Escape From Reality

February 14, 2026

In Plotinus, and many of the ancient philosophers I’ve read, the planets (and other heavenly bodies) are not made of the same stuff as things down here. Aristotle considered everything outside of Earth to be made of aether, an element opposed to earth, water, fire, etc, in that it is neither hot, cold, wet, or dry. This was his way of saying he doesn’t know what’s going on up there. Plotinus is more concerned with the placement of the heavenly bodies on a sort of hierarchy of beings, where there are worldly beings that come and go, and then eternal beings that stay around forever. The human soul is an example of the latter, and to his mind planets have their own souls which determine their movement. The planets’ souls are better than our souls because they are closer to the One, as evidenced by the fact that their movement is so regular. They are not thrown about by contingency and accident, but instead follow their perfect course in perpetuity.

Our understanding of the solar system is a lot different now. The current understanding is that the movement of the planets is, in fact, contingent: an accident of mass and gravity that will one day fall to pieces, just as it formed from pieces so many millions or billions of years ago. We can’t transfer what Plotinus said about planets to stars and galaxies, because we know that they operate in a roughly analogous fashion according to the universal laws of physics. Plotinus was simply wrong about planets. Therefore, Plotinus’ cosmology is dead.

It’s still interesting to look at dead cosmologies, but only in a historical sense. Ancient theories about animals are the same way. We have a much better idea now about how animals are formed, how their bodies work, and what they do with their lives. While some animals still contain very specific mysteries, the broad strokes of evolution provide a decent explanation of the nature of animals as a whole — why there are so many different ones, how they come to adapt to their environment, and how they all relate to each other. The theory of evolution is a wonderful little tool, and unlocks many fun mysteries to solve, but all these mysteries are contained within a relatively non-mysterious system.

And so sometimes I wonder what I have left to wonder about. Back in ancient times, there wasn’t the technology (both cultural and material) to gain such understandings about planets and animals. Thus, observation wasn’t considered as important as speculation. Not only were there not the precise measurement tools that we have now, but there wasn’t a broad social support system built around scientific research. Nowadays, you can dissect a pig at a university and no one bats an eye, but imagine being the only guy in your entire city who wants to dissect a pig. You probably wouldn’t end up doing it.

Science is great for knowing things, but idle speculation is more fun. A lot of us don’t want to perform scientific experiments or read research papers. We don’t want to open Wikipedia every time we come up with a question. Sometimes, I just want to answer it myself, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s right or wrong as long as it sounds right. I wouldn’t call this anti-intellectual or pseudo-intellectual. I don’t know what I would call it. It’s like a little training game for your mind. If you have a wrong idea, at least you have an idea. If you read the answer on Wikipedia, you don’t have an idea at all; a fact is inserted into your mind, and if you don’t use it, don’t play around with it a little bit, it’ll disappear before you know it. Our reason is a tool for playing around, throwing concepts together, making connections, and forming something new. Placing these new formations under the constraints of factuality is a great way to lose one’s power of reason altogether.

I know more factual information about outer space than Plotinus ever did. I know why the planets move in the way they do, what they’re made of, what they look like on their surface, and, to a certain extent, how they were formed. But I know outer space as a large, dead thing. To Plotinus, outer space was “alive,” and it had significance. Outer space was embedded in his intellect, integrated into his philosophy, and subject to his reason. I can’t claim any such thing. To me, constellations are just pretty pictures in the sky, and the planets are old rocks. They don’t have a soul. They’re not closer to the One. They’re not really that important in any way.

I’m not one of those who loses themselves in feelings of insignificance when they look out at the night sky. I feel just as big as I always am. I’m always the exact same size! This is because I don’t consider magnitude or quantity particularly important. As far as I’m concerned, we’re all really big, because we contain things that cannot be defined by mass and matter.

There are two worlds. There is the world that is all the stuff around us, and then there is another world that is not all that stuff at all. I don’t know what exactly this second world is, and in fact it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t need to have qualities or characteristics, and it doesn’t need to contain anything in particular. The only significance of this other world is that it exists, and that it is not the first world. For clarity, let’s call the world that is all the stuff around us the Worldly World, and the other world that is not that stuff the Other Realm. Where is this Other Realm? Well, it’s not anywhere. What is it made of? It’s not made of anything. How can we say it exists at all? Well, maybe it doesn’t — but it does, because it has to.

