The Needed Distinction Between Reality and Existence

Making Room For Modern Science And Ancient Wisdom

To say that something exists, in our normal mode of speaking, is, first, to say that it has life, is alive, living, figuratively or actually breathing, thus it is being something (verb) and is a being (noun); second, it also has the sense of being discovered, found, uncovered, met with; but most importantly, that it is remaining, continuing, lasting, enduring, staying for a spell.

I want to bring your attention to this last point about this very fundamental aspect of what “existing” means: that something about it has to do with a duration of time, so that it is actual — actually here, alive, breathing, or just enduring as it is.

But, to say that something is real, in our normal mode of speaking, is to say that it is actual, existing, factual, genuine, true, veridical (necessarily true), and not imaginary. I want to bring your attention to the mention here of “actual” and “existing,” because that is the source of so many of our misunderstandings today; and also, to bring your attention to the lack of a reciprocal connection — for nowhere in the different meanings of ‘exist’ do we find ‘real’. We can get there through the synonym used in the definition of both words — “actual” — because what is actual is both “real and existing” in our common parlance.

The problem that I am presenting here becomes glaringly obvious when we assert the negation of existence and discover that it necessarily is also the negation of reality…

If to be real and to exist are the same thing, which they are, in light of their primary meanings in our normal mode of speaking, then:

• If it is said that nothing exists, then “exist,” “existing,” “existent,” and “existence” have no referent — nothing those words actually (truly) stand in for, if it is a requirement that there be something actual for these words to refer to — so they would be cognitively meaningless in this case, and the underlying assertion would also be without any referent whatsoever.
• But to be real also means to exist, normally, so if it is asserted that nothing exists, then to be ‘real’ is also cognitively meaningless, at least in regard to the characterization of existing.
• And if both these words are cognitively meaningless because of their association through their synonymous meanings, than any statements we make, any claims we hold to, any thoughts we may have on the subject, are cognitively meaningless — in the case where it is asserted that nothing exists and words must refer to something actual.
• So these two words preferably would have different meanings, or at least we must allow them to not have any relationship to something actually present. If they have different meanings, then the negation of one of them doesn’t imply the negation of the other. Privative negation — that only asserts that the object of the negation cannot be qualified by the word in question — would mean only that the quality being negated is not actually there. It does not imply that the other quality is not there as well. In fact it would say nothing about the other quality. And this would also allow these two negated words to not have to refer to something actual; instead, they can just refer to an absence of the quality we are hypostatizing so our language is not cognitively meaningless.
• Therefore, if “real” and “exist” have different meanings, then saying something is “unreal” does not mean it doesn’t exist. And in the same way, saying that something doesn’t exist, does not mean that it is not real. However, if “real” and “exist” have the common meanings I described above that makes them synonymous, then saying that nothing is real, or that nothing exists, negates the entire universe. Poof!
• Thus, we can assert that something is real, while also asserting that it doesn’t exist; and similarly, asserting that something exists, does not mean that it is real, or “truly existing” as we have a habit of saying. Which just means that if something which exists is not as it seems, i.e., being something other than it seems, or being different in some way from what it appears to be, it is not truly existing in that sense — but it is still existing in some way, otherwise we wouldn’t be talking about it. I’ll come back to this in a bit.
• Finally, if something can exist — enduring for a while in time — but not be real; and that to be real does not ever entail that it exists, then a clue to what must needfully be the case is that to exist is to endure in time, while to be real is to be other than existing in time. It means that to be real, it must be timeless and veridical — necessarily true — because it cannot be contingent upon anything that exists.

Going a little deeper, if these two words continue to have the same interchangeable meaning, having declared that nothing exists, is to have also declared that nothing is real. But if nothing is real, which is the only foundation upon which any statement can be held to be true, then the assertion that nothing exists cannot be true, because nothing can be said to be true in that case. Every word would be meaningless speech. Every idea would be an illusion. Every perception would be imagined.

