something about reality doesn’t add up

our worldviews

A worldview is a curious thing, isn’t it? None of us choose the one we’re born into. We inherit it, absorb it into our day-to-day lives, and often only really notice it when it begins to fracture.

And even the most compelling worldview will offer only a map to the eternal mystery:

what, exactly, is this thing we call reality?

The answer can never be pinned down. And that’s fine. Certainty isn’t the goal. A worldview is simply a way of seeing that, at its best, moves us incrementally closer to what is actually real.

Yet worldviews are powerful. They are far more than just a collection of beliefs. They shape what we think is possible, how we interpret experience, and even how the world shows up for us.1

They frame our lived sense of meaning, suffering, hope and purpose.

For this reason alone, there is intrinsic value in examining our own worldviews. The drive to understand what this is. That’s a worthy pursuit in itself, a beautiful devotion.

For years, my own worldview has aligned closely with the perennial philosophy and many of it’s familiar intuitions:

that consciousness is fundamental,

that love is intrinsic to reality itself,

and that, at the most fundamental level, consciousness is love.

These are ancient teachings, and their power often lies in the fact that they can be known experientially. Indeed, my own worldview was shaped by such encounters. As a result, I’ve considered them reliable axioms for my own worldview.

But lately, fractures have appeared.

Certain facts of life no longer fit my worldview without distortion. The more honestly I confront the reality of truly unnecessary suffering, the harder it becomes to take seriously the idea of love at the root of all things. In fact, it begins to sound and feel increasingly absurd. And once that thread is pulled, arguments that place consciousness itself at the foundation of reality start to feel less decisive than they once did.

I now find myself re-examining the foundations of my own worldview. And as I begin to loosen my grip, new ideas come into view.

And it comes with a kind of childlike wonder, as I contemplate a simple reversal of these axioms: are love and consciousness really something we come from, or are they what everything is slowly struggling to become?

The beauty of a worldview is that it’s our own, and it can change. It isn’t something we inherit once and for all. So if you, like me, feel that pull to examine what this is, and have been drawn toward - or even fallen in love with - the perennial philosophies, I invite you to read on with a generously open mind2, as I begin to question some familiar assumptions, and trace the fault lines now running through my own.

the world as object

If you follow any worldview far enough, it eventually runs into the same pesky question:

what is the nature of reality itself?

In the modern West, the default answer has been materialism3. Matter is taken as fundamental, consciousness as something that emerges from the brain, and reality as ultimately reducible to ever smaller parts of matter4.

There is no question that this worldview has delivered results. Modern science and technology owe most of their success to its assumptions.

And yet, for all these advances, we still can’t explain how subjective experience arises from matter at all. It remains a question for which we have nothing even close to a satisfactory answer.

Part of the problem, I suspect, lies in what materialism has become today. What began as genuine open scientific inquiry has hardened into a bit of a rigid belief system.

This becomes clear when we look at how phenomena that strain materialist assumptions are treated. Rather than being investigated openly, they are quite often outright dismissed.

In this sense, materialism has begun to resemble a kind of secular orthodoxy.

Rupert Sheldrake famously refers to the defenders of this orthodoxy as the “high priests of science”. A growing number of once respected insiders have found themselves pushed to the margins by these high priests for pursuing lines of inquiry deemed heretical5.

Of course, there are mountains of evidence against materialism across a wide range of anomalous phenomena, from terminal lucidity, to rich near-death experiences reported during periods of absent brain activity, to frontier research into non-local consciousness, and a whole host of other psi-phenomena.

The broader consequence is this: certain unorthodox ideas are wholesale ignored because materialism is simply not prepared to them seriously. It is not because those ideas have been decisively disproven.

As a result, many of the serious enquiries into post-materialist worldviews have been happening at the margins. And some of these lines of inquiry are now beginning to gather real momentum.

at the heart of things

Before we dive into post-materialist worldviews, I want to pause to examine one of the most powerful assumptions the perennial traditions tend to share.

For much of my early adulthood I was a committed, if increasingly uneasy, materialist. Partly as a reaction against an overbearing Christian upbringing which left me very suspicious of dogma. Materialism offered clarity and a sense of intellectual safety.

But it never fully accounted for my experience. And less than a decade later, I began to set it aside. A series of transformative experiences opened me to the perennial worldview, non-duality, and a range of mystical traditions.