The core of this belief is a refusal. I refuse to believe that the Worldly World is everything and contains everything. It’s as simple as that. And the reason for this is that if there is only one world, the Worldly World, then we are trapped. We can only view things from inside. Imagine trying to figure out what the exterior of your house looks like, but you can’t go outside. That’s the situation we’re in. What would you do in that situation? Well, eventually you’d start imagining what the exterior of your house looks like. You’d look out the window at the other houses, and figure your house looks similar. You’d consider the exterior walls of your house, and determine the rough shape. Obviously, the windows on the outside would be in the same place as the windows on the inside. Same with your doors. In this fashion, you develop a rough idea of the outside of your house.

What is this idea? It’s not real, because it’s not part of the world you’re trapped in. You can’t prove its factuality, because you can’t go outside. But it’s certainly something. It’s not nothing. The Other Realm is where all these Somethings are. I don’t want to call to the Realm of Ideas, because we’re talking about something very different from Plato’s ideas here. Plato’s ideas were ideals: the concepts we use to categorize entities. The Other Realm does not aspire to such heights; it contains all sorts of ideas, right or wrong, big or small. There are as many as there are people having ideas.

It’s clear that we all — even the most literal-minded of us — have access to this Other Realm. The question is, how much of your life are you willing to spend in it? And further, how much credence are you willing to give the things you find there? The answer to these questions depends, in part, on your definition of reality.

What is real? Any time we attempt to define this, we get caught up in contradictions and paradoxes. Kant and Schopenhauer both reached a point where they realized they had to struggle with the difference between the phenomena of dreams and the phenomena of waking life. Kant, as was his wont, came up with some crafty device; but Schopenhauer, after weighing the evidence, decided that “if we assume a standpoint of judgment external to both, we find no distinct difference in their nature, and are forced to concede to the poets that life is a long dream.” This may seem like philosophical hocus-pocus, but does it not reflect a much simpler and more intuitive view than our common reality-unreality framework?

The truth of the matter is that I’m not looking to construct a philosophically rigorous system. All I’m trying to explain is that sometimes we’re here, and sometimes we’re there, and no matter where we are, we’re experiencing something real.

Art is a connection to other people’s Other Realms. Maybe we each have our own Other Realm, but it sure feels like our Other Realms are all connected in some way, doesn’t it? Not quite as rigidly as something like a “collective unconscious,” but like we each have our own room with thousands of little doorways. The doorways in the Other Realm are wonderful things, because they don’t need to be connected in space or time. One of my doors leads directly to Proust’s bedroom, where he leans on his elbow and scribbles his scribbles. He’s right there! We’re next-door neighbours!

So when I read a book or watch a movie or stare at a painting, I’m in a different place. I’m not Here at all. I’ve used the word “escape” in the past, but I’m starting to like it less and less. It’s like calling one’s own house an escape from the outside world. That’s not an escape; that’s where you live. It’s just a different room.

The general idea when we talk about art as “escapism” is that the Worldly World is this depressing and terrible place, leading us to lose ourselves in art in order to forget about it. Usually, escapism is depicted as a form of weakness: an inability to cope with Real Life. In this sense, the escape is a fiction; since the Worldly World is Real Life (i.e. “everything”), there is in fact no escape from it, only a futile delusion that calls itself escape.

The Worldly World isn’t necessarily bad, although it contains a lot of bad things. It’s not so altogether depressing that we need to create a fantastical world full of joy and happiness. The only problem with the Worldly World is that it’s just not enough. It’s missing something. There’s joy and happiness to be found in both places; there’s sorrow and misery to be found in both places, but they’re of distinctly different kinds, and the happiness of one world is but one part of true happiness. It is only by careful exploration of both realms that we can discover the fullness of whatever we wish to call Everything — the “universe,” the “world,” “life,” etc.

This Worldly World has its good points, but I hesitate to call it reality. I struggle to determine whether those lifeless rocks we call planets are more real than Plotinus’ eternal, ensouled heavenly bodies. I feel like they’re both real. The Ancient World I read about in books and the modern world I live in; they’re both real. They’re both here. I can place them side by side just as easily as I can see my glass of water beside my keyboard.

This Other Realm, containing all of our memories, all of our dreams, all of our memories of dreams and dreams of memories, all that we have imagined and will imagine, all that others have imagined for us, all the dead and living cosmologies and philosophies along with their myths and allegories and parables, everyone who is gone and all the pieces of those still here that have been left behind — are we to say that this is not real? Are we to say that this is not reality? Let’s cast that word aside — it’s such an ugly one. Too often has it been the enemy of wonder, the enemy of dreams, and to be frank, my own personal enemy. Let’s forget all that.