> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.withrealityinmind.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # What the shadows reveal.. - URL: https://www.withrealityinmind.com/shadows-reveal/ - Published: 2026-03-13T13:19:43.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-20T14:48:49.000Z - Description: On Blackholes, Jung & karma - Author: Amir Giles - Tags: recording Recording details Date: 12 March 2026 Duration: 2h 13m Free preview Chapters 0:00:00 What can the shadows of reality reveal? 0:05:21 Dissociation is something mind at large does 0:10:05 Why doesn’t metacognition simply appear? 0:25:00 Why parsimony matters 0:30:08 Evolution: **a shadow that tells us something real** 0:40:20 Does evolution make sense outside time? 0:45:13 Must every statement be true or false? 0:50:45 Is logic something we discover in nature? 1:00:10 Could a **black hole** be a world unto itself? 1:05:05 Body and mind: one process, two perspectives 1:15:32 **Karma without cosmic justice?** 1:20:07 Is physical reality sealed off from the daemonic? 1:35:15 What our perceptual filters leave out 1:40:30 **Philosophy as an operating system for life** 1:50:06 Gravity and the power of convenient fictions 1:55:04 Why behaviour and being need different questions 2:05:03 **Jung’s apparent contradictions**: walking around the truth 2:10:16 **The Seven Sermons**: before Jung had the concepts In this 'Ask Me Anything' session hosted by Nour, Bernardo was at his most wide-ranging and candid. From the genesis of alters, to the metacognition of nature, from the validity of **evolution** to the axioms of Aristotelian **logic**, the conversation ranged from **black holes** to **karma**, and the apparent contradictions in **Jung's *Seven Sermons to the Dead*.** ### Evolution as shadow Rebecca's question tackled a tension many members feel: if space-time is merely a cognitive filter, why take evolution so seriously? Bernardo offered one of his most fundamental insights. Whilst **spacetime is not fundamental, it reveals something that is.** If you illuminate a bottle from above, the shadow on the floor is a circle. The circle doesn't represent the full picture. But it *does* tell you something true: that there is a three-dimensional object whose cross-section, at that angle, is circular. > "The events in time are not the real thing, just like the shadow of the bottle is not the real thing, but they **betray the presence of something that is real**, and which, when projected onto the extension of space and time, appears to us as events." Evolution, then, is valid within the world of shadows. To dismiss it because spacetime isn't fundamental is like refusing to look at the circle because it isn't the bottle. **We live in the world of shadows, but taken seriously they reveal something real.** ### **Karma Reflects Nature's Tendency to Learning** As for karma: Bernardo offers a naturalistic reading — not karma as cosmic justice, but as **a teleological gradient in nature that tends to favour learning**. If you mistreat others, it may reflect a lack of empathy for their perspective; a nature oriented toward maximising understanding might then place you in that perspective. It can look like justice — but it may have nothing to do with it. Does the daemonic chaos of mind at large disrupt our shared dashboard of physical reality? **Yes,** **all the time** — in the form of anxiety, depression, impulses we can't explain. Our perceptual systems evolved over four billion years to filter out precisely that which is unpredictable and therefore useless for survival. The daemonic doesn't appear on the dashboard not because it's absent, but because we never evolved the sensors to amplify it. ### Black holes as self-bounded mental processes Reuben asked whether, under analytic idealism, a black hole might be understood as a self-limiting mental process whose boundary arises from its own internal consistency rather than external constraint. Bernardo found the framing compelling. He discussed serious speculation in cosmology that **every black hole may be a universe unto itself** — and the related possibility, now slightly dented by recent data on galactic angular momentum, that we ourselves are inside a black hole. He expressed regret that the evidence for this view has weakened, calling the combination of black-hole cosmology and the holographic principle "a very elegant idea." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c5/20/c520bbe6-927b-460d-bf38-d4f48d5dc338/content/images/2026/03/BH_Accretion_Disk_Sim_360_Continuous.gif) NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons ### "I'm completely daemonic in this regard" Anna's question about Bernardo's study methods and extraordinary recall drew a characteristically self-deprecating answer. He has no system, no mnemonics, no planning. He dog-ears pages and writes in margins. His explanation: **philosophy was never an academic exercise for him — it was a search for an operating system for his life.** When physicalism collapsed under scrutiny, he felt in freefall. Everything he has written, he first had to convince himself of. And you can't cheat yourself. > "I am the first customer of everything I have ever written. By the time I sit to write, I've already gone through the entire exercise — not because I'm disciplined, but because I can't deceive myself." ### "There is not one serious defender of materialism today" Ron brought up the reaction his sharing of Bernardo's now-circulating clip had provoked — the accusation that "no serious materialists" is a No True Scotsman fallacy. Bernardo stood behind the statement while accepting the critique of its rhetorical framing. His definition of 'serious' is specific: someone who, in a private conversation with no audience and no career at stake, would say without reservation that physicalism is ontologically true. **He hasn't encountered one in about ten years.** The broader exchange led into a sharp distinction between science (which models *behaviour*, not *being*) and metaphysics (which asks what *is*). Both Newtonian gravity and Einsteinian spacetime are, in Bernardo's framing, convenient fictions — instrumentally useful, not ontologically definitive. Any scientist who believes otherwise, he suggested, "does not understand what science is." ### Jung's circumambulation; non-linear approach to truth ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c5/20/c520bbe6-927b-460d-bf38-d4f48d5dc338/content/images/2026/03/image-1.png) The session closed with a first-time attendee, Nikola, raising apparent contradictions in Jung's *Seven Sermons to the Dead* — between the monstrous, indifferent Abraxas and the inner divine creator that earths itself within man. Bernardo's response centred on **circumambulation** — Jung's deliberate method of walking around an idea from multiple perspectives, rather than exposing it linearly. What looks like contradiction from one angle is simply a different face of the same thing seen from another. He also contextualised the *Seven Sermons* within Jung's years of crisis and breakdown following his rupture with Freud — a period of psychotic openness to the collective unconscious, before he had the conceptual tools to understand what was erupting in him. Everything Jung wrote from 1922 until his death in 1961, Bernardo suggested, was an elaboration of what came to him in that dark period. ### We also discussed - The difference kinds of **logic** and where they break down - Why Analytic Idealism does not accept the valid intuition that **metacognition** is fundamental - How Mind at Large actively gestates our emerging individuality *The next session will be on maths and archetypes — a fitting continuation of themes that surfaced today.* I look forward to watching the always inspiring conversation! With appreciation, Amir Speakers ![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c5/20/c520bbe6-927b-460d-bf38-d4f48d5dc338/content/images/2026/09/Bernardo-Kastrup-profile.jpg) Bernardo Kastrup Analytic idealism Bernardo Kastrup is the Executive Director of Essentia Foundation and Founder/CEO at AI systems company Euclyd BV. His work has set off the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy (ontology, philosophy of mind) and another in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence). As a scientist, he has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories (where the ‘Casimir Effect’ of Quantum Field Theory was discovered). He has also been creatively active in the high-tech industry for almost 30 years, having founded parallel processor company Silicon Hive (acquired by Intel in 2011) and worked as a technology strategist for the geopolitically significant company ASML. Most recently, he has founded AI company Euclyd BV. Formulated in detail in many academic papers and books, his ideas have been featured in *Scientific American*, the magazine of *The Institute of Art and Ideas*, the *Blog of the American Philosophical Association* and *Big Think*, among others. His most defining book is *Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A straightforward summary of the 21st-century’s only plausible metaphysics.* [Explore Bernardo’s work →](https://www.bernardokastrup.com/?ref=withrealityinmind.com)