The nature of reality is a central issue on the spiritual path. South Asian traditions call the question of the nature of reality paramārtha, the domain of ‘ultimate truth’. Here I argue that the confounding problem in this domain is the human mind’s tendency to confuse what is with our mental representations of what is. I will distinguish these two with the phrases ‘first-order reality’ and ‘second-order reality’. I believe those labels are more useful than the tendency some nondualist teachers have to label the domain of second-order reality—thoughts, memories, imagination, etc.—as ‘unreal’.
First-order reality may be defined as what we experience before we have a thought about it or an interpretation of it. Second-order reality is constituted by our interpretations, stories, narratives, or mental frames: ways that we represent our experience to ourselves and to others. Anything that we can put into words is automatically second-order reality. It’s a representation of our direct experience.
Another way to say this is: first-order reality is what presents, second-order reality is our mental re-presentation of what presents. First-order reality includes not only sensual perceptions, but also all sorts of sensations (including the sensations we label ‘emotions’), as well as instinctive desires and needs (ones that don’t arise on the basis of a thought).
Though this distinction seems obvious when parsed in this way, in practice it’s very difficult for human beings to grasp. People constantly confuse their narratives about reality with reality itself. To parse this difference experientially, most people need some substantial experience in meditation. This is because meditation has, for many, the effect of slightly widening the gap between direct experience and interpretation. It can also facilitate the ability to rest in not-knowing; that is to say, on the basis of a meditation practice, the compulsion to form a narrative before one has enough certain information to make a plausible one arises less and less often. Furthermore, one learns to enjoy the state of not knowing, whereas for most non-meditators it occasions anxiety.
It seems to me that values can also be a part of first-order reality in some way. Some things matter to you more than others prior to thought or interpretation. You might experience an emotion, and that might be linked to a need that is intrinsic to our human natures, such as the need for human connection. But through a process of spiritual or psychological maturation, the edginess of that need might fall away, and then we might say that you value connection rather than need it.
So emotions, needs, and values can be part of first-order reality. You can experience a sweet, or desperate, longing for connection even before you have a thought about it. It’s natural, not a product of cultural conditioning (which really just means deeply internalized thoughts and narratives). There’s a wide range of emotions that can exist before you have a thought about them, but it’s also the case that as soon as you label the emotion, which in and of itself is constituted by physiological sensations, it changes your relationship to it. Certain emotions we judge as negative or problematic, such as anxiety, despite the fact that anxiety is physiologically indistinguishable from certain types of excitement, which we do not judge as negative or problematic.
So these elements of first-order reality might be reinforced by thought, or justified by thought, or interpreted by thought. And it’s also the case that there are certain emotions that exist only because of certain thoughts. An easy example would be envy or jealousy—they only arise on the basis of thinking about a situation in a particular way, and believing those thoughts. Some versions of depression are also caused by believing certain thoughts. I would suggest that these are precisely the kinds of emotions that fall away when we’re far enough along the spectrum of awakening.
A central feature of what we mean by awakeness, then, is the ability to distinguish between first-order and second-order reality. But this teaching does not amount to saying that second-order reality is invalid. Our representations and interpretations of our experience are perfectly real as representations. They can never capture the totality, nuance, complexity, or subtlety of our experience, but nonetheless, they have their own reality, and their own power.
There are some spiritual teachers out there who doggedly work to help people get free from their ‘stories’, or at least from their emotional attachment to their stories. This is a perfectly valid and important part of the spiritual enterprise. But it can also lead to a spiritual cul-de-sac, where we discount and dismiss other peoples’ interpretations of their experience without being sufficiently curious about the experiences that gave rise to those interpretations.
The ability to distinguish between first-order and second-order reality, between experience and interpretation, doesn’t require us to entirely invalidate those interpretations, it just requires us to see them for what they are. When we look into this matter, we discover that not every interpretation is equally contingent on the experience that it purports to interpret. Most are contingent on much more than that—namely, our past history, psychology, and cultural conditioning. The latter comes to us through parents, teachers, friends, media, movies, and television feeds into our conditioning which partially determines how we interpret any given experience. Most especially, our unresolved painful or pleasurable past experiences influence how we interpret any given present-moment experience. An inability to see this fact, and compensate for it to some degree, makes interpersonal relationships very difficult, to say the least.
