The New Flat Earthers

Donny, Todos Santos, 2018

Dear Robert,
I wanted to write to you mostly to thank you for saving me from what might have been a lifetime of seeking. I have read both of your books and feel I’ve started understanding what you are getting at. I have been ‘seeking’ for at least 10 years now. I’ve read almost every book out there. I’m thankful that I never got involved in any spiritual groups, mostly because I’m a loner and have always despised ‘group think’. I’ve always found the emulation/sucking up that goes along with these groups a bit sickening. It all seems like a bit of a joke.

Rather than constantly trying to change my experience for something better, I am what I am now. Every thought, feeling, and emotional sensation is me. Full stop. Nobody is controlling it or making it happen. Decisions happen, but nobody makes them happen. What I experience as ‘the world’ is also me. What causes those sensations of a world is a mystery that I can’t explain. It’s not that there’s no me. It’s just that “me” isn’t what I thought it was.

I also see now where so much of the spiritual misinformation comes from. If you feel a oneness with everything, it’s easy to draw incorrect conclusions from that. Like in days gone by, our experience of the Earth led us to conclude that it was flat and the centre of the Universe. Feeling one with everything could make you conclude that there is only consciousness or that we are part of some big meta-consciousness that is ‘self-aware’. But as I see it, that is going too far. I can see that everything I perceive is ‘me,’ but how can I conclude that there is nothing outside of that? How can I ever know what causes this? For all we know, we could be living in a computer simulation and we would be none the wiser!

I always believed that to ‘get it,’ I had to understand how everything worked. That’s the idea that’s peddled in the spiritual world. Never stop seeking until you understand how the whole Universe works and realise it’s all made of consciousness, etc. The problem is that no matter how hard I tried, I could never prove this to myself beyond all doubt. I can see that objects depend on consciousness to exist, but then when you think about it, consciousness also depends on objects to exist. For what would consciousness be without something to be ‘conscious of’? Your work has helped me understand that I don’t need to resolve all these questions and that, in all likelihood, nobody ever will be able to resolve them. For that, I will be eternally grateful.

With gratitude, Richard

Hi, Richard. Thanks for writing. Your third paragraph is right on the money. The foolish Flat Earthers are perfectly sure that Earth only appears to be spherical. They can spin out complex logical arguments to “prove” the Earth is flat and will ignore any evidence to the contrary.

With that metaphor, you have captured the crux of my disagreement with philosophical idealists—Bernardo Kastrup, Donald Hoffman, Rupert Spira, Deepak Chopra, and the like—who, like the Flat Earthers, seem delusionally sure of themselves and disinclined to consider any evidence that might cast doubt on their ideas. They even claim that their view that the material world is only an illusion constitutes the ultimate and undeniable “Truth.”

Making a reasoned case for a speculative philosophical idea—transcendental idealism*, in the case of those I mentioned above—is one thing. But to claim that your point of view is unambiguously factual and that those inclined to see life more naturalistically are naive or just plain wrong is quite another.

“I can see that everything I perceive is ‘me,’” you wrote, “but how can I conclude that there is nothing outside of that? How can I ever know what causes this?”

Yes. Precisely. You can’t know, and neither can anyone else. Accepting our inability to comprehend reality other than subjectively is a big part of what I mean by “awake.”

We see what we see and make of that what we do. We human primate animals have no way of getting “outside” of that process—no way of understanding any ultimate reality. Regarding what is real and what isn’t, we have opinions and ideas, not knowledge. To claim certitude about such matters is, as you said, like a joke, but the idealists and non-duality mavens who speak with total conviction don’t get it.

I wish you well.

*the view that matter, space, and time are merely formal features of how we perceive objects, not things in themselves that exist independently of us.