Newsletter #6
What is real? It’s time to get deep.
Hi there,
In the last newsletter (you can read all my previous newsletters here) I talked about the subtle forms of addiction and dopamine overload we face as a nation. And I mentioned an insight from an addiction expert called Gabor Mate. He was the one that suggested that we shouldn’t be asking “Why the addiction?” We should be asking “Why the pain?”
The pain Gabor is talking about isn’t a physical pain. Not at its core. The pain he’s talking about goes deeper than that. It’s a spiritual pain. A pain that haunts our soul and taunts our emotions. And that sort of pain can’t be healed with physical interventions like medicine, potions and pills. A spiritual pain can only be healed by a spiritual solution.
But what would that spiritual solution look like?
Fortunately, our good old friend, Mate, has got an answer for us. He suggests that the spiritual solution that we’re looking for consists of the relatively simple sounding task of…
“Waking up to what is real. In and around us.”
OK. That sounds easy enough. I’ll just wake up then.
But hold on. What is the ‘real’ thing I’m trying to wake up to? What is really ‘real’?
It’s not something we stop and ask ourselves very often. Or ever, for that matter. I don’t think I pondered this question in any depth until I was well into my 40s. And even then I only did it because I was desperate to stop drinking.
The truth is we don’t ponder what is real because we don’t live in reality. We spend most of our time living in ‘stories’. We create stories. We tell each other stories. We use stories to guide the decisions we make.
Big decisions. Small decisions. There’ll always be a story lurking in the background.
Should I change my career?
I’m now in my 50s and I’ll find it hard to get a job I really like and will pay well. It’s probably a bit too risky. I’m best off knuckling down and waiting for my retirement package to kick in. That’s a story.
Should I recycle this plastic bottle?
There’s so much pollution on this planet. The more I can do to help the environment the better. So I’ll pop this bottle in the re-cycling bin. There’s another story.
The more you start thinking about the decisions you make and the way you behave, the more you’ll start seeing the stories you hold in your head that guide those behaviours.
Now there’s nothing wrong with this. Quite the opposite. Stories are incredibly helpful. And incredibly powerful. Stories are how we make sense of the world. Without them we would find it almost impossible to navigate life.
But stories are just that. They’re stories. They’re not real. They are patterns of beliefs and assumptions that we’ve picked up over the years. They are products of our imagination. They do not exist.
Being able to see the truth of this is incredibly freeing. Once you realise that many of the things that hold us back or keep us in emotional pain are simply stories, you can go about the task of interrogating them. And the beauty of stories….. you can change them. If a story isn’t serving you well. Change it.
Change the story, change your life.
So if the stories aren’t real. What is? It looks like we need to go deeper.
Behind stories are logic-based narratives. Narratives that consist of structured sentences and sequenced words. And so could it be that to find the ‘real’ we need to focus on the individual words that make up the story?
Possibly. But even at this micro-level we come up against superficiality.
The Map Is Not the Territory
As we dig deeper into reality, we see that words aren't real either. They're symbols. Abstractions. Incredibly useful ones, certainly, but they're not the territory they describe. They're just the map.
This point was brought home to me in a passage I once read about a child seeing a bird for the first time. The child doesn't know what a ‘bird’ is. She hasn’t learned the word for it yet. So when she sees the bird for the first time she experiences the reality of the creature with no preconceived notions or categories. There's just open awareness. She takes in the intricate patterns of feathers, the gleaming bead of the bird’s eye, the bright yellow beak, the incredible song the bird sings and the impossible miracle of flight.
Then an adult comes along and says, "That's a bird, my child" And in that moment, the vivid, rich, multi-dimensional experience collapses into a label. A category of things. The child learns to see "birds" instead of individual, specific, miraculous creatures in all their breathtaking uniqueness.
To start with, the child was experiencing the ‘real’ without trying to label it. Without trying to create a story around it.
Then the word was introduced. The word became a shortcut that bypassed direct experience. Something precious was lost in that moment of naming. That preciousness was the experience of reality.
This is our first big clue into awakening to what is real. It is not in the telling of the story or the naming of the experience. It is in the experience itself. Reality is sensed. It is felt. It is all around us. But we seldom stop to fully take it in.
Reality can be found in the daffodil you notice on your walk tomorrow morning. Not in the story you tell your self about it. Or how you try and recount it to someone else. But in the precise moment you take in the specific shape of a specific petal. In the many different shades of yellow you notice. In the light that refracts from the dew clinging to its stem. That is reality.
That is how we experience reality.
But there’s more. We can go deeper still.
The Perennial Wisdom of Reality
We can go deeper because reality has layers. Two layers to be precise.
According to ancient wisdom and most spiritual traditions, reality consists of two distinct realms. There's the material realm we perceive through our senses—the physical, measurable world that science investigates. But beneath this surface layer lies a deeper, more subtle realm: the spiritual domain of consciousness itself.
This may sound a bit fanciful. A fluffy new age concept even. But this profound insight has emerged independently across cultures and traditions over thousands of years. The material world that appears so solid and permanent is actually more like the visible tip of an iceberg—with the vast majority of what's really ‘real’ lying beneath the surface.
