Facets of Reality

One truth. Many maps. None of them complete.

Hi everybody! It’s been a while since I wrote an essay. I spent most of 2025 going through an intense spiritual emergency that was activated when I went into church on Good Friday, which is symbolic of the death of Christ on the cross in the Christian faith. I proceeded to go through my own intense psychosomatic death and rebirth, lasting more than a year, which required all of my time and willpower to stabilize, make sense of the experience, and return to “normal” life.

What followed that experience, among many things, has been a deluge of expansive contemplation, and the desire to write and express the many philosophies that have been maturing in my mind before seeping out of my fingertips and onto this page. This is the first of many new essays I’ll be sharing, which reveal some of the fundamental beliefs that have arisen through this 6-7-year journey of reinvention I’ve been on, inspired by forces beyond myself.

I hope you enjoy it.

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No single system of human thought, no discipline, no tradition, no framework of measurement or meaning, has ever captured the totality of reality.

Not science. Not philosophy. Not religion. Each represents a facet of something that exceeds every attempt to fully contain or express it. Reality, in its ultimate nature, is beyond the complete comprehension of any one mind, any one culture, or any one method of inquiry. This is not an intellectual path of despair. It is an invitation to a more honest and more expansive way of engaging with the thing we call reality.

Every serious discipline and every serious wisdom tradition points to the same reality from a different angle. Physics, mathematics, Taoism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, shamanism, indigenous cosmology, and so on. Each has developed its own symbols, methods, and language for approaching something that ultimately exceeds all of them.

Each illuminates something true. Each represents a unique face of what might be imagined as an impossibly complex diamond, one whose total form no single perspective can take in. The traditions are not competing explanations of the same thing. They are complementary angles on something too large for any one angle to exhaust. And crucially, even this diamond metaphor is itself a simplification, a useful approximation of something that resists every frame we bring to it, including this one. The point is to stop mistaking any map for the entire territory.

The assumption built into modern educated life runs directly against this recognition. Science, the assumption goes, is the master discipline, and what cannot be measured is not quite real and unworthy of serious consideration. This is not a scientific finding. It is a philosophical position. And it is worth examining carefully, because if it is wrong, the cost is high. An entire civilization organized around a partial map, convinced the map is complete, will systematically filter out the dimensions of reality that the map cannot represent. Which raises the prior question: how much is ordinary human perception already filtering out, before we even get to the question of which intellectual tradition to trust?

This is where the perceptual argument becomes essential to the larger theme rather than a detour from it. If the case for any single tradition’s completeness rests on the assumption that ordinary human consciousness is a reliable instrument for perceiving the full range of reality, that assumption deserves scrutiny before the case is made. And the scrutiny is not flattering.

Human senses detect only a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. The eyes that feel like windows onto the world are highly selective filters shaped by evolution for survival rather than accuracy or completeness. Donald Hoffman’s Interface Theory of Perception makes this case with academic precision. What we perceive is not reality. It is a species-specific interface optimized for fitness, not truth. The map built into ordinary human perception is a sketch, with large portions deliberately left blank. If that is true of basic sensory perception, it raises a serious question about what else the ordinary mind filters out, and what becomes available when that filter loosens. The materialist assumption that science captures the complete picture of reality is built on a perceptual foundation that Hoffman’s own work suggests is partial by design.

The strongest objection to what follows is worth stating directly. So-called “Mystical experiences” across cultures feel similar, the objection goes, because human brains are structurally similar. Put any brain under sufficient stress, changes in oxygen concentration through breathwork, psychedelic compounds, or sustained meditative practice, and you will produce comparable altered states. The convergence across traditions is not evidence of a shared metaphysical reality. It is evidence of shared neurology.

This is a serious objection, and it deserves a serious answer. The neurological explanation accounts for the mechanism. It does not account for the content or the consequences. We do not dismiss mathematics because it is produced by brains. The fact that an experience has a neural correlate does not settle the question of whether it is tracking something real, since every perception has one. That is what perception is. The question is not whether the brain is involved but whether what the brain contacts under these particular conditions is more or less accurate than what it contacts under ordinary conditions. If Hoffman is right that ordinary perception is already a heavily filtered interface optimized for survival rather than truth, then the materialist objection faces an inversion problem. It assumes ordinary waking consciousness is the reliable baseline and altered states are the distortion. But the heavily filtered state might be the noisier signal, not the cleaner one.

