ow do we know what is “real” in this world? Allegedly, real is something that is not an illusion, fantasy, imaginary, or a feeling or intuition. But this feels heady and spiritually distressing to me. The real I know is based wholly on my perception of those things existing in simpatico. “We must attach ourselves to all,” French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil wrote when discussing what’s really real in this world, “we have to feel the universe through each sensation.” As grounds for knowing, Weil believed that the only way to explore and transgress the boundaries of the real – the
