Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything

by Bernardo Kastrup

According to idealism, all of reality – the entire universe – exists in mind, although not all in your egoic mind alone (this is a crucial point that we will discuss in depth shortly). Mind is not generated by configurations of matter and energy. Instead, configurations of matter and energy arise from the dynamics of mind. They only exist insofar as they are experienced. Mind is the ground of the real.

My hypothesis is that mind is a broad and continuous medium unlimited in either space or time; a canvas where the entire play of existence unfolds, including space and time themselves. Your egoic mind – that limited awareness you identify yourself with – is, in this context, merely a segment of the broad, universal canvas of mind.

I concluded then that mind is an ontological primitive: a fundamental, irreducible aspect of nature which itself cannot be explained in terms of anything else. In this chapter, we are making the case for idealism, which entails that everything else in nature can be explained and described in terms of mind, the sole ontological primitive.