I Think Therefore I Am Confused

A Manifesto for the Rational Mystic

I think, therefore I am confused

I think thereore Iam Confused

On Why the Universe Probably Doesn't Exist — But You Should Probably Still Pay Your Council Tax

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." — Philip K. Dick

(A man who spent considerable time testing this hypothesis personally)

The Problem With Reality (Besides Everything Else)

Let us begin, as all good philosophical investigations must, with an admission of profound uncertainty. Not the fashionable uncertainty of the postmodern dinner party, the performative kind where everyone agrees that nothing is knowable and then argues passionately about where to order the takeaway, but genuine, rigorous, epistemologically-grounded uncertainty about the nature of reality itself.

I have spent the better part of three decades oscillating between scepticism and mysticism with the determined enthusiasm of a pendulum that has read too much Kant.

The result of this rather unusual intellectual journey is what I call the position of the Rational Mystic: the view that the universe is simultaneously explicable through reason and irreducibly mysterious. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either selling something or hasn't thought about it hard enough.

This is not a wishy-washy 'everything is valid' relativism. This is a rigorous, carefully considered philosophical position with serious intellectual ancestors. It is the tradition that says: yes, let us apply the scalpel of reason to the world, but let us not be surprised when the scalpel discovers it is also being applied by the world to itself.

Welcome. Try to remain calm.

The Founding Fathers (and Occasional Mothers) of Rational Mysticism

George Berkeley and the Universe as a Very Convincing Idea

Our story begins, as so many of the best stories do, with an eighteenth-century Irish bishop who decided that matter doesn't exist.

George Berkeley (1685–1753), Bishop of Cloyne and arguably the most cheerful nihilist in the history of the Church of Ireland, proposed what he called esse est percipi — to be is to be perceived.

In Berkeley's view, the physical world is not a collection of independently existing objects bumping about in the dark; it is a collection of ideas sustained in the mind of God and perceived by minds such as ours. Matter, in the Berkeleyan universe, is rather surplus to requirements.

Now, most people's first response to this is the celebrated one attributed to Dr Samuel Johnson, who, upon hearing Berkeley's argument, kicked a large stone and declared, 'I refute it thus!'

Johnson's foot, one suspects, had a different view on the matter.

But here is the thing: kicking the stone proves nothing whatsoever. The resistance you feel — the hardness, the pain in your toe — is precisely the kind of perceptual experience Berkeley said reality consists of. He wasn't claiming stones feel soft. He was claiming that 'soft', 'hard', and 'stone' are all mental constructs.

Johnson's bruised foot was Exhibit A.

Berkeley's idealism — the view that mind is primary and matter is derivative — forms the bedrock of what philosophers call Mentalism. Not the performance art of reading minds at corporate conferences (though that is also rather good), but the metaphysical position that the universe is, at its most fundamental, mental in nature. This is the first pillar of Rational Mysticism.

"The very existence of matter is something we deduce — we never directly experience it. We experience our experience of it. Which is, philosophically speaking, a very different thing indeed."

Immanuel Kant and the Thing You Can Never Actually Know

If Berkeley gave us the radical idea that reality might be mind-dependent, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) gave us the slightly more terrifying idea that even if there is an objective world out there, we can never actually know what it is really like.

Kant, who reportedly never left his home town of Königsberg and yet managed to revolutionise Western philosophy from a modest flat, argued for a distinction between the phenomenal world — reality as we experience it, filtered through the apparatus of our senses and cognition — and the noumenal world — the thing-in-itself, das Ding an sich, which lurks behind experience like a philosophical bouncer refusing all entry.

To clarify: Things as they are in themselves, not mediated through perception by the senses or conceptualisation, and therefore unknowable.

According to Kant, space, time, and causality are not features of the world that we discover; they are features of the mind that we impose on raw sensory data. We don't perceive a world and then categorise it. We categorise it first, and then perceive it. Our cognition, in other words, actively constructs what we take to be reality.

This is enormously important for the Rational Mystic position. It means that the mystical experience. The sense of transcending ordinary categories, the dissolution of subject and object, the feeling of touching something beyond conceptual thought, may not be delusional at all. It may be a glimpse, however brief and disorienting, of what lies on the other side of the Kantian partition. Not the phenomenal world we habitually inhabit, but the noumenal ground we habitually can't.

Kant himself was too Prussian and disciplined to follow this thought into mysticism. But the door he opened is wide enough to walk through.

Ernst von Glasersfeld and the Radical Constructivist's Guide to Building Your Own Universe

Which brings us to Radical Constructivism, perhaps the most epistemologically subversive school of thought to emerge from the twentieth century without anyone outside academia noticing.

Ernst von Glasersfeld (1917–2010), Austrian-born polymath and intellectual provocateur, took Kant's insight and sharpened it into something considerably more unsettling.

Where Kant suggested our minds shape experience, von Glasersfeld argued that knowledge itself is not a representation of an independently existing reality, but a construction — a functional model built by the organism to navigate its environment.

The word 'reality,' in radical constructivist terms, refers not to an external world we discover, but to constraints that push back on our constructions.