The reason why some spiritual teachers say ‘thoughts are not true’ is that they’re trying to get across that second-order reality is not first-order reality. And indeed it can be a mind-blowing realization to discover that you are not your story about yourself, and everyone in your life is not your story about them. Even when you have very strong, emotionally charged and thoroughly fleshed-out stories, the person that they’re about is still not your story about them. They are not reducible to your diagnosis or mental picture of them. Which is not to say that your story has no value, or that it has no relationship to reality. The teaching here is simply: if you confuse first and second-order reality then, by definition, you’re asleep. It’s the opposite of awakeness. Of course, we can be awake in some dimensions of our lives and asleep in others. Whenever you act as if your story about someone is a true description of them, rather than a description of your experience of them, this is confusing first and second-order reality. And yet on the other hand, there’s a spiritual bypassing that can happen when we discount our own or someone else’s story. Spiritual folks are fond of saying ‘that’s just a story’—but perhaps the story points to, or is a clumsy attempt to point to, real aspects of the other person’s experience with you that merit addressing.
A wonderful part of awakeness is the ability to repose in the embodied (that is to say, visceral) awareness that you are not your story about yourself or anybody else’s story about you. If you really get that, then you don’t jump to defend or justify yourself and discount their story. It’s only when you’re still trying to get yourself to believe that you’re not their story about you that you bother to discount it. When you know that you’re not their story about you, then you can listen to what they’re sharing about their experience with you, even if they’re expressing it in judgmental terms. Their image of you might not fit your image of yourself but that’s not the point—their story is ‘true’ insofar as it points to genuine aspects of their lived experience in relationship to you, however distorted by their inability to parse first- and second-order reality.
The word ‘story’ is useful in this teaching, because we can all understand that fictional stories we find compelling tell us something true about human experience. It’s the same with our narratives about interpersonal experiences. If you wrote up an analysis of yourself, or of someone else, it’s likely that nearly every single sentence of that analysis would connect to your lived experience in some way. But that doesn’t make it true as stated. Indeed, it’s inevitably distorted in countless ways, such as in its attribution of causes or apportionment of blame. A story, interpretation or narrative is inevitably a distortion because it’s necessarily partial and fragmentary. You can never tell the complete story because to account for every single impinging factor and every single nuance of experience is simply impossible. Since you can’t every tell a complete story, somebody else who witnessed the same events would tell a different story about it because they’re choosing different fragments of experience to focus on, unconsciously based on their past experience and cognitive biases. Indeed, it’s almost certainly the case that even if two people try to ‘objectively’ remember everything they can about a series of events both were present for, they will still remember some different things. But the deeper issue is that, when crafting a narrative about those events, they will apply significantly different interpretive frames or what some would call ‘spin’.
Every narrative or interpretation is also inevitably distortive because when crafting a narrative, without quite a bit of mind-training, we simply can’t help but apply spin. The spin we have on any given event, or series of events, or any given dynamic between people, is deeply influenced by the totality of our past experience, especially our saṃskāras. When we tell stories we’re all ‘spin doctors’ in that even when we’re telling the story of our experience as honestly as we can (which itself is not so common), the way we understand that experience is profoundly influenced by everything we’ve ever thought, believed and experienced up to that moment. This is why people come up with such markedly distinct narratives. In literature and film, this has become known as the Rashōmon effect. The lack of understanding of this effect produces surprise, shock, bewilderment, suspicion, and/or outrage when we hear the other person’s version of events. But they might well be speaking in good faith, and be having a similar experience vis-à-vis your version of events.
The most important confounding factor in the formation of our interpretations is the self-serving ego. Our instinct for telling self-serving stories (which is another version of ‘spin’) can operate unconsciously, or it can be calculated. Both are common, but the first is probably moreso, and harder to deal with, because the person really believes what they’re saying. You, dear reader, are almost definitely a case study of this, just like everyone else. I’ll give some examples.
The self-serving ego is almost constantly in play when describing human behavior. It manifests in what is often called emotive conjugation, first described clearly by Bertrand Russell in 1948. Russell argued that we use words with different valences when describing the same behavior or attitude, depending on whether we’re describing ourselves, our interlocutor, or someone not present (and not liked), for example: “I am firm, you are obstinate, and he is pig-headed.” Or: “I have reconsidered the matter, you have changed your mind, he has gone back on his word.” Since this principle is so important to understand, I’ll give a couple more examples for you to consider. “I stand up for myself; you won’t take no for an answer; she always needs to get her way.” Or, “I am highly observant, you are detail oriented, he is a nitpicker.” (Or sometimes, if the third person is highly thought of, we see a different version of emotive conjugation, that is perhaps self-serving in a much subtler way, such as: “I perspire—you sweat—she glows.”) Examples could of course be multiplied endlessly.
