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title: Why idealism?

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# Why idealism?

Idealism is the philosophical position that reality is fundamentally _mental_ in nature. It is often contrasted with _materialism_, which says that reality is physical. Although it may seem difficult or impossible to know which of these (among countless other possibilities) is correct[1], I'd like to explain why you should bet all of your chips on idealism.

Suppose you really _are_ an individual being embedded in a fundamentally external reality --- which materialism, amongst others, entails. In that case, nothing could prevent a malicious entity from taking over your mind and presenting you with a false reality. If executed flawlessly, you could never even detect that it was happening. Therefore, you could not even assign a meaningful _probability_ that you were being thus controlled. In this way, materialism prevents you from ever having _any confidence whatsoever_ in the ultimate nature of your reality.

On the other hand, suppose that what you truly are is the self-aware ground of reality itself, whose very nature is fundamentally conscious. You dance realities into apparent existence, and then live out seemingly-mundane lives from countless perspectives within these dreams. If that is true, then nothing outside yourself could prevent you from "waking up" and confirming this fact with flawless certainty --- there being nothing outside yourself in the first place.

It is difficult to imagine what such "confirmation" could possibly be _like_. Although nothing logically _prevents_ confirmation, it's hard to fathom how any experience, no matter how convincing, could provide you with certainty. After all, how could you be sure that _that_ wasn't just another very compelling trick, too?

The short answer is that it does not fall into the category of _experience_. Experiences are indeed, by their very nature, unreliable. What it _is_ is much harder to say, and cannot be precisely described from within the dream. Mostly, the realization has been communicated via [poetry](https://plumvillage.org/articles/please-call-me-by-my-true-names-song-poem/). Reality is _miraculous,_ in the sense of transcending any and all attempts to pin it down --- idealism itself ultimately included --- and this can be known directly and concretely.

This probably sounds outlandish, but there is a clear reason to take it seriously: amongst all possible hypotheses, it is essentially the only one that can (logically) be known with complete certainty. Other possibilities cannot be confirmed with _any_ nonzero confidence. Therefore, if you hope to know the true nature of reality _with any confidence whatsoever_, there is only one possibility worth exploring, however bizarre it initially seems.

How does one explore it? There are many methods, but one is particularly relevant to this piece. Begin by becoming _radically skeptical_ about the world around you, down to the very nature of space, time, and consciousness. If you can **completely** forget everything you think you know about reality, and directly confront what is manifestly here and now, the "miraculous" aspect will begin to stand out. This can be traced back Home, to the glory-beyond-glory that those poems gently remind us of...

```
So close you can't see it
So deep you can't fathom it
So simple you can't believe it
So good you can't accept it
-- Tibetan Buddhist saying
```

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[1] This is a nice summary: 

[Idealism vs Materialism](http://philosophyterms.com/idealism/#III_Idealism_vs_Materialism)

> *Idealism and materialism are both impossible to prove or disprove, of course — they’re unfalsifiable statements, which means there’s no neutral test that could weigh them against each other. The test, ultimately, has to be one of intuition, or “gut reaction.” Many people find that materialism makes more sense because, after all, everyone has the experience of interacting with an outside world and believing that’s really “out there.” On the other hand, it’s impossible for us to step “outside” our own minds, so how can we be so sure that there really is an “out there” at all?*

(Archived [here](https://web.archive.org/web/20210326162142/https://philosophyterms.com/idealism/))