Ponderables ...

Materialism actually lives by virtue of a hidden contradiction. For it is entirely impossible for a materialist, as a materialist philosopher, to account for his own being if he continues to hold fast to the conception that there is only one type of being - namely, the being of a thing. The contradiction consists in this that the materialist, on the one hand, admits that tables and chairs, geological layers, and rain showers are incapable of creating a philosophy while, on the other, as a materialistic philosopher, he wants to explain his own being by means of the same categories through which he expresses the being of chairs and tables, geological layers and rain showers.

- William A. Luijpen, Existential Phenomenology

We have become accustomed to considering the nature of reality solely in terms of what is "out there." But the relation between what is actually "out there" and what we perceive to be "out there" is tenuous at best. For example, the frequency of a sound-stimulus that strikes the cochlea and the electrical response this causes to take place in the auditory cortex are entirely dissimilar. Strictly speaking, the so-called "objective" world, the world of things-in-themselves, is unknown to us. So perhaps the sounder approach to the nature of reality is by way of the only portal open to us: our own consciousness. And consciousness involves more than responses to external stimuli. The myths that rise from its depths are every bit as real as the bricks and mortar, clouds and tempests we encounter "out there."