, and impermanent nature of self and world—not to a single universal essence.

Books By Robert:
The Ten Thousand Things
Depending On No-Thing
Understanding Claude
The 21st Century Self