What Is Real? On Dissociation, Doubt, and the Soul’s Quiet Return

I’ve grown cynical with age.

Or maybe just more honest.

“I get so cold / I don’t know if I belong here anymore”

— Charli XCX, I Might Say Something Stupid (2024)

Maybe I’m only now admitting what I always felt:

That anything can be diced into pieces—

dissected, scrutinised, drained of meaning—

until it resembles something like a meat factory.

Cold. Efficient. Stripped of life.

“It looked adequate from far away, but up close the whole thing was fake—and terribly lonely.”

— Lisa Millar, The Awakened Brain

That everything, in the end,

gets fed to the grinder anyway.

“One day wilt thou see no longer thy loftiness, and see too closely thy lowliness; thy sublimity itself will frighten thee as a phantom. Thou wilt one day cry: ‘All is false!’”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Fluorescent lights.

Burgers flipping.

Dark winter days in cities too big for souls.

None of it feels real.

“Convenience, in other words, makes things easy, but without regard to whether easiness is truly what’s most valuable in any given context.”

— Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

Maybe it’s dissociation.

Maybe it’s just waking up.

Not that I think we’re in a simulation—

but if we were, would I know?

Sometimes God feels elusive.

Other days, I don’t even care.

“Why, O Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?”

— Psalm 10:1

The Ache Beneath the Image

Am I real?

Yes.

And no.

I’ve had moments—memories—

that hit so deep they leave me shaking.

That’s real. 

(See my post “Learning to Shudder”)

I’ve walked through worlds built by ego—

content for profit, religion for status, perfection for validation—

and they’ve left me feeling two-dimensional.

Empty.

Lonely.

“And anyone who tells you they know the way out? Well, they’re likely the most lost of all.”

— DJ Kadagian

It’s everywhere.

In families, in institutions, in sacred spaces that lost their scent.

And yet to tear it down feels like a tragedy.

They know not what they do.

But still I wonder: was it ever real?

 

Beyond Logic: The Felt Sense of Truth

Realness isn’t a thing.

It’s not material.

It’s not even logical.

It’s a quality. A weight. A resonance.

You don’t detect it through intellect.

You feel it—like a tuning fork vibrating in your chest.

“Surely you desire truth in the inward parts; you teach me wisdom in the inmost place.”

— Psalm 51:6

Rationality will fail you here.

You can dissect a thing until you forget what it ever meant.

And even then, you’re left with nothing but an echo in your skull.

The mind, turning in on itself,

creates infinity mirrors that never resolve.

A maze of self-reflecting thought.

No exit.

“You are never the same once you have acquired the knowledge that there is no self that will not crumble.”

— Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon

So what’s left?

Your senses.

Your breath.

Your body.

Your ache.

Start there.

 

Shared Questions, Private Truths

Reality isn’t objective in the way we wish it were.

It’s shared, but only ever partially.

“Your consciousness is actually experiencing your mental model of reality, not reality itself.”

— Michael A. Singer, The Untethered Soul

So we reach across to others and ask:

“Do you see what I see?”

Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t.

But even asking feels more real than pretending.

Science helps us navigate the outer world.

But it cannot define the inner one.

“Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them.

And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

For even our interpretation of science

flows through the filter of self.

And the self?

It wants to feel real—not in theory, but in lived truth.

So what is real?

Maybe this:

The sound of your breath right now.

The tightness in your chest.

The memory that makes your hands tremble.

The ache you haven’t named yet.

The still voice that whispers, “This matters.”

That’s where I begin again.

Not with certainty.

But with honesty.

 

Honesty is the gateway to reality.

If nothing feels real, perhaps it’s not that life is fake—

—but that we’ve been taught to ignore ourselves.

Maybe we don’t experience “life” at all.

Maybe we only ever experience ourselves in contact with it.

The ego wants efficiency, survival, familiarity.

It edits your experience for speed, not truth.

But truth doesn’t live in the edits.

It lives in the margins.

In the quiet.

In the pain.

To feel real, you don’t need more knowledge.

You need more presence.

More noticing.

“When there is no way out, there is still always a way through. So don’t turn away from the pain. Face it. Feel it fully. Feel it — don’t think about it!”

— Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

More witnessing of your own soul.

To feel real is not to see the face of God,

but to know that something inside you is still awake.

To be real is to find your congruence. For a closer look at this idea, read my article here.

You’re not a concept.

You’re not a function.

You’re not a product.

You are a being.

A self-evident, flickering, feeling thing.

“I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you… I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”

— Ezekiel 36:26

And that—whatever it is—

is as real as it gets.