What is the nature of existence? Surprisingly, the answer is knowable. In fact, it’s so well known they call it the perennial philosophy. It’s the idea that, at the core of our being, we are all one.

This may sound like religious wishful thinking, but it is also scientifically well supported, philosophically sound, and personally verifiable. We are here by some means, and this is it.

The answers to the big questions are knowable, not by our intellect, but because the source of the world happens to be what we are; consciousness. Waking up to this in a physical body is the goal of evolution, and humans have evolved just enough to achieve this.

The world is the wheel of God, turning round and round with all living creatures upon its rim. -Shvetashvatara Upanishad

Religions often symbolize our condition with a circle or a tree; a many-to-one relationship representing our true nature. The perennial philosophy is just pointing out that there are many paths leading to this realization. Even preeminent scientists can agree …though usually in private.

A human being is a spatially and temporally
limited piece of the whole…an optical
illusion of his consciousness. The striving
to free oneself from this delusion is the
one issue of true religion. –Albert Einstein

Why are we here?
Where do we come from?
Where are we going?

Answer:

There is an infinite, changeless reality
beneath the world of change.
This same reality lies at the core of
every human personality. The purpose
of life is to discover this reality
experientially—that is, to realize
God while here on earth.
-Eknath Easwaran

HOW IS IT WE ARE HERE? A case for the Perennial Philosophy.

Our human senses and cognitive abilities are limited, but we can still be certain there is something rather than nothing. For there to be anything, something outside this causality must have caused all this, since nothing ever comes from nothing (note that empty space is not nothing).

With the discovery of the Big Bang, science agreed there was a causal starting point. The universe was created, somehow. But then, quantum mechanics came along, and the physical determinism of the Big Bang was replaced the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics. Now the relevant question is: What’s keeping the lights on today? What is sustaining the quantum fields that generate the appearance of this physically deterministic universe. It’s not as though science knows what quantum fields are, or what causes them.

What is it that breathes fire into the
equations and makes a universe for
them to describe…Why does the universe
go to all the bother of existing?
–Stephen Hawking

So, we can say with great certainty that something outside of time and space must be the cause of this spacetime.

Time, nature, necessity, accident,
elements, energy, intelligence—none
of these can be the First Cause.
They are effects…
-Shvetashvatara Upanishad

But there still may be a big bias in our way. Western science works with quantitative data only, and ignores qualitative experience. Because of this, we’ve come to believe the data is more real than the experience. We have forgotten that all experiences only ever happen in consciousness. This misunderstanding is what leads to the Hard Problem of Consciousness.

In reality, the only thing we can be absolutely certain about is our own consciousness. That is to say, information from our mind and sensory perception is less reliable than the certainty of our own conscious awareness. We see the world through limited human senses, and our perception of it is less than perfect, but we can always be absolutely certain that we are witnessing it.

I am, I exist, is necessarily true
each time that I pronounce it,
or that I mentally conceive it.
–René Descartes | Meditation II

If we adjust the wording a little, we can now be absolutely certain about our conclusion:

Something outside of time and space must be the cause of this conscious experience.

This is essentially the Cosmological Argument, which was the worldview of Western science, from Aristotle (350 BC) to the 1700’s—when materialism became popular, replacing the ancient Parmenidean monism and Plato’s forms with matter itself being most fundamental.

But now, modern science is pointing back toward the perennial philosophy; the idea that consciousness is fundamental. Quantum mechanics tells us the universe only exists in experience, and otherwise resides as wave functions. So why all the resistance? With such a parsimonious explanation of the universe, the most skeptical of scientists should be all for it.

But, be advised. These concepts can be helpful, but they are just prep for direct experience.

Of course, if you still think consciousness is a random anomaly of matter left over from the Big Bang, then this conclusion would not satisfy you.

SO, WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS? It’s what we are.