Notice that tribalism also plays into this, because one’s social group is part of one’s ego-structure: a politician you support reconsidered the matter in light of new evidence, but the politician you don’t support flip-flopped. It is in precisely this sense that all our news sources have become partisan, and therefore they are all bad-faith actors, since far from compensating for the human tendency toward emotive conjugation, they are using it to pander to their audiences—and even sometimes weaponizing it. But it’s important to understand that the self-serving ego is very good at concealing itself, creating what we might call a cognitive blind spot. Because of this, we tend to be convinced that our verbal assessments are mostly fair and balanced and based in reality, at least compared to those of others, and we tend to believe that our preferred news outlets are reliable. It’s vital that we learn to compensate for our individual and collective tendency toward emotive conjugation. It’s a form of story-telling that exacerbates division and outrage at a time when we need unity and understanding more than ever.
Since in this analysis ‘second-order reality’ constitutes interpretation of direct experience, we must of course consider interpretations based on other people’s reports as ‘third-order reality’ and thus even more potentially problematic. (So what we call ‘second-hand information’ is actually third-order reality in this classification.) That is say, narratives based on other people’s narratives are potentially subject to double the number of distorting factors. This is why good journalism is so extraordinarily rare, and also why gossip can be so damaging for all kinds of organizations.
Despite all this, every single story ever told, every single interpretation ever offered, must be considered simultaneously false and true. False in the ways I already described (and in more ways that I haven’t described), but also true in the sense that if we bothered to unpack it, every single sentence of the narrative with which we represent ourselves or others corresponds to some aspect of our lived experience. Such unpacking needs to proceed with utmost patience and care to get at any underlying truth, but there is truth value to nearly everything we say about our experience because every single sentence uttered in good faith can be linked to some specific moment of real experience. Psychologist Marshall Rosenberg argued, for example, that negative judgements of others are best viewed as distorted expressions of our own difficult emotions and unmet needs. To cite some simplistic examples, the truth-value to be mined from the judgement “You’re a slob” directed at a housemate or family member, say, is something like “I’m angry because I want to live in a clean house, and I can’t see you supporting that goal in any way.” The truth-value to be mined from the judgement “You’re selfish” is something like “I’m upset because I want you to pay more attention to other people’s needs than I see you doing.” The second-person judgement always points back to something true in first-person experience, and in that sense every story, opinion, and judgement has some hidden truth-value. No one has ever literally been ‘selfish’, because that is a one-word story with which we clumsily represent our own experience of dissatisfaction with that person’s behavior. And when we call someone selfish to their face, it is a tactic of attempted manipulation: we’re hoping to shame them into behavior that we find more palatable. This is painfully ironic considering that we would have a much better chance of influencing them in the desired direction by simply articulating the truth of our first-person experience as honestly as we can.
I do not mean to suggest by this argument that some behaviors are not better than others by any demonstrable measure. I think it’s a good idea to call behaviors that are likely contribute to the well-being of yourself and others ‘beneficial’ and to call behaviors that are likely to decrease or impede the well-being of yourself and others ‘detrimental’. But these labels are effective, and we might even say true, relative to a presumed goal, that of human well-being (or the well-being of conscious creatures more generally). Therefore labels of beneficial or detrimental (or their Near Enemies, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ or ‘right’ and ‘wrong’) cannot constitute objective truths that exist irrespective of a specific context, however much we might wish otherwise. The present essay is concerned with the pursuit of truth, and the value of parsing first- and second-order reality in that context. But I also suggest that the ability to perform such parsing is beneficial as defined above. When we can distinguish first- and second-order reality, we can take responsibility for our own inner experience, and give feedback to others who impact that experience in ways that are more likely to be effective. Even more significantly, with this ability we can become free of the mind-world, and enjoy the astonishing mode of being that we might characterize as communion with reality-as-such, also known as awakeness.
