Beyond Materialism and Spiritualism: Realism through the Lens Of Awareness Quotient
Sid Sharma, Independent Scholar | ORCID: 0009-0005-7875-929X
Keywords: Awareness Quotient, AQ, IQ, EQ, AI, spiritualism, materialism, realism, consciousness, human potential, neuroscience, psychometrics
Abstract:
Human civilization has oscillated between two philosophical extremes for centuries. Materialism reduces reality to matter and energy, dismissing or diminishing consciousness as epiphenomenal. Spiritualism elevates consciousness while treating the material world as an illusion or an obstacle. Each position corrects the other's most visible excess while generating its own characteristic pathologies. The oscillation itself (not either pole) is the problem.
This paper argues that Realism, understood as complementary realism, provides the genuinely third position that neither compromise nor synthesis between the two extremes can offer. Drawing on the foundational insight that reality manifests as two irreducible and complementary principles (consciousness and energy, neither primary nor illusory) the paper demonstrates that this understanding resolves the three most persistently misunderstood concepts in human development (ego, duality, and freedom) and reorganizes five domains of civilizational concern (economics, healthcare, the environment, technology, and governance) in ways that neither materialism nor spiritualism can produce.
The Holographic Universe metaphor, grounded in both the ancient Vedic Purnamadah Purnamidam mantra and David Bohm's physics of the implicate order (Bohm, 1980; Talbot, 1991), provides the governing image: each part contains the whole, the whole is expressed in every part, and neither part nor whole is more real than the other. This is not oneness; it is the inexhaustible complementarity of the manifest and the unmanifest, the individual and the universal, consciousness and matter.
The Awareness Quotient framework, established in the foundational paper (Sharma, 2026) and demonstrated in practice in the companion paper (Sharma, 2026), is the practical expression of this philosophical position. AQ measures what materialism cannot account for and what spiritualism cannot ground: the development of consciousness within an embodied, relational, ecological life. Realism is the philosophical home AQ has always implied. This paper makes that home explicit.
Sharma, S. (2026). Beyond Materialism and Spiritualism: Realism through the Lens Of Awareness Quotient. https://writersid.com/realism-through-the-lens-of-awareness-quotient