The universe is happening. It is not a myth. It is not a fabrication of your mind. There is something outside of your head, and we know this because the material world shaped living creatures to have senses precisely so they could navigate it. There is something to see, which is why we formed eyes. There is something to hear, to taste, to smell, to touch. You are experiencing some portion of it right now, in this moment, whether you are paying attention to that fact or not.
Beyond the external world, there is clearly an internal one. Thought, feeling, perception, the experience of being a self moving through time. And if there is an internal world, there must be an external one, because everything in the universe has an equal and opposite expression. The existence of inner experience implies outer reality. They define each other.
Here is what makes the universe genuinely strange. There are vast dimensions of it we are simply not designed to perceive. Some creatures read heat signatures and see infrared. Others see ultraviolet. We see neither. We do not interpret them, not even slightly, not even as a vague impression. Evolution made this decision on purpose. It is not useful for a creature to process more of reality than it needs to survive. The brain is expensive to run. Every sense requires metabolic investment. Nature gave us exactly the perceptual equipment we needed and nothing more. Which means the slice of reality we call experience is narrow. Extraordinarily narrow. Whatever we think we know about the nature of things, we are working with a very small fraction of the available signal.
What does this mean for you, here, now? It grounds you. Something is happening. There is a feeling of time, which is why human beings developed systems to measure it, because it felt like something from the beginning, because ignoring it would have been dangerous. Sunrise to sunset, season to season, something is moving and we are inside the movement. That is not nothing. That is the basic condition of being alive.
You could go deeper into physics and argue that time is an illusion, a construct, a story the mind tells itself to organize experience into sequence. You could argue that the entire material world is a projection of consciousness, that nothing exists independently of the observer. These are serious philosophical positions with serious thinkers behind them. They may even be true.
But you cannot prove them. And there are straightforward reasons to believe the material world is real.
Here is one. When you die, other people remain. They look at your body. They speak about your life. They continue to navigate a world that looks, by every available account, very much like the one you experienced while you were alive. You could argue that they are simply inheriting the same illusion you were running. Maybe. But that argument proves too much. If the shared experience of countless conscious beings across all of recorded history points consistently toward the same basic reality, calling that reality false because we cannot prove it from the inside is a philosophical move that leads nowhere useful.
The glimpse may be shallow. It is almost certainly incomplete. But a shallow glimpse of something real is still contact with something real. It is not nothing. It is, in fact, everything we have to work with.
Start there.