Now, as you might have already realized, by the logic of this argument it must be equally true that positive judgements of others are also distorted expressions of our own inner experience, in this case pleasurable feelings that arise from having our needs met. So if you say another person is ‘wonderful’ or ‘kind’, the truth-value that can be mined from that statement is that you are having pleasurable feelings that arise from the way that person meets your needs or nourishes your values. These sorts of interpersonal judgements are regarded as positive or unproblematic because they don’t seem to cause harm. Except that they do cause a subtle kind of harm, as all distortions of reality inevitably do, I argue. When you eulogize someone else, you subtly (or obviously) pedestalize them, placing them at some distance from yourself. This makes it harder to recognize that your appreciation of them is based in shared values that you have with them. That recognition would probably bring about a feeling of connection, whereas pedestalization contributes to a sense of separation and therefore alienation.
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To summarize, there’s no such thing as a thought or a verbal statement that is totally true (apart, perhaps, from verbal statements that effectively approximate sound and valid mathematical equations or formulae). But there are interpretations that illuminate our individual or collective experience more effectively than others. We consider insights into our individual experience to have a different quality or character than insights into our collective experience. This doesn’t necessarily mean we need to consider the latter truer than the former. While a valid insight into one person’s lived experience might be seen as trivial, the more ground even a well-tested generalization seeks to cover, the more it must be watered down until approaches banality. I argue that we must always keep in view that thoughts or narratives are best viewed as tools rather than truths, to avoid the common conflation of first- and second-order reality. It is simply is the case that some thoughts or narratives are articulated in such a way as to more effectively help people understand their experience and make peace with it. And perhaps, in the final analysis, that’s really what we mean by truth, whether personal or scientific: propositions and interpretations that are more effective at helping people understand their experience. And we could define that understanding as truthful in terms of its ability to help us make peace with the past and more effectively navigate the future.
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We can conclude this post by considering the phenomenon that has become known as gaslighting. This term, derived from the 1944 film Gaslight (which is worth seeing, by the way), rightly refers to the act of undermining someone’s interpretation of their experience so cleverly or thoroughly that they begin to doubt their own experience, and in extreme cases, their own sanity. In the strict usage of the term, gaslighting is a form of lying: you know the other person’s interpretation is valid (as far as interpretations go, anyway) but you systematically sow seeds of self-doubt in them for reasons of your own, even implying that they might be delusional. However, these days the term is thrown around carelessly, and sometimes even weaponized. For example, someone who is mounting an effective counter-argument might be accused of gaslighting, especially by someone who conflates their experience and their interpretation of their experience, and who therefore believes that their interlocutor has no right to question their interpretation at all.
It might be a fine line at times, but there’s an important difference between questioning somebody’s interpretation of their experience out of curiosity to get at the underlying truth versus questioning their interpretation as a power-play—a manipulative attempt to systematically undermine their confidence in their own interpretive process. Gaslighting is always a manipulative act based in the presumption that your interpretation of their experience is better than theirs, and based in the desire to supplant their interpretation with your own in service of your agenda, which often entails power over them. Gaslighting is almost always a bid for power in a relationship. The frightening thing is that we can do this without even realizing that we’re doing it. It takes honest self-reflection combined with openness to the possibility of being wrong to uncover this phenomenon in oneself. Before engaging in this self-reflection, I gaslighted people frequently without realizing it, and even subsequent to this self-reflection, I can’t claim to have become totally free of this insidious habit. (I can claim to have made a lot progress on this front, however, and so I am deeply grateful to the unknown person who was brilliant enough to introduce the term gaslighting into our culture.) I am sure that many others who have honestly self-reflected on this issue would say the same. And it does seem to be the case that any form of unearned privilege (based on the cultural dominance of one’s ethnicity, gender, etc.) exacerbates the likelihood that one commits this particular sin against the truth, often without realizing one is doing so. I would suggest that we humans instinctively engage in power-plays of various kinds until we train ourselves not to, or until we reach a point in the awakening process where we have lost the ability to believe in hierarchies and likewise have lost the desire to wield power over others, due to seeing with clarity that that particular belief is purely a mental construct and that that particular desire does not contribute to well-being.
Let’s explore the fine line here more carefully. First we must allow that it is possible to question someone’s interpretation of their experience (or have them question yours) without it being a manipulative bid for more power in the relationship, however rare that might in fact be. Investigating this requires us to look into the difficult and subtle question of our underlying motivation. We must ask ourselves, “Am I coming from an honest desire to know the truth, out of care for both myself and the other person? Am I curious to see what happens when we dig under these mind-formed interpretations to undercover the visceral lived experience? Or am I seeking to advance my interpretation at the expense of theirs, because I love to be ‘right’ or because I want the upper hand?”