This isn’t a word game — the only game being played is when others play fast and loose with the meanings of these two words, first equating them, then holding them to be different, even in the same sentence. That leads us nowhere profitable.

There is a foundational believe in most spiritual systems, that complex organization cannot come from random events. Modern scientists as a collective, don’t see a problem with complex organization arising from random events — but they stipulate that a very long period of time is needed so that a sufficient number of events can occur. What is implied in this, but not said, is that the action of events stick around, so that later events are somehow coherent with prior events whose effects are still present. Otherwise, an infinity of random events could never give rise to anything. So what is the source of this coherent continuity? While it may not be too troubling in terms of physical particles that have extremely long lifetimes, it becomes truly an admission of oversight — or let’s call it a gloss — in terms of biological cells which have very short lifetimes in a geological-time sense. So where does the coherent continuity rest in the case of biological entities? I’ll cover this in the next article.

Modern scientists do, however, as a collective, see a problem with intentional acts giving rise to complex organization. And that is how the battle-lines were drawn between religions and the Modern Scientific Industry. Individual scientists may have different opinions, but they don’t have a voice unless they are in the majority. That’s not part of the Scientific Method, it’s part of being an industry. Lost in the glaring-at-each-other (or eye-rolling, if you want to be kind) between Modern Science and Religion is the many spiritual traditions that do not assert a Divine Being behind the rampant complexity found everywhere one looks. These traditions assert a Divine Principle instead — a kind of supercharged version of all the forces that Modern Science relies upon to help organize everything. Forces, like Divine Principles, are real, but do not exist. That means, we can’t see forces, we can only see their effects — we can only impute their reality, because they certainly don’t exist. We can’t see Divine Principles either, we can only see their effects. Spiritual traditions that do not assert a Divine Being, usually have only one, or only one principle one — which is a secondary reason why it is called a “principle.” Modern Science has many, but they want only one — the one that will undergird their “Theory of Everything.” I see a theme…

There is a general presumption in Modern Science, and daily life, that things are exactly what they appear to be. Except in Quantum Physics, where what they are described as is often a diffused phase-space of possibility interacting with other existents as well. Things that truly are what they seem to be have the nice quality of being susceptible to exact mathematical modeling. Quantum-level ‘things’ are not so well-behaved and they exhibit stochastic behavior/qualities. This means they can’t be modeled in the normal sense, but only statistically modeled in the stochastic sense. Stochastic means the activity or behaviors are apparently random, but with a bell-curve-like ‘preference’ for certain outcomes. Divine Principles are like this too.

But the one truly impermeable standard is that nothing can come from nothing. This necessarily means that order cannot arise out of chaos, ex nihilo nihil fit. And therefore, the necessary genesis of order cannot be self-originated. So the initial genesis of anything at all is often asserted to be via an organizing principle. And of course, the organizing principle cannot itself be any thing at all, so it is held to be a divine principle, which means that it does not exist, but is, instead, real.

Surprisingly, this is only the stance of spiritual traditions, and is not honored by Modern Science. For these traditions anything that exists, in the sense of being some actual thing — an entity of some kind — cannot just spontaneously arise from nothing, not even a very long series of random events occurring over very long periods of time. For some thing to exist there must be an ontogenesis for it that is guided by a divine principle — or the divine principle is the action itself. In any case, there is no entity that is doing anything.

This assertion that nothing comes from nothing means that, for example, order, which is formal organization, and chaos, a word that marks the absence of formal order — referencing nothing actual, in other words, just physical interactions between actual things — are not truly different, because every actual thing must have an ontogenesis — even those which are involved in what we call “chaos” — and the characters of each actual thing determines how it interacts with other actual things, so calling it chaos, or even random chance, is a real stretch of imagination.

And, again surprisingly, there can be nothing that exists that is not formal. In fact, there isn’t anything that is not formal. Even sub-atomic particles have a form. When they are the result of smashing atoms together — all of which have a form — what results is sub-atomic particles, all of which still have a form. Even the so-called ‘probability wave-function’ of sub-atomic particles is simply the probability of the various forms that the particle can ‘lawfully take’ after an interaction.