This is the crucial distinction: von Glasersfeld did not say the world does not exist. He said we can never know whether our model of it is true in the sense of corresponding to it. We can only know whether our model is viable — whether it works well enough to keep us alive, thinking, and capable of writing mildly ambitious philosophical blog posts.

The implications are profound. Science, in this view, does not discover truth; it constructs increasingly viable models. Religion does not describe cosmic reality; it constructs meaning-making frameworks. Mystical experience does not penetrate metaphysical reality; it disrupts and expands the boundaries of the constructed model. And the Rational Mystic occupies the peculiar but defensible position of regarding all of these activities as legitimate — and none of them as definitively final.

"The map is not the territory. But sometimes the most interesting thing about the territory is what the map cannot represent."

Jean Piaget and the Developmental Architecture of the Knowable

Von Glasersfeld's constructivism drew heavily on the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget (1896–1980), the Swiss polymath who spent decades observing children build increasingly sophisticated models of the world through their interactions with it. For Piaget, cognition is not the passive reception of information; it is active construction through cycles of assimilation (fitting new experience into existing schemas) and accommodation (revising schemas when experience refuses to fit).

What is charming, and deeply relevant for our purposes, is that Piaget's framework is essentially mystical in structure. The most significant cognitive development happens not through confirmation but through disruption — through the experience of meeting something that does not fit, that exceeds the current model, that cannot be assimilated without something in you fundamentally changing. This is, as any contemplative practitioner would recognise immediately, precisely the phenomenology of genuine mystical experience.

The infant who discovers that objects persist when hidden — that the world doesn't vanish when mother leaves the room — is experiencing a small but structurally identical version of the contemplative's discovery that consciousness persists beneath and beyond the narrative self.

Piaget called it object permanence. The Zen tradition calls it something rather more dramatic, but the epistemological structure is remarkably similar.

William James and the Pragmatic Case for Taking Mysticism Seriously

No account of Rational Mysticism would be complete without William James (1842–1910), American philosopher, psychologist, and the first person to apply genuinely rigorous intellectual tools to mystical experience without either dismissing it as pathology or uncritically accepting it as revelation.

In his landmark work The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), James identified four key characteristics of mystical states:

• noetic quality (the sense of genuine insight or knowledge),

• transiency (they don't last, which is both a relief and a disappointment),

• passivity (they happen to you rather than being willed), and

• ineffability (language fails them, which is inconvenient for blog posts).

James's philosophical framework, Pragmatism, argued that the meaning of any concept lies in its practical consequences. If a belief works: if it generates insight, reduces suffering, enhances function, expands one's sense of what is possible — then it has a claim on our attention.

The Rational Mystic endorses this wholeheartedly, while adding the important caveat: works for what? A belief can be pragmatically useful for emotional regulation while being epistemically hazardous if mistaken for literal truth. The art is in holding both simultaneously.

The Mentalist's Position (Not the One With the Playing Cards)

Philosophical Mentalism: The Mind-First Universe

Let us be precise about what philosophical Mentalism claims, since it is frequently confused with a variety of less defensible positions. These include the view that the universe is literally a thought in the mind of some cosmic being sitting in a celestial armchair, which is both theologically ambitious and rather unfalsifiable.

Philosophical Mentalism, in its strictest interpretation, claims that mental phenomena are fundamentally primary; that mind, consciousness, experience, or a similar concept is more essential than the material structures we typically consider as the foundational elements of reality.

This differs from idealism because it does not require the assumption of a singular divine mind upholding everything. It aligns with a range of perspectives, from panpsychism (which holds that consciousness is a fundamental attribute of all things, similar to mass) to neutral monism (which suggests that both mind and matter are manifestations of a more fundamental substance that is neither).

The hard problem of consciousness — David Chalmers' formulation of the apparently unbridgeable explanatory gap between physical processes and subjective experience — lends unexpected contemporary support to the Mentalist position.

We can explain, in principle, why neurons fire in particular patterns in response to red light. We cannot explain, in any currently available framework, what it is like to see red. The 'what it is likeness' — qualia, in the technical vocabulary — stubbornly resists reduction to physics.

This is not, as materialists sometimes suggest, merely a gap in current knowledge that will eventually be plugged by better neuroscience. It is, as the philosopher Thomas Nagel argued in his celebrated 1974 paper 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?', a structural feature of the problem.

You could have a complete physical description of bat echolocation — every neural pathway, every sonar calculation, every millisecond of processing — and still have said nothing whatsoever about what it is like to experience it from the inside. This, for the Rational Mystic, is not an embarrassment to be explained away. It is a clue.

"Consciousness is the one thing in this universe whose existence is absolutely certain — and the one thing whose nature we understand least. Draw your own conclusions."

The Constructivist Meets the Contemplative: An Unlikely but Productive Friendship

Here is where things get genuinely interesting and where the Rational Mystic position distinguishes itself from both unreflective scepticism and credulous mysticism.