Even if your motive is pure, when you question someone’s interpretation of their experience, they might become upset, especially when they feel a strong emotional charge in the relationship of their story to their lived experience. When their story is emotionally charged in this way, being, for example, an interpretation of the reasons for very painful experiences that is sanctioned by their social group, then if you question their interpretation, they can only regard it as gaslighting. It feels as if you’re doubting their experience itself, even if you’re not. You’re treading on very delicate ground.
How to make this conversational ground firmer? I would say that questioning somebody’s interpretation of their experience is only valid when they give consent for you to do just that, and when you’ve checked your motive for doing so (in the manner suggested above). Both are necessary, and neither is sufficient on its own. If people tell their story and you question it without their consent, it’s not going to go well, even if that story deserves to be questioned in general.
Interpretations of reality deserve to be questioned when they are unsupported by the evidence (or supported by insufficient evidence to warrant the conclusions being drawn) and are likely to cause harm of one kind or another. Here, too, both conditions are necessary, and neither is sufficient on its own. One might argue, why not question interpretations that are harmless but likely to be wrong (that is, unsupported by sufficient evidence)? Because that’s a tragic waste of time and energy when global problems and existential risks face us that require more and more unity on our part to negotiate successfully.
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One of the most useful and meaningful definitions of awakeness is this ability to distinguish between first- and second-order reality. If that distinction is authentically available to you but it’s not yet available to your interlocutor, then that can be frustrating. The other person might perceive you as positioning yourself as having superior knowledge or wisdom because you’re trying to talk about a form of discernment that doesn’t make sense to them. You’re seeing a bright line that they don’t see. If they’re not persuaded that that line exists, and that you have some ability to see it, they might even suspect you of playing mind-games with them for nefarious (or deluded) reasons of your own. I do not think such conversations can prove fruitful. There’s no point in trying to point out a distinction that others don’t believe in and don’t yet want to see.
These are challenging issues to negotiate because even though first-order reality is always simple (indeed, it’s that which cannot be simpler), second-order reality is always complicated. Teasing out the precise relationships between our mental structures of representation with that which they seek to represent is one of the most difficult things we can do. It calls on our intellectual capacities, it calls on our intuitive capacities, and it calls on our capacity for clear self-reflection, which is often not nearly as available to us as we’d like to think it is.
Even though it’s still very rare among humans, the easy part here is seeing the difference between what presents in direct experience and our representation (i.e., interpretation) of it. The hard part is seeing clearly the nature of the relationship between these two—the surprisingly tenuous threads that connect various aspects of the interpretation to experience itself in highly complex and nuanced and culturally-contingent ways. These threads connect the interpretation not only to the reality the interpretation purports to represent, but also to everything else in the person who is making the representation.
There is no perfect way to communicate direct experience, due to the nature of language itself. We can’t even adequately describe a simple sensual experience, like the taste of a mango, to someone who has never had it, let alone the nuances of our experience of love or spirit or the subtleties of human connection. When we’ve grokked this, we stop searching for stable truths (or universal Truth) in the thought-world, and we evaluate articulable thoughts solely in terms of their efficacy.
When you clearly see the real but nonconceptual difference between experience and interpretation, it radically impacts your life. It radically transfigures the way you experience reality. If you actually see the difference between first- and second-order reality, then you realise that nothing is what you think it is. “A tree is not my concept of it.” Then you ask yourself, “What actually is it?” And then you realise that you don’t know, because the only answers that arise are more words, which are concepts, and that’s not what a tree is or what it’s made of. Then lightning strikes: “I don't know what anything is!” What is anything apart from your concept of it? When you genuinely tap into this inquiry-cum-realization, you are launched into a world of profoundly wondrous unknowing. If you’re ready for it, it’s a state of exquisite aliveness. That state doesn’t render all your interpretations wholly meaningless because, again, there might be value in teasing out why you interpret things the way you do. But reality itself is just . . . pure is-ness. Words fail. There aren’t even objects anymore, since you see that objects are concepts. As a result, you see that everything is ‘ultimate reality’ and nothing’s separable. If the word God makes sense to you, you see everything as the direct and immediate manifestation of God. Or the Absolute. The words don’t matter. You see that the One manifests as everything we experience before we have a thought about it—and then it manifests as all our thoughts about it.
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