In their attempts to answer the timeless question, these traditions consistently share one assumption:

that love is intrinsic to the nature of reality

Love is something woven into the structure of existence, not merely an emotion or an evolutionary byproduct, like materialism would suggest.

It’s a deeply consoling idea, that beneath the chaos of the world lies a loving order. That reality, at its core, is benevolent.

Indeed, this assumption shaped my own worldview. It was reinforced through my own direct experience. Contemplative practices and plant medicine gave rise to powerful encounters, access to higher realities, and glimpses of a benevolent, loving force I have come to call God (though what you call it matters less than the experience itself).

And yet, despite these experiences, my journey into mysticism has never been one of blind faith. If anything, it has been marked by an ongoing tension. Years of left-brain knowing left me with a thirst for coherence and a real urge to integrate the profound transformative and mystical experiences I’ve had, with a coherent understanding of the world6.

That tension has not gone away. And today it leads me to question the very assumption that once felt most secure: is love really fundamental to the nature of reality?

the question of primacy

Back to love in a moment. First, let’s take a look at another key assumption underlying the perennial traditions:

that consciousness itself is fundamental

This idea is thousands of years old. But in recent decades it’s been given new life beyond the spiritual traditions. We have post-materialist ideologies that aspire to bridge science and spirituality to thank for that7.

Among the most elegant of these is Analytical Idealism. Its core claim is along the lines of: matter is not a separate substance at all, and our physical world is what consciousness looks like under certain conditions.

When I came across analytical idealism, what immediately struck me was just how familiar it sounded.

Long before encountering it, I had been drawn to an almost identical claim within one of the world’s oldest spiritual traditions. Advaita Vedanta, a cornerstone of non-dual philosophy, makes the same basic assertion: consciousness is primary, and the world arises as an appearance within it.

Around the same time, I also had an experience that can only be described as a deeply embodied insight into the interconnectedness of all things. Whatever it was, the experience was powerful enough to leave a lasting mark on my worldview8.

Non-duality offered one way of making sense of it. Analytical idealism later offered another, and did well to satisfy the more analytical, left-brain instincts.

Together, analytical idealism and non-duality formed a surprisingly coherent account of whatever this is. It is not difficult to see why they persuade many, especially those with direct experiential insight, that consciousness lies at the foundation of everything.

what will not reconcile

What often goes unnoticed, however, is the claim so often carried alongside: that consciousness, which is fundamental, is also inherently loving.

This far stronger claim emerges from the non-dual traditions9. Not only is consciousness fundamental, but consciousness is also inherently loving. In Advaita Vedanta, this is captured in the phrase Sat–Chit–Ananda: existence, consciousness, and bliss10, as one indivisible reality.

From this emerges a third powerful assumption that runs through much of the perennial worldview:

that consciousness and love are ultimately inseparable

For a long time, this assumption also sat comfortably with me. It resonated with my non-dual insights and was reinforced by deep meditative and psychedelic states that pointed, unmistakably, to a benevolent ‘okayness’ beneath everything.

Indeed, one of the most transformative moments of my life was sitting a three-day ceremony with the Huni Kuin, after which I can say without hesitation that, whatever I mean by God, it is first and foremost a God of Love.

So let me be clear about what I am not doubting. I don’t doubt the reality of something deeply loving encountered within existence.

What I am now inviting closer scrutiny on, is the stronger claim that this love has been present, unchanged, from the very beginning of reality itself.

This assumption has begun to give me real sense of unease.

This unease stems from one primary issue: If reality is fundamentally loving, and if all that exists arises from and within that same loving source, then God has a great deal to answer for11. Across its 14-billion-year unfolding, our universe has been marked not only by struggle and hardship, but by vast amounts of suffering that appear entirely unnecessary.

I am not talking about suffering that clearly plays a developmental role. The strain of physical challenge, life’s inevitable losses, or the difficult inner work that can foster growth and resilience. Painful as these experiences are, most can recognise how they can be alchemised towards growth, deep compassion, and wisdom.

I am speaking here of something else entirely.

There exists a category of suffering so extreme, so apparently purposeless, that it resists all easy justification. A terminally ill infant dying in agony. A child subjected to prolonged and unspeakable abuse. Individuals trapped in severe mental illness without relief or the capacity for meaning-making. Countless beings, human and non-human alike, endure profound torment long before they possess any cognitive ability to contextualise, redeem, or grow from what is happening to them.

If reality is, at its core, love, how does this very specific category of suffering exist at all? How are such forms of cruelty to be reconciled with a loving source of existence?