How does something as immaterial as consciousness arise from something as unconscious as matter? -David Chalmers

Consciousness is fundamentally different from everything else. It’s not just different from mass, energy, space, and time, it’s also different from thoughts, feelings, intuitions, and memories. Those are things that happen in consciousness. Without consciousness what good are thoughts? In the West we conflate consciousness with thinking because we misinterpret Descartes. He didn’t really say, I think, therefore I am. He said, thinking is happening, therefore I must be an entity that thinks.

Our mental abilities are clearly a function of our human brain, but our conscious awareness, inherent to all lifeforms, is still a complete mystery to science. And that is what we really are. What are we when we’re unconscious? Our mind and body are earthly accumulations, but we are the conscious witness which has accumulated it. When we meditate—look back toward consciousness—we find it’s behind everything.

It takes some understanding to distinguish
between awareness and conceptualization.
It is said that the scope of
conceptualization is very limited,
whereas awareness pervades all that exists.
-Gen Lamrimpa

We can’t assume the brain causes it because we see conscious behavior in organisms that that don’t have a brain. Also, science can’t explain how life started on earth, but they do know it started as soon as conditions became available. So, given that everything is caused by something, and that consciousness is so distinctly different from everything, isn’t it possible that it has its own unique cause? Why isn’t that still a reasonable consideration?

I think that modern physics has definitely
decided in favor of Plato. In fact the
smallest units of matter are not physical
objects in the ordinary sense; they are
forms, ideas which can be expressed
unambiguously only in mathematical
language. –Werner Heisenberg

WHERE ARE WE GOING? Nowhere, until we can see past materialism.

Every man takes the limits of his
own field of vision for the limits of
the world. –Arthur Schopenhauer

This materialist view is the common sense view of physical determinism—that matter is fundamental, and consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain (matter), ultimately caused by the physical and chemical chaos of the Big Bang. And since time only began flowing as a result of the Big Bang, there is no chance of finding a first cause. It could be said that,

Modern science is based on the principle:
‘Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain
the rest.’ -Terence McKenna

Something can’t come from nothing, so the Big Bang theory still requires a cause. There must still be a super-space, or a mother universe; some place where a universe like ours can emerge from.

Because of the 200-year divergence physics took into materialism that ended a 100 years ago, most people still think science proved materialism explains the universe. It doesn’t. On the contrary. Materialism has been proven ontologically false for a century now.

Scientific materialism sees the world from only the body side of Descartes’ mind/body dualism, which is a philosophically weak position. Arguing from just the physical side, they are unable to explain many things—like the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, or how the universe is relative instead of objective, or even consciousness. In materialism, everything is physically deterministic (no conscious volition) so they must accept that consciousness itself is an illusion. But again, that’s because they are interpreting the world while limited to just the physical side of Descartes’ dualism. A further complication is that Cartesian dualism was never really about mind & body, but mind-body & consciousness. How much has that misunderstanding cost us?

If the fundamental building blocks of matter turned out to be physical, that would have given materialism a leg to stand on. But instead, physics found a fuzzy edge of reality where matter transitions into mathematics. So, matter is not fundamental. It’s a phase of quantum probability fields. Particles are how wave functions appear to us, though they never do fully exist in spacetime. In my opinion, quantum mechanics is studying the noumenal realm of Kantian philosophy. Clearly, physical spacetime reality has been shown to be not fundamental.

The Measurement Problem is a big problem for the materialist position. In quantum mechanics, the particles that make up matter always behave as probability distributions (wave functions) until observed, and only then do they transform into a particle in spacetime. To put it in physics parlance, to make a Heisenberg cut in the von Neumann chain you need a extra-physical element like consciousness. The Copenhagen Interpretation is by far the most widely held and experimentally supported interpretation of quantum mechanics, and it says the observer collapses the wave function. All objections to this view have provided no evidence. Clearly, observation plays a critical role in the emergence of matter. Once again, ontological materialism has been proven wrong.

A century ago, science discovered that consciousness causes the world to manifest by collapsing quantum states into physical reality. Therefore, the brain can’t cause consciousness, because consciousness causes the brain.

