#Resource --- status: tags: source: image: time: aliases: directions: Reminder: false focus: --- # Tasks ```tasks path includes {{query.file.path}} not done ``` ```tasks tag includes not done sort by scheduled ``` --- there **are** novels—often strange, metaphysical, or metaphysically mischievous—that resonate with the _spirit_ of Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism: reality as mind-like, the world as symbolic expression, the collapse of subject–object boundaries, and consciousness as primary rather than produced. - [ ] https://youtu.be/ib9jDiHIsC4?si=SiRUwAiBlOdEYXf3 ⏳ 2025-12-02 - [ ] [# Is Idealism Enough? A dialogue between Bernardo Kastrup and Rupert Sheldrake](https://youtu.be/Lr93mW3QmWo?si=7xXlkG7PXDtrGlf2) Here are the most fitting **leftfield, uncanny, metaphysically charged** works whose atmospheres or structures echo Kastrup’s worldview in unexpected ways: --- ## **1. VALIS — Philip K. Dick** Dick’s gnostic, mind-bending narrative of a reality that is _actively communicating_ with the protagonist resembles Kastrup’s view of consciousness expressing itself through symbolic avatars. Reality becomes a thinking process rather than dead matter. --- ## **2. The Hearing Trumpet — Leonora Carrington** A surreal, esoteric, playful rewrite of reality where consciousness leaks, morphs, and infiltrates the physical world. Carrington’s occult feminism aligns with the idea of a deeper, mind-like substratum erupting into the visible. --- ## **3. The Man Who Was Thursday — G. K. Chesterton** Not metaphysics in the analytic sense, but a parable where the boundaries between self, world, agency, and meaning dissolve into a symbolic drama—akin to Kastrup’s notion that the “others” we meet are interfaces of the same mind. --- ## **4. Lanark — Alasdair Gray** A novel of nested realities, dream-logic infrastructure, and consciousness as both the creator and prisoner of its own symbolic landscape. Feels uncannily close to Kastrup’s dissociated alters in a larger mind. --- ## **5. The Invisibles (graphic novel) — Grant Morrison** Radically aligned with idealism: consensual reality as a construct, consciousness as the fundamental substrate, beings existing across layers of mind, and awakening to the mind behind matter. --- ## **6. A Voyage to Arcturus — David Lindsay** A metaphysical quest-novel unlike anything else. Reality is a shifting projection of inner states; bodies, worlds, and others are expressions of a single overarching mind. Very close in _gesture_ to analytic idealism. --- ## **7. The Third Policeman — Flann O’Brien** Existence loops, selfhood disintegrates, time folds, and objects behave as if consciousness infects matter. A comic masterpiece with deeply metaphysical undertones. --- ## **8. Hortensius Prince of Denmark — Stig Dagerman** A lesser-known, almost mystical text where internal states materialise as external worlds, and reality feels like a dream made solid. --- ## **9. The Left Hand of Darkness — Ursula Le Guin** Not idealist explicitly, but deeply concerned with the fluidity of identity and the constructed nature of the categories through which consciousness organises experience. --- ## **10. The Book of the New Sun — Gene Wolfe** Highly symbolic, reality as layered consciousness, perception as world-building, and a metaphysical framework in which “matter” is always a veil behind which mind operates. --- ## **1. VALIS – Philip K. Dick (1981)** Perhaps the closest fictional analogue. Dick’s “Vast Active Living Intelligence System” mirrors Kastrup’s idea of **a unified mind expressing itself through dissociated alters**. The novel wrestles with: - reality as a mental construct, - a cosmic intelligence communicating through symbols, - selfhood as fragmentation within a larger mind. --- ## **2. The Book of the New Sun – Gene Wolfe (4 vols., 1980–83)** Wolfe’s layered, dreamlike world feels like a **shared hallucination** sustained by consciousness. Its metaphysics (resurrection, recursion, universe-as-story) echo Kastrup’s interest in **phenomenal appearance vs. underlying mental reality**. --- ## **3. The Third Policeman – Flann O’Brien (1967)** A deeply strange metaphysical comedy where causality, time, and identity break down. Reality behaves like the dream of a single mind—precisely the sort of thing Kastrup uses to critique material realism. --- ## **4. Ubik – Philip K. Dick (1969)** A world that flickers between ontological states. Characters occupy “half-life,” where mind seems primary and matter derivative. It reads like an argument for **mind-first metaphysics** disguised as a pulp thriller. --- ## **5. Nausea – Jean-Paul Sartre (1938)** Oddly compatible despite the existentialism. The protagonist experiences reality peeling away to reveal **pure appearance**, almost idealist in how perception produces the world moment by moment. --- ## **6. A Void / La Disparition – Georges Perec (1969)** A linguistic-ontological trick: the missing “e” becomes a metaphysical absence. Not idealist per se, but structurally echoes the idea that **worlds can be generated by restrictions within a mind-like system**. --- ## **7. The Wandering Inn (ongoing web serial)** Surprisingly philosophical beneath the fantasy. It uses consciousness, narrative fields, and symbolic mediation in ways resonant with **Kastrup’s dissociation thesis**. --- ## **8. Nightwood – Djuna Barnes (1936)** A dream-state novel where characters feel like **dissociated shards of a shared psyche**, aligning with Kastrup’s idea that individuals are partitions within a single field of mind. --- ## **9. The Raw Shark Texts – Steven Hall (2007)** Reality is shaped by conceptual entities—ideas that behave like predators. A beautiful metaphor for **mental content as the structure of the world**, not an epiphenomenon. --- ## **If you want something more directly idealist** I can assemble a short list of fiction explicitly dealing with: - cosmic consciousness, - panpsychism or idealism, - dream/metaphor ontologies, - dissociated selves, - metaphysical monism. Just say the word, Lord Thomas. Just say the word, Lord Thomas.