What is Ultimate Reality?

Mind, Matter and Everything in Between

What is fundamental reality, and what is our relationship to the fundamental? Are we fundamental, or just a secondary reality? Are we fundamentally distinct, or just suffer an illusion of separateness? This discussion explores different notions of ultimate or fundamental reality (or objections to the idea of fundamentals), including physicalism, idealism, panentheism, pragmatism, relationalism, process ontology, and a new theory of triunalism.

Triune Ontology

The trinity is traditionally understood as three entities that are at the same time one being. The triunal is explained a little differently, in that, 2 things are related in such a way that they become a new, third thing that is neither a singular thing nor 2 separate things (their relatedness can also be seen as a third entity).

A subject cannot exist without an object; the self cannot exist without the other. But the self and other are bound together; together they become a third thing. The triune is not one, but not two either. It is neither oneness nor separateness. It is connection; relationship. And this binding together of the self and other, is also the third entity, their relationship.

Consciousness includes both self-consciousness and other-consciousness. The self contains and is contained by the other, in that what is self to the other is other to the self. The other becomes the object for the subject of the self. The other then gives rise to the potentiality field out of which objective reality emerges.

The other is also what causes the self to come into being. A monad cannot replicate itself (perhaps it can only dissociate), only a triune can procreate. And procreation is itself a triune process: creating a new reality that is not a secondary reality, but as fundamental as the first. In becoming a self, we as well retroactively give rise to the other — in this way the creation becomes the creator.

If ultimate reality begins with selves asleep in the fullness of their potential, we emerge from other-consciousness to become a self (but yet not to forget that we are also other), lured on by the teleological aim to create a home for being.