The Question of Reality

Inclining as I do towards Vedic and Taoist philosophy, I often come across the assertion that all material reality – and that means the whole physical universe – is just one of many levels of illusion. The first difficulty here is that you need to define ‘reality.’ It could be said that anything with which we can engage in any objective way is, by definition, real. That seems reasonable, even if it does raise the difficult question of whether things like abstract thought and emotional reaction are objective; and , if they’re not, whether that disqualifies them from being regarded as real. I think this is merely a matter of semantics. What I find more intriguing is another question.

We make a distinction between dreams and waking reality. One is a psychological phenomenon which has no substance; the other is the real thing. Should we be so certain of that? How do we know that waking reality is real? The only bases for that are our self-awareness and the evidence of our five senses. But we are aware of ourselves in dreams too, and we can experience the same subjective reaction to sensory input. Dreams can be tactile; we can even ‘die’ in dreams. Whilst we are dreaming we are convinced of the reality around us, however irrational it might seem later.

So how do we know that our waking state is any more real than a dream? In other words, how do we know it isn’t just one more level of dreaming, and that we won’t wake out of it one day and then be convinced that we are now in the ‘real’ world?