From Capitalist Realism to Anarchist Idealism, Part Ten

“The unfolding of the universe around us consists of excitations of That Which Experiences from which we are dissociated.” — Kastrup. Image by Adam Fuss.

It takes time to assimilate Bernardo Kastrup’s idealist viewpoint — developed in The Idea of the World, More than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth, and Belief, and other works — but it is well worth the effort. Kastrup’s philosophy is similar to what I proposed in earlier works. In 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (2006), I promoted “idealism” over materialism, reviewing ideas from Amit Goswami, Patrick Harpur, and Rudolf Steiner, among other thinkers.

Kastrup’s great service is to argue for philosophical idealism in a more comprehensive and logically satisfying way than anyone has done before. As a scientist who worked at CERN, he is well equipped to show how quantum physics meshes with the idealist model. Taking the debate between materialism and idealism to the next level, he proposes, based on the evidence, that “the seemingly objective world we live in is a result of mental process at work and, as such, akin to a transpersonal dream: the tables, chairs, stars and galaxies we perceive within it do not have an existence independent of our minds.”

Just to review, idealism postulates that there is no dichotomy between consciousness and matter, no “hard…