Then there is the question of consequences. Hallucinations do not typically reorganize a person’s relationship to mortality, dissolve long-standing addictions, produce lasting increases in psychological wellbeing, or permanently reorder someone’s fundamental values. The research on psychedelic-assisted therapy, on near-death experiences, and on advanced contemplative practice consistently shows effects that outlast the experience itself by years or decades. Whatever is happening in these states, the mere hallucination explanation does not account for the data. A more adequate explanation is needed, and the traditions have been developing one for a very long time.

What the traditions developed, each in its own language and through its own methods, is a sophisticated account of what becomes visible when ordinary consciousness loosens its grip. The methods differ. The metaphysical conclusions differ on many points. But the direction is consistent.

Taoism teaches that beneath the ten thousand things, beneath all the categories and distinctions of ordinary life, there is a single undivided movement. The Tao resists definition by design. The practice it calls for is not intellectual mastery but a kind of surrender, learning to move with the grain of reality rather than against it. This is wu wei, effortless action, and it belongs to the sage who accomplishes everything by forcing nothing. Reality in this framework is not a fixed structure to be decoded. It is a ceaseless process to be joined. Grab your surfboard and ride the wave.

Buddhism opens with a diagnosis. The root of suffering is a fundamental misperception: the belief in a fixed, separate self. The wave does not think of itself as separate from the ocean. Liberation is not an achievement. It is a seeing-through. What remains when the illusion of the separate self dissolves is not absence but something the tradition calls by different names: rigpa, buddha-nature, the open ground of awareness. The Buddha’s most insistent teaching was impermanence. Suffering is not caused by change. It is caused by the sustained refusal to accept that change is not the exception but the nature of things. The practice of Vipassana, or insight meditation, is the systematic cultivation of exactly that seeing, watching experience, in which the impermanent nature of everything, including the self, becomes undeniable.

Hinduism, in its non-dual expressions, makes the same argument in a different language. The individual self is not ultimately separate from the ground of all being. The experience of separation is maya, illusion. Awakening is recognition rather than acquisition. The practice of pranayama, the systematic regulation of breath as life force, works directly on the relationship among body, mind, and the deeper energetic substrate that ordinary awareness rests on.

Christianity, beneath its institutional history, carries a mystical core pointing in the same direction, such as Meister Eckhart’s Godhead. The central Christian mystery of death and resurrection is itself a precise teaching about transformation through dissolution. The old form must go. What replaces it cannot be predicted from within the old form.

Shamanic and indigenous frameworks add something that the other traditions sometimes lose in their sophistication. The sense of reality is fundamentally alive, relational, and participatory. In these cosmologies, the world is not an aggregate of objects awaiting analysis but a network of intelligences awaiting relationship. Consciousness is not sealed inside the skull. It extends into the land, the dream, the ancestor, the plant. The shaman is trained to read a category of clues that the modern mind was specifically conditioned to stop seeing.

The convergence across these traditions carries evidential weight that is easy to underestimate. They developed in isolation from one another, across different continents, languages, social structures, and historical periods. There was no common source text, no shared teacher, no cultural exchange sufficient to explain the similarity in depth.

When isolated investigators using completely different methods arrive at the same conclusion, that is not proof of anything. But in any other domain of inquiry, we would call it convergent evidence and treat it with corresponding seriousness. Aldous Huxley called this convergence the Perennial Philosophy, the idea that beneath the surface differences of the world’s wisdom traditions lies a single metaphysical truth, available to direct experience but resistant to final definition. The convergence matters in practice because understanding it is part of how a person begins to find their way out of the suffering that follows from taking an incomplete map of the whole territory, especially when they use their own map of meaning to suppress the maps of meaning of others.

However, the perennial philosophy has to be held carefully. The version that collapses all traditions into sameness, treating their differences as mere cultural decoration atop a single universal core, is intellectually careless and condescending toward the traditions themselves. The Christian’s encounter with a personal God is not identical to the Buddhist’s dissolution into selfless awareness. The shamanic relationship with plant intelligence is not the same as the Taoist’s alignment with natural process. These distinctions are real and point to genuinely different faces of the diamond. The defensible version of the perennial philosophy acknowledges those differences fully while still insisting on convergence at depth. Not the same experience. The same direction. Away from the defended surface self and toward something that language can approach but not contain. Each tradition is a unique and irreplaceable instrument. None is the whole orchestra.

Think about what happened to martial arts. For most of human history, practitioners of different fighting styles spent enormous energy arguing about whose method was superior. Kung fu versus karate. Wrestling versus boxing. My tradition against yours. The argument was never resolved because it could not be resolved at the level of argument. It took the UFC and the emergence of mixed martial arts to force a different kind of settlement. When fighters from different traditions actually met in the ring, the specialists who had mastered a single style were consistently outperformed by fighters who had learned to integrate multiple disciplines. The integration did not produce a watered-down average of all styles. It produced something new, more dynamic, more creative, and more effective than any single tradition had generated alone.