Consider this.
Our physical world is made up from atoms. And yet atoms are essentially vast areas of emptiness. If we enlarged an atom to the size of a football stadium, the nucleus would be roughly the size of a pea at the centre. The electrons orbit this nucleus at various distances, but they're so tiny that the vast majority of an atom (more than 99.9%) is actually empty space.
So what we think of as physically ‘real’ is mostly invisible to our ordinary perception and what can be measured scientifically.
We occupy a world that is 0.1% physical and 99.9% spiritual.
And here's where it gets really interesting.
As human beings, we straddle these two realms. We have physical bodies and analytical brains that navigate the material world. But at our core, there's something more soulful - a centre of pure awareness that connects us directly to the spiritual foundation of existence. Consciousness is the ‘space between’. It’s the emptiness that makes up 99.9% of everything. And the omnipresent essence that connects everything to everything else. And unlike everything else in the universe, we are aware of this emptiness.
We are aware of our consciousness.
We are aware of the space between.
We are aware of the essence that connects everything to everything else.
You’ll have experienced this connection.
Maybe you’ll have experienced it whilst immerse in nature - standing before vast oceans, walking through ancient forests, climbing mountain peaks, or gazing at star-filled skies. Moments when you felt simultaneously tiny yet connected to something infinite.
You may have experienced it in states of flow - whilst being creative, losing yourself in music, or in the zone at sport. Moments when you felt like you were channeling something beyond yourself.
Or at the birth of a baby. In deep meditation. Witnessing incredible acts of compassion. Lost in intimate relation. Deep in spiritual practice. Overcome by everyday awe.
These moments surround us most days. Yet we seldom take them in. We seldom savour the unfiltered experience.
Most of us are so identified with our physical bodies and our logical, thinking minds that we mistake the map for the territory. We believe our thoughts about reality are reality. We create a story and don’t allow the full expeirence of reality to sink deep into our soul.
And that's where suffering begins.
When we live solely from stories and words we deprive ourselves of contact to the real. And in doing so we starve our souls. We start atrophying. We become spiritually bereft.
Finding Our Way Back
Welcoming these experiences of reality into our lives is how we start the process of building deep awareness. This is how we break down the illusions and stories that control us. It’s how we find a path back to what's real. It’s how we nurture the soul. It’s how we heal.
This is what awakening is all about. This is what enlightenment is all about. This is the ‘real’ that Mate was advising us to wake up to.
This process of awakening doesn't mean abandoning abstract concepts, words and stories altogether - we need them to function in our day-to-day lives. But it does mean holding them more lightly, remembering that the word "water" won't quench your thirst, and the concept of "love" is not the same as the lived experience of loving and being loved.
When we practice awareness of the really ‘real’, we begin to notice the difference between our thoughts about reality and reality itself. We catch glimpses of our true nature - not as separate individuals defined by our stories and histories, but as expressions of consciousness itself.
This isn't easy. Our minds are constantly pulling us into abstraction, analysis, and judgment. That's what minds do. They categorise, compare, and contrast. They tell stories and create meaning. All useful functions, but easily mistaken for the whole of what we are. We are soulful as well as logical beings.
I've been contemplating this deeper level of awareness and reality for a few years now. I feel I've barely scratched the surface. But even some of these early glimpses have transformed my understanding of what's real. They've shown me that beneath the noise of my thinking mind, there's a quiet presence that can witness and experience everything without judgment. When I manage to do that, I feel more authentically "me". I feel grounded. I feel simultaneously more calm and more alive.
The Journey of Discovery
The journey toward discovering what's real isn't about acquiring new information. It's about stripping away layers of conditioning and abstraction to reveal what was always there, hidden in plain sight.
It's about creating space in our lives for contemplation and inner exploration. As we learn to observe and disengage from the constant chatter of the thinking mind, we open ourselves to directly experiencing the deeper dimension of reality that has been obscured by our abstract stories and beliefs.
This takes time. This isn’t a quick-fix solution. It can’t be achieved in a weekend workshop. It's a lifelong practice of returning, again and again, to the immediacy of direct experience. Of noticing when we've wandered off into abstract thinking and gently bringing ourselves back to the sensory reality of this moment.
So what is really real?
It seems that’s a question that can’t be answered with words. It can only be known through direct experience. And that experience is available to all of us, right now, beneath the surface of our busy minds.
The act of waking up to what is real is a spiritual solution that can help each and everyone of us deal with our everyday, subtle addictions. It can help us heal the anxieties, the overwhelm and discontent that modern life bestows on us. We live in a world that is completely dominated and entranced by the abstract stories we tell ourselves. Especially those related to success, wealth, and fame. There’s far too little experiencing of reality. Far too little nourishing of souls.
We don’t need more business podcasts, social media content and or news-related information. We need more people who know how to see. How to really see. Like a child seeing a bird for the first time - with wonder, curiosity, and open-hearted presence.
And that’s my call to action for all of you today. Let’s learn to see - to really see. Let’s wake up to what is real in and around us. Let’s get deeper into the reality of life. And let’s tell everyone how good that feels.
How good that really feels.
Until next time,
Simon