But beings are, well, being, and therefore exist by definition, so the idea that a supreme being is behind everything that exists cannot be correct for that which is the absolute genesis of everything that is. This primordial origin, which comes first in any ontogenetic succession of geneses, has only one necessary attribute that we can state categorically: it is not among that which it has or causes to be.

However, I want to point out to those who may be just glossing over reading this, that having a supreme being is a huge bout of hubris on our part, because it is asserting that God acts in the same way that we humans act, because God is limited, or self-limits, to be in the same way we limited humans are, even though we deny that there are any limitations upon God’s acts. Which is to assert that God, by clear definition, rather than confused understanding, would not act as we do. Instead of creating the world (the universe and everything in it) as if ‘he’ was a polymath master builder, I cannot imagine God as being other than the Divine Principle sought, and not this hand-puppet of humanity. In fact, I would be quite happy to refer to the Divine Principle as God, except for all the baggage that word already has to carry, so let’s leave it as the “Divine Principle,” which again, is not a being.

So let’s call this genesis of all things the intrinsic naturing of all things. What we have suddenly done is to break the succession of geneses down into a direct activity — the intrinsic naturing of all things. I will deal with having done away with the succession of geneses by replacing it with a direct activity later in the next article, but first, I want to make it crystal clear why it is necessary that we make a distinction between Reality and Existence in order to see how such an intrinsic naturing could be real.

The intrinsic naturing of all things — the world and every natural thing and being in it — must be real, and therefore it must be non-contingent, necessary, simple, and evidenced.

“Non-contingent” means that this intrinsic naturing cannot be dependent on anything in any way. So it can’t be brought into being, caused, or created, and it certainly can’t depend on you experiencing it, or believing in it, or proving it, for its reality.

“Simple” means it is not a collection of parts; it is not a union of characters — it must not be structured in any way. The reason for this is that if a thing isn’t simple then it depends on something to cause it, to make it, for ‘it’ to be, or be whole, and so it is contingent, and contingent things can only exist.

Therefore, what is real is necessarily nondual. This doesn’t mean it is one thing, nor any thing at all — because I am asserting that natural things and beings are the activity of this intrinsic naturing, so what thing among all the existing things would it be? — and it’s certainly not a bunch of things all put together, the way we construct a house.

Please note, though, that there are non-natural things which are artifacts of our artisanal techniques and our technology — all the ways we humans take natural things apart and put parts of them together for a human purpose. These piece-parts of natural things and beings, at their surface level, accord with physical causality, even while they themselves are still a denatured complex of natural things or beings which are originated by the intrinsic naturing that I am speaking of. Which is to say, that nothing we humans make ever accomplishes a continuity of being because they have no intrinsic nature — they merely have a human end in mind.

Continuing on, “necessary,” means what it says. What is real must be necessary — like a motor in a car, or a charge in a battery — or nothing works. What is real cannot be an option that one can take or leave, something gaudy to set our car apart from those of others.

This point will be the most controversial for Modern Science which, while holding to the causal model of reality, deems the assertion of anything without a physically present cause to be a product of magical thinking. Instead, Modern Science, at least officially, hold to the explanatory standard of ignorance; that is, they say: Modern Science does not currently know how some things have come to be — the universe, for example — but knows that everything must be caused by something ultimately knowable, though it is perhaps obscured by such complex interactions that it is not presently possible to lift the veil of ignorance about how it is.

Modern Science says this, while ignoring all the theoretical forces they rely on that are not physically present, but for their effects on physically present things. These forces can only ever be known by their effects. It’s the same for the intrinsic naturing of all of those physically present natural things and beings. That is to say, the appearance of these things in the world — their ontogenesis — is the testimony to the reality of these theoretical forces AND the intrinsic naturing of what is, by the Divine Principle. While it doesn’t seem like there is much of a difference between these two, and certainly not any kind of fathomless chasm between their views, perhaps it is just that Modern Science can’t see the need for such an intrinsic naturing, simply because it is not looking for one — Modern Science’s is a limited physical view of lawful interactions between real entities, while this book is presenting a view of reality where all that manifests naturally, does so as the creative, but coherent, spontaneous responsiveness of that which is real.