I can accept that much suffering plays a role in growth. But the claim that all suffering does so collapses under scrutiny.

I have met many thoughtful people who hold the view that there is purpose in all suffering, even unnecessary suffering, yet I cannot bring myself to defend a universal love that is, by design, compatible with the torture to death of a child who will never have the chance to find meaning out of what has happened to them.12

Even setting human suffering aside, the natural world compounds the problem. Countless animals endure immense, ongoing pain that serves no obvious developmental or redemptive purpose at all.

An honest inquiry cannot simply smooth this over. The problem of genuinely unnecessary suffering is real, and it presses directly against the limits of the perennial worldview.

It raises the uncomfortable possibility that something vital about how we understand reality is really, quite seriously, incomplete.

Various explanations have been offered to me: that all suffering is illusory (it’s not), that the ultimate love is the freedom to suffer (a very hard pill to swallow), that all suffering builds character or has purpose (no, not the type we’re talking about here), that the Grand Architect’s reasons are unknowable and that it’s all part of the grand plan (this now feels morally bankrupt).

While I personally found solace in most of these ideas at one time, I now find them deeply unsatisfying.

Attempts to define love so broadly that it encompasses and validates acts of extreme cruelty defeats its essential meaning as a force for good.

I would not want to die on the hill of a universal love that aligns itself with the act of torturing a child to death.

It is here then, that my worldview is beginning to break with the perennial tradition.

on certainty

At this point, it is important to be precise. Analytical idealism, unlike non-duality, makes no claims about the moral character of consciousness. As far as I know, it does not posit that consciousness is loving, benevolent, or good13. It simply claims that consciousness is fundamental14.

Initially, I have little resistance to this idea. My difficulty lies almost entirely with the claim that consciousness-as-love has been present from the very beginning.

But something unexpected began to happen as I examined that assumption more closely. In questioning consciousness-as-love, I found myself drawn, almost unwillingly, into questioning why consciousness itself must be fundamental at all.

This line of inquiry was first opened for me by philosopher Tim Freke, who pointed out a subtle flaw in one of the most common arguments offered in defense of consciousness primacy.

The argument, often articulated in non-dual circles by their head figures like Rupert Spira, goes roughly like this:

consciousness must be fundamental, because everything we have ever experienced is experienced in consciousness.

Taken at face value, this sounds persuasive. But on closer inspection, it reduces to a tautology. It is equivalent to saying: you have never experienced anything you have not experienced. Of course you haven’t. The statement verifies itself by definition.

This does not mean that non-duality (or analytical idealism) is wrong. All it means is that this particular argument as a justification of consciousness as primary doesn’t hold. There are many other lines of reasoning which are more sophisticated. I am not a physicist, and at best an armchair philosopher, focusing here on just one argument (albeit a big one for non-dualists).

Still, subjectively, the idea that consciousness is fundamental can feel compelling. Worldviews are powerful in this way. As the saying goes: change how you see the world, and the world you see changes. In my own experience, reality can present itself as deeply unified, and in those moments it can feel as though what is presenting is consciousness itself.

But something has now begun to slowly shift for me.

The fact that reality appears this way does not mean that it must be this way at the most fundamental level. Consciousness may be one way reality reveals itself. There may be other ways.

Rather than defaulting to consciousness, perhaps the simpler starting point is that there is a world at all. Only once our meta-cognition has developed does it become apparent that this world is experienced, and that it is experienced by us.15

we are becoming

If you’ve stayed with me this far, I want to invite one final shift in perspective. Let’s assume, just for a moment, that neither matter, consciousness, nor love sit at the very beginning of reality.

If that’s the case, what might?

Tim Freke’s evolutionary philosophy (what he calls Unividualism) begins by inverting the usual metaphysical question. Instead of starting with some primordial substance and asking how everything else arises from it, he starts with becoming itself.

Reality, in this view, is not a thing but a relational process: an unfolding that will start at the most simple foundations, and gradually learn how to differentiate and relate to itself.

Seen this way, consciousness and love are in no way guaranteed from the outset. They are possibilities that only become real once the process of reality reaches sufficient complexity, coherence, and self-reference.

This is not a retreat into materialism. Mind and matter are both expressions of the same evolving process, taking on new emergent forms as reality learns, through itself, how to become more than it was.

