What if our suffering wasn’t meaningless? What if every ounce of pain, injustice, or despair wasn’t just something to bear, but something through which the universe learns what it is doing to itself?

This isn’t a metaphor. It’s the heart of a deep philosophical vision put forward by Bernardo Kastrup—computer scientist, philosopher, former CERN researcher, and leading advocate for analytic idealism. In a recent, wide-ranging conversation, Kastrup dove into his understanding of life, consciousness, the metaphysical frameworks of Carl Jung and Arthur Schopenhauer, and ultimately, what it all might mean.

At the core of analytic idealism is a provocative idea: the world isn’t fundamentally made of matter, but of mind. Reality, in this view, is mental—not in the sense of being in your mind or mine, but as an external world comprised of thoughts, ideas, and experiences. Just as your thoughts are mental but not mine, the world is a shared field of mentality—objective, stable, yet fundamentally experiential.

From that premise, Kastrup lays out a transformative rethinking of human existence. Instead of seeing ourselves as isolated biological machines navigating a cold universe, he proposes we are dissociated alters—isolated pockets of consciousness—within a vast, mental field. Our brains, rather than generating consciousness, are what the process of dissociation looks like when represented in our cognitive dashboard. This, he says, is the foundation of Jung’s metaphysics too: that we are immersed in a universal mind—the collective unconscious—and our egoic, waking selves are merely its surface ripple.

The implications of this are staggering, especially when applied to suffering. Why do we endure such hardship? For Kastrup, echoing Jung’s Answer to Job, it is through suffering that the universal mind gains metacognition—awareness of itself. Without our personal experiences, particularly the painful ones, God (or nature, or the universe) does not know what it is doing to itself.

“You are the sacrificial life,” Kastrup says. “It is through your eyes that nature looks back at itself and evolves.” This isn’t to romanticize pain or justify injustice—he’s quick to say that morality demands we resist cruelty and protect one another. But if the pain is already happening, the way we internally frame it can change everything.

We add a second layer to our suffering, he explains, by telling ourselves the wrong story. “This shouldn’t be happening to me,” we say. “I’ve failed,” or “Why me?” But if you understand your experience as nature becoming self-aware—if you see yourself as a witness, even a spy for the divine—your suffering retains dignity and becomes bearable. We stop piling “meta-suffering” on top of life’s natural hardships.

This philosophy aligns deeply with Schopenhauer, whom Kastrup also defends and decodes in his writing. Often misunderstood as a bleak pessimist, Schopenhauer simply observed the brutal truths of the world and refused to sugarcoat them. But he didn’t stop there. Schopenhauer also found meaning through the surrender of the ego and personal will to the universal will. Life becomes lighter, he said, when we stop demanding things be other than they are, when we allow the world to wash over us and loosen our grip on control.

Both Jung and Schopenhauer saw the path to salvation not as personal achievement, but as inner transformation. We are not here to “win” life but to witness it, to attend to it, and—perhaps most importantly—to pay attention.

For Kastrup, that’s his primary spiritual practice: paying attention to life. Not in a mystical sense, but literally—to what is happening, to what one is feeling, to what the moment contains. He rejects the need for complexity in spiritual practices. “Just pay attention,” he repeats. “That’s it.”

The discussion spans deep philosophical ground—psychedelics, dreams, synchronicity, the collective unconscious, and metaphysical structure of reality itself—but keeps returning to something profoundly human: the need for meaning.

Meaning is not found in material success or intellectual mastery. In fact, our culture’s obsession with materialism—economic or metaphysical—is part of what’s crumbling, Kastrup believes. He sees signs everywhere that materialism, both as a worldview and as a consumerist culture, is collapsing under its own weight. Why? Because it doesn’t deliver. We chase wealth, fame, and status believing they’ll fulfill us, only to discover the promises were empty.

“What keeps people chasing things is not achieving them,” he says. “It’s when you do achieve them that you realize they were never the answer.” The real fulfillment comes when we stop trying to “win” life and begin to see our lives as embedded in a much vaster process—one that includes suffering, joy, failure, and beauty, all as part of a single unfolding field of experience.

In Kastrup’s latest work, including his forthcoming book The Daemon and the Western Mind, he’s shifting his focus from explaining idealism to living it. What happens once we’ve accepted that reality is mental and consciousness is fundamental? What does that mean for how we live? He wants to explore how our lives, our relationships, and our culture might evolve under this new paradigm.

There’s an honesty to Kastrup’s philosophy that resonates in a world saturated with shallow answers. He’s not selling easy hope. But he’s also not selling despair. He’s offering something rarer: a metaphysics that dignifies experience—especially suffering—by placing it in a meaningful cosmic context.

We may be small, but we are not insignificant. Through our eyes, nature becomes aware. Through our pain, the universe learns empathy. Through our lives, God wakes up.

And maybe that’s enough.

Credits:
Based on a conversation with Bernardo Kastrup, philosopher and author of Decoding Jung’s Metaphysics, Decoding Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics, and Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell. Interview by Ryan Bush.