I see the villagers are coming over the hill with their pitchforks and flaming torches. A hasty retreat may be in order (I can't take you all on, after all). But let me explain something, as some of you are getting confused about what exactly I mean by reality.
I think that the fundamental basis of reality is Mind (not our little ego minds, but something larger) and that this universe is projected by it. The reason science hasn't detected Mind is because science is part of the projection. This projected universe is real, but not objectively real. It's created by Mind and is more like a hologram, a shared dream or a movie. There are two kinds of knowledge, rational and empirical. Everything about the universe that we know, including all science, is empirical, and is therefore uncertain and does not deserve our complete trust. Rational knowledge, mathematics and logic, is certain and therefore really is fully trustworthy. Logically all you can be sure of is that you exist and have thoughts and experiences and that must be the starting point for any metaphysics, because it is all you know for certain. One consequence of it is that your knowledge that you are a conscious mind supercedes anything science has to say about consciousness, such as the claim that mind is merely an epiphenomenon of the workings of the brain. You already know you are a conscious mind with total moment-to-moment certainty. Nothing in science is certain, so you can eventually discount such claims as you learn more about your mind and its relationship to the movie. (This is why there is a 'hard problem of consciousness', because science is unable to detect the mind that projects everything our senses detect.)
Someone accused me of solipsism. If our mind has only thoughts, sensory experiences and emotions, then either solipsism (total identification with the mind) or naturalism (total identification with the movie it projects) becomes inevitable. However, we lose consciousness, we dream, some of us have visions and other spiritual experiences. We realise we did not consciously create these experiences and therefore that there is at least one deeper level of consciousness than we seem to be part of or in contact with. The little ego mind has discovered Mind at large, or the surface of it at least. We also observe others and suspect they have minds too. Some of us have experiences of being linked to those minds through telepathy and then we know that there are separate minds also connected to Mind at large and that we are not alone (solipcism is wrong).
If we identify with the projected world we forget to look inside and start to believe more and more that we are part of the movie. The actor identifies with the character and thinks the movie is reality. That's the position many atheists and skeptics are in. They are totally deluded. They couldn't be more wrong. They are almost out of their mind (think about that phrase). But because they are such great actors (and it's method acting writ large), they get most of the best parts in the movie and become 'men of the world'. But if we don't get too involved with the world, if we take time out for contemplation, if we avoid too many strong emotions and sensations, if we keep an open mind about everything, we become more aware that we are mind, we become mindful. We see that the signals we receive from and the emotions we feel about the projected world are strong, that our own thoughts can stir emotions up, and that dreams are ephemeral and intuitions and other subtle feelings are easily drowned out, so if we want to become mindful we have to seek silence. We go fishing or walking, solitary activities that give us space - in other words, help us get in contact with Mind-at-Large. We learn about people who pray and others who meditate, so we try these things and find that they help us too. We may start to see pictures in our head, have flashes of insight and knowledge, hear a 'still small voice', and we know there are still deeper layers of mind and we wonder how deep it goes. We also hear about the beliefs of people who pray and meditate and see that they correspond to what we are experiencing, so we take an interest in religion and spirituality. A lot of it seems crude and anachronistic and emotive, but we can see that there is also real insight and knowledge there. They are the people who are most like us now, so we may join a religion. There, we may learn about a book we never paid much attention to before, but which we eventually see was written by the scriptwriter to help us remember him. We may even witness a miracle, written into the script specially for us. We start to suspect this deeper layer of mind is helping us and notice an increasing correspondence between what is happening in our minds and what is happening in the movie-world around us. We understand then that this deeper layer of our mind is the one writing the ongoing script for the movie, putting clues in it for us. We stlll enjoy the movie now, but know that it really is just a movie, not real life, which is inside us, yet beyond our little ego minds. We realise that this is where the real action is and as we focus inward more than outwards we learn and are shown ever more about the larger Mind, which is limitless in extent and love. This is reality for us now, initially the picture house where the movie is being shown and eventually the door out of that picture house into the real world, from whence we came.