Which brings me to the last point: What is real must be evidenced. If a thing isn’t directly evidenced, since I am asserting that it doesn’t exist, i.e., it can’t be experienced in some way directly, just as an electromagnetic field can’t be, so if it is just inferred, hypostatized, or hypothesized, than it’s not real.

“Unreal,” when used in the necessarily coherent formulation, means simply “not real” — it doesn’t also mean “not existing”. This is, then, not a privative negation leading to there being nothing at all, it is simply a disqualification of the application of the word “real” to something that is other than real. “Existing” would be an excellent word to use here, especially in Buddhism, because in that tradition, those things that are unreal, are impermanent, meaning they show up and then they disappear, having stayed for only a spell of time. In between those two points, is a state that would usually be labeled as “existing,” but this causes much confusion in minds that have not distinguished the meanings of the words “real” and “exists”.

There is a difference between rainbows, which do not exist other than in the perception of someone looking at them (i.e., they are not truly existing as they appear to be to an observer), and a bus, for example. You can never catch a rainbow, as you can catch a bus; nor can a rainbow ever run you over, as a bus can — in fact, no matter how fast you chase it, you’ll never catch a rainbow either, as you can catch a bus. Yet, both a bus and a rainbow are the same in not being real. Each interacts with other existing things according to specific rules established by their individual characters, but they both simply exist. It is the same with conceptual names and ideas, as well as what we believe we are experiencing.

To wit, there is a difference between things that exist and your apperceived experience of them — that difference is whether or not the things that are involved in a certain experience are truly existing as you take them to be. The body of understandings into which what you perceive is apperceived as experience can mislead you as to what is actually there.

This is even more prevalent in your conceptual thinking, that calculus of ideas that sucks so much bandwidth from our lives, because it is wholly based upon your conceptual understandings and the trained or wild quality of your mind — there is no necessary connection between concepts that we can think about and some truly existing thing upon which a concept is ‘founded’. It’s good when there is a connection, because then we are not just idling away our lives thinking about things that don’t truly exist.

But let me bring this back to Buddhism, in which nothing can be said to be truly existing, and therefore many believe that there is nothing truly real. However, Emptiness, the accepted name for the intrinsic naturing of all that manifests in and of this world, has three very specific characters as normally defined: one of which is responsiveness, and so the arising of the things that seem to be existing, but aren’t truly existing, have their origin in this activity called Emptiness. And therefore, the only truly real thing, which necessarily is not something that exists in time, but is necessarily real, is the active function of Emptiness: Responsiveness.

And in Buddhism, this responsiveness is the source of the coherent continuity that Science relies on, but fails to justify.

So, by properly crafting the meanings of the words “real” and “exist” we can veridically state that what exists is not truly real — because it is unreal — but that is not to say that it is nothing at all. It is existing, but unreal. And there is nothing that is real that truly exists. There is only the real activity of naturing all that which appears to be. This last sentence should be read as the activity of appearing is being, yet there is no entity that exists, nor is there a real entity. The chosen word for this in English — chosen by Western translators of Buddhism — is “Emptiness,” because it invokes the absence of any entity anywhere, i.e., no entity with an intrinsic self-nature. But the original Sanskrit word for this is “Sunyata” and the Sanskrit root of this word, “su”, conveys the concept of being swollen with possibility,¹⁠ which I find to be a much better way to describe it. So rather than name it in a way that points to what isn’t there, it would be much better to name it for what is there — the possibility of everything that exists and is not real.

Footnotes:

¹ Loy, David, in the afterword to Swedenborg, “Buddha of the North,” page 104, Swedenborg Foundation, ISBN 0–87785–184–0.