Bernardo Kastrup

What is mind? The most natural and obvious answer to this ancient question is simply this: mind is the medium of everything you have ever known, seen or felt; everything that has ever meant anything to you. Whatever has never fallen within the embrace of your mind might as well have never existed as far as you are concerned.

Granted that contemporary materialist thought about the nature of reality, as we have seen in Chapter 1, entails that the world is ‘out there’ and that the contents of your mind are a reconstruction – architected and hosted by your brain – of that external reality. But even if that were true, the implication is still that you live your entire life locked within this brain-constructed hallucination. An ‘external reality’ is merely a non-provable abstraction, regardless of how good the theoretical reasons can be to believe in it. Therefore, even if it were true that reality is some external realm of abstract energy fields, and even if it were true that your mind is merely a product of brain activity, your mind would still be the sole carrier of reality you can know. All materialist ideas about nature and reality are products of mind and exist solely within mind.

It is impossible to know anything outside mind, for anything that is touched by the act of knowing is inevitably and instantaneously ‘dragged into’ the sphere of mind.