The same logic applies to the wisdom traditions. The long history of my god is better than your god is the theological equivalent of my kung fu is better than yours. It is a competition that cannot be won because it is asking the wrong question. The right question is not which tradition is correct. It is what each tradition knows that the others do not, and what becomes possible when those knowledges are genuinely integrated. Each tradition has developed not only intellectual insight but also specific practices and technologies of transformation that are unique, valuable on their own, and more powerful still when brought into genuine relationship with one another.

Taoism’s precision about surrender and natural process is embodied in practices like qigong and tai chi, which train the body and mind to stop interfering with the natural intelligence already moving through them.

Buddhism’s diagnostic rigor about the mechanics of suffering is transmitted through vipassana, practices that systematically dismantle the illusion of a fixed self through direct investigation.

Christianity’s depth on love, sacrifice, and transformation through descent into darkness is carried in practices like lectio divina and the Ignatian examen, each training a different quality of interior attention.

Hinduism’s cosmological expansiveness and non-dual perception are transmitted through yoga as a complete psychophysical system, pranayama as direct work with life force, mantra as the use of sacred sound to reorganize the mind, and bhakti as the dissolution of the self through devotion.

Shamanic and indigenous practices, including plant medicine ceremony, rhythmic drumming, vision quest, and deliberate dreamwork, train the practitioner to move through and receive intelligence from dimensions of reality that ordinary consciousness cannot reach on its own, while also preserving the understanding of participation, reciprocity, and the sacred embedded in the ordinary that the textual traditions sometimes lose.

These are not redundant. They are complementary instruments, each developing a capacity that the others either lack entirely or address from a different angle. And when integrated with the practical and powerful insights that modern mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology have contributed to our understanding of reality, the possibility becomes extraordinary. Not a new religion. A universal philosophy built from the disciplined integration of all of them, one that moves us away from the fragmentation and conflict that come from mistaking a facet for the whole diamond, and toward a wholeness that is both individually transformative and collectively necessary while always acknowledging that even this integrated view remains an approximation. The diamond exceeds every description of it, including this one.

The wars fought in the name of one tradition’s exclusive claim to truth, literal wars and cultural ones, are a direct consequence of mistaking the facet for the whole; the current conflicts in the world included.

When any system of thought declares itself the complete account of reality, it has stopped being a path toward truth and started being a defense against it. The movement from separation to wholeness, which every tradition in its own way identifies as the direction of genuine maturity, requires the willingness to hold your own map lightly enough to learn from maps that look nothing like it. Individually, this produces a person of unusual depth and range. Collectively, it points toward something the world badly needs.

I’m not making this argument purely theoretically. Over several years, I moved through extended sequences of deeply symbolic and archetypal dreams, multi-night narratives whose content tracked my psychological evolution with a precision that defied coincidence. I have entered altered states through psychedelics, advanced breathwork, and meditation, and found in each a different angle of approach to something consistent beneath them. In 2021, I went through what I can only describe as a spontaneous spiritual awakening. In 2025, during a Good Friday church service, something cracked open, initiating months of intense emotional and somatic purging. I came to call these experiences my crucifixions. Not metaphorically. The felt sense of profound suffering moving through the body and releasing was as literal as anything I have experienced. These are not offered as proof of anything metaphysical. They are offered as the lived ground from which this argument is being made. It has been walked at considerable cost, and what I found there is consistent with what the traditions have reported for centuries.

Contact with that depth tends to reorganize a person’s relationship to everything. Not by changing the facts of their life but by changing what the facts mean and how tightly they need to be held.

If you are reading this and something feels “off”, even though everything is technically fine, you are already bumping up against the limits of your current map. The hunger that the standard solutions keep failing to resolve is a clue. The sense of misalignment that persists despite doing everything correctly is a clue. The traditions are clues. The research is a clue. Reality has been leaving evidence everywhere, for anyone willing to treat it seriously.

The materialist enclosure is not a conclusion. It is an assumption. Assumptions can be examined. What I am asking here is not belief or conversion to a new system. It is something more demanding. The willingness to take seriously the possibility that reality is considerably larger than your current working model of it, to follow that possibility with dedication and honesty wherever it leads, and to stay with what you find even when it does not fit your existing framework. No single facet is the whole diamond. The diamond is real, it is luminous, and the clues it leaves are everywhere.