This intuition has deep roots. Hegel captured it, in his characteristically thorny way, with the idea that pure Being collapses into Nothing16, and that the only genuine starting point is the movement between them: becoming. What Freke is gesturing toward belongs to this and the Alfred Whitehead family of thought, where what is most fundamental is the process that is continually becoming.

At first glance, this can sound like a demotion of consciousness. If consciousness is not primordial, does it become secondary, just incidental, somehow less important?

It is exactly the opposite.

Whatever metaphysics we adopt, consciousness remains the most undeniable fact of our lives. It is the medium of all the meaning we make, every value we recognise, every beauty we perceive, every act of love. Even the impulse to question reality arises within experience.

And yet, many of the most real and meaningful things in our lives are not present at the beginning of a process. Life is not less real because it appears after chemistry. Music is not less real because it depends on vibration and pattern. In the same way, consciousness is not diminished if it turns out to be a late-blooming achievement of reality rather than its primordial ground.

This is the appeal of Freke’s movement. It allows me to take my experience of God seriously, without forcing me to claim they must have been present, fully formed and morally perfect, from the very beginning. Love and consciousness remain real. What is changing is my understanding of their role in the story.

Neither may be at the origin of everything.

The absolute perfection and divine beauty of consciousness, of love, might just be what reality, what we, are slowly, painfully, and astonishingly learning to become.

where this leaves me

I cannot say that I have fully arrived at adopting a relational or process philosophy worldview, nor that I have completely let go of worldviews that place love, or even consciousness-as-love, at the primacy of reality.

The beauty of a worldview is that it’s ours to build. It isn’t fixed or inherited once and for all; it’s a living structure, shaped and reshaped as experience gives us new ways to see, and new chances to learn.

I do have a few non-negotiables. I want my worldview to gravitate toward what is most real, not merely what is most comforting. I want to hold the undiluted reality of unnecessary suffering alongside my lived experience of a benevolent, loving presence. And I don’t want our world to abandon the hard-won insights of the scientific revolution, which has undeniably reduced immense amounts of suffering.

Analytical idealism remains somewhat attractive. It is elegant and makes no necessary claims about the moral character of consciousness at the very beginning. It may yet prove sufficient. But I can no longer rest on the truism that everything is experienced in consciousness, therefore consciousness must be fundamental. And, to be honest, the assumption itself is losing its grip the more I can see just how anachronistically we rely on it.

What I cannot reconcile, is the non-dual claim that love has been the underlying substrate of all of reality, present, unchanged, from the very start. I struggle to align my experience of God with that which would preside over 14 billion years of profound, mostly unnecessary, suffering.

Something in me refuses to see how that can be called love without defeating its essential meaning as a force for good.

Freke’s Unividualism offers a way through this impasse. If the nature of reality is evolutionary, then unnecessary suffering is a symptom of an unfinished world, and love appears as something reality is - maybe only recently - discovering to be essential.

This doesn’t demote love. In many ways, shouldn’t it make love even more precious? Each of us bears a fragile torch, carried through 14 billion years of struggle, pushing into the unknown, co-creating the way for the evolution of the divine.

At a gut level, this feels more coherent to me than the assumptions underlying most perennial traditions. But I admit it’s not without cost. It asks us to sit with much uncertainty around the hard problem of consciousness. It requires a willingness to entertain the possibility that being at the beginning, as a process, and being-with-consciousness are different things (for now, a tentative grasp of Hegel’s insight helps).

where this leaves me

I do not know what reality ultimately is. I no longer trust anyone who claims to. But I know this much: If meaning, consciousness, and love are fragile achievements, hard-won - and perhaps terrifyingly easy to lose - then they are therefore worthy of our utmost care.

What this means is our participation in this life is not incidental or meaningless. We carry both responsibility and purpose in equal measures, to tend, to protect, and to carry love forward.

Indeed, love becomes the very purpose of our existence. In this way, perhaps, over countless lifetimes, our lives truly, deeply, matter.

The deeper question then, is no longer what reality is. It is what is reality becoming?

And whether, in this brief and fragile life, will we heed the call to shape it?

Speira is a private, conscious community of leaders, founders, thinkers and mystics committed to expanding consciousness and exercising meaningful agency in the world.

Our world is in desperate need of credible, optimistic, post-materialist worldviews. Ones that transcend and include materialism, honouring all that the scientific revolution has given us, while recognising that it has been necessary but not sufficient for what comes next.

Speira is at the forefront of this discovery process. If you’re interested in joining Speira, you can learn more here.