AtmanIsBrahman

To take the analogy literally, your hand can grasp a part of itself, just not the whole thing. Based on that, we can grasp a part of reality but not the whole thing.

I struggle to understand why Leo, along with many other spiritual and philosophical schools of thought, think that reality is essentially mental, or non-physical. The materialist view is that the universe is made of physical stuff and that our consciousness results from a specific arrangement of matter. This runs into the issue, how do subjective experiences come about from matter that doesn't have subjective experience? This doesn't make sense intuitively. So it might seem like considering consciousness the most fundamental thing solves that issue. But since most things in the universe are not conscious, at least as far as we can tell, this seems like projection because we are giving the entire universe our human attribute of consciousness. Why is consciousness really fundamental and not just a projection? P.S. I ask this genuinely wanting to learn, not just to criticize

I know that it's an assumption, but I don't see why it's wrong. Isn't it also an assumption that a rock can only exist inside consciousness? Or is this just a better assumption? I'm willing to accept that all we can know for sure is our own consciousness, but why does this mean that everything "out there" only exists when perceived by consciousness? I feel like this is making the mistake of saying, "because I can't know things about physical objects outside of my consciousness, they must not really exist and I must just be imagining them". There's a difference between the epistemological status of things and their actual metaphysical being.