Let’s cut right to the chase. My belief is that is more “real” than “reality”. The idealist philosophy comes in many shapes and guises but essentially claims that all of this stuff that is so obviously real, right in front of our faces, is in fact, all an illusion. Even better, it appears to be a shared illusion. It seems that we are tiny pieces of a much larger consciousness.

This means, of course, that we are responsible for the mess the world is in today. It also means we are responsible for all of the joyful and wonderful experiences as well. And all of the beauty.

When I say “we” are responsible, the fun part is ruminating on just “who” is doing the collapsing of all those probability waves. Humans are by and large an arrogant lot and most people wouldn’t like to consider the fact that we share our reality creation with other forms of consciousness, but why not? For that matter, what is consciousness anyway? Is a tree conscious? Who can say definitively? You can measure a reaction from a plant if you tell it that you are going to cut off all of its leaves. Is it conscious?

Certainly the materialists will scoff and tell us that consciousness is mere of the brain. I don’t buy it. Take the plant for instance. It obviously doesn’t have a brain. Yet it plainly reacts to emotional input.

Of course, the conjecture gets more interesting when you start to allow for other life forms that may or may not exist, which might actually have a greater effect on consensus reality than we humans. There is certainly no lack of theories put forth by people in all walks of life about what exactly is holding all this together. ETs, benevolent and malevolent alike, “higher” selves, oversouls, faerie folk, disincarnated entities… and of course, who can forget “gnomes”?

One of my favorite theories was put forth by Don Juan of Carlos Castaneda fame. He described seven bands of emanations, only four of which humans could interact with. If you can switch the personal assemblage point at which these emanations intersected, you could in fact change your universe, including place where the “laws” of physics are drastically altered. As much as I love this theory for its practical explanation of an occult principal, I mainly like it for not supposing that we humans are truly at the top of the multiversal food chain.

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