If Radical Constructivism holds true that our perceptions of reality are constructions rather than mere representations (if what we perceive as 'the world' is a structure validated by cognition using raw sensory input) then the assertion by contemplative traditions of accessing states beyond typical conceptual frameworks is not a rejection of reason but an expansion of it.

Within this context, meditation is not superstition. It is a systematic approach to examining the structure of the constructed world from within.

The phenomenology of advanced contemplative practice maps with striking precision onto the constructivist account of how models work. The initial stages of meditation practice (concentration, relaxation of habitual thought patterns, the quietening of the narrative self) correspond precisely to the suspension of assimilation processes.

The deeper stages (the dissolution of subject-object distinction reported consistently across traditions) correspond to something like a direct encounter with the process of construction itself, prior to the construction. And the insights that emerge: impermanence, interconnection, the contingency of the self — are not mystical fantasies. They are observations about the constructed nature of the model that any serious constructivist would recognise.

Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch made this connection explicit in their remarkable 1991 work The Embodied Mind, which brought Buddhist phenomenology into direct dialogue with cognitive science and enactivism.

Their argument, that cognition is not the processing of information about a pre-given world but the enaction of a world through the living body's engagement with its environment, is Radical Constructivism with a contemplative nervous system.

So What Does a Rational Mystic Actually Believe?

Good question. And I shall answer it with the caveat that any answer is itself a construction and should be held accordingly.

The Rational Mystic holds the following positions — tentatively, provisionally, and with the perpetual willingness to revise in the face of better evidence or more compelling argument:

1. Reality is real enough. We are not solipsists. The constraints that push back on our constructions — the stone that hurts when kicked, the cancer that kills, the grief that overwhelms — are not invented. But our model of what those constraints fundamentally are is precisely that: a model.

2. Consciousness is not reducible to matter. This may mean consciousness is more fundamental than matter, or that both are expressions of something else, or that the categories themselves are insufficiently precise to capture what is actually going on. The honest position is not certainty but carefully maintained uncertainty.

3. Mystical experience is evidence of something. Not necessarily what the mystic reports it to be evidence of — the interpretation is always culturally shaped and conceptually mediated. But the experience itself — the dissolution of ordinary conceptual boundaries, the noetic quality, the profound sense of significance — is real, consistent across cultures and centuries, and deserves serious investigation rather than dismissal.

4. Reason is necessary but not sufficient. The rationalist tradition has given us science, medicine, democracy, and the ability to get from Cornwall to London in a mere four hours if we choose to believe the train schedule. These are not nothing. But reason operates on models, and the models are constructed, and the construction process itself lies beyond the reach of purely conceptual analysis. This is not anti-rational. It is what careful reasoning, followed far enough, reveals.

5. Mystery is not a deficiency. The Rational Mystic's response to the genuinely inexplicable is not to paper it over with premature explanation, nor to retreat into comfortable irrationalism, but to sit with it. The mystery is not a problem to be solved. It is an invitation to a more honest and capacious relationship with what is.

"The fool knows everything. The sage knows nothing. The Rational Mystic knows the difference — and finds it rather funny."

In Conclusion: A Prescription for the Philosophically Bewildered

We live in an age that has largely abandoned the middle ground between two equally inadequate extremes: the hard-nosed materialist who dismisses any experience that cannot be measured as mere sentiment, and the credulous spiritualist who accepts any claim that cannot be measured as profound wisdom. Both positions involve a failure of intellectual courage: one refuses to look at the full range of evidence, and the other refuses to apply the necessary critical scrutiny.

The Rational Mystic occupies the uncomfortable, draught-prone, philosophically honest middle ground — the position that says: here is what reason can do, and here is what it cannot, and the boundary between those two territories is not a cause for despair but for genuine wonder.

George Berkeley said matter is mind. Kant said we can never know what's behind the curtain. Von Glasersfeld said the curtain is something we made ourselves. Piaget said we made it by bumping into things. William James said the bumping sometimes produces transformative states that deserve serious attention. And somewhere, down the ages, in caves and cathedrals and Zen gardens and the occasionally baffling space between a perfectly executed piece of mentalism and an audience that cannot quite explain what just happened, something that might be called the ground of experience has been quietly present throughout.

That is the Rational Mystic's position. Not comfortable, not complete, and certainly not finished. But honest. Rigorously, carefully, stubbornly honest.

And if you find that unsatisfying — if you would prefer a cleaner answer, a neater system, a philosophy you could summarise on a motivational poster — I understand entirely.

But I'm afraid the universe doesn't do motivational posters.

It does, however, do extraordinary.

Further Reading for the Philosophically Reckless

• Berkeley, G. (1710). A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge

• Kant, I. (1781). Critique of Pure Reason

• James, W. (1902). The Varieties of Religious Experience

• von Glasersfeld, E. (1995). Radical Constructivism: A Way of Knowing and Learning

• Varela, F., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind

• Nagel, T. (1974). What Is It Like to Be a Bat? — Philosophical Review, 83(4)

• Chalmers, D. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory

• Piaget, J. (1954). The Construction of Reality in the Child

Alan /|\