Mind no longer appears to be an accidental
intruder into the realm of matter…
we ought rather hail it as the creator
and governor of the realm of matter.
–Sir James Jeans

To make of the brain the condition on
which the whole image depends is in
truth a contradiction in terms, since
the brain is by hypothesis a part of
the image. -Henri Bergson

Meanwhile, materialists have spent the last century not advancing science, while no progress has been made on how electro-chemical states in the brain can give rise to conscious experience. Consciousness is regarded as an epiphenomenon. One favored theory is that it’s an emergent phenomenon caused by the vast integration of information in our large brains. But then why do all organisms, even as simple as a single cell, behave consciously?

The philosophy of the perennial philosophy is actually ontological idealism, which is well supported by modern physics, yet we still think scientists should be materialists. For an in-depth look, consider this 2-hr YouTube of an ontological idealist interviewed by a famous materialist:

Bernardo Kastrup on the Nature of Reality: Materialism, Idealism, or Skepticism | YouTube 2:14:21

IF WE ARE ONE, THEN WHY DON’T WE KNOW IT?  Because we don’t meditate.

Brahman cannot be realized by those
who are enmeshed in life’s duality.
-Tejobindu Upanishad

Delusion arises from the duality of attraction and aversion. -Bhagavad Gita 7:27

Desire and aversion blind you to Suchness.
-Xinxin Ming

Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. -Romans 12:2

Born into a world of individual bodies, we learn to see ourselves as separate. By the age of three we develop an ego, and learn how to fulfill our egoic desires within the hierarchy of egos around us. This process is necessary for living in the world, but it hides our true nature, like clouds obscuring the sun.

This process of identifying with the egoic self is the topic of the Garden of Eden story. When Adam and Eve lived in the garden, they knew themselves to be God; both immanent and transcendent (egoic self and transcendent Self). But after living as individuals for, let’s say, three years, they forgot their transcendent nature, and began to only identify with their egoic selves—symbolized by eating fruit from the tree of duality, and suddenly becoming self-conscious.

The thought, “I am the doer,” is the bite of a poisonous snake. -Ashtavakra Gita

Forgetting their transcendent nature, they lost their identity with God, the animals, the garden, and found themselves in a world of separateness. This is our condition. But the way back to the garden can be as easy as looking inward in silent meditation. It’s just, most people don’t know this.

The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad says it most clearly: Separateness arises from identifying the Self with the body. The story of the Garden of Eden is meant to remind us of our true nature—that we are not just our mental and physical accumulations (the egoic self), but also our higher Self.

How Judaism and Christianity Differ on the Original Sin | YouTube 3:35

This realization feels like being born again, or waking up from a dream, but it’s not the egoic self that wakes up (this can be very destabilizing if the necessary prep work hasn’t been done). All the true religions are really just about this one thing.

There is only one Self in all creatures.
The One appears many, just as the moon 
appears many, reflected in water.
-Amritabindu Upanishad

As long as we think we are the ego,
we feel attached and fall into sorrow…
When you realize that you are the Self…
you transcend the duality of life
and enter into the unitive state.
-Mundaka Upanishad

Brahman is all, and the Self is Brahman.
-Mandukya Upanishad

Consciousness is the Self.
-Shiva Sutras

I say, ‘You are gods; you are all
children of the Most High…’
-Psalms 82:6 | NLT

Don’t you realize that all of you together
are the temple of God
and that the Spirit of God lives in you?
-1 Corinthians 3:16 | NLT

Tao is your very nature.
Seeing this, everything is clear –
you walk free and undisturbed as Tao.
-Xinxin Ming

Remove the veil.
You will find your beloved within.
In every heart the Lord dwells.
Therefore, speak no bitter words.
The one who listens within you
Also listens within everyone else.
-Kabir

God dwells within you as you.
-Swami Muktananda

That one God who shines within everything,
Who is formless like the cloudless sky,
Is the pure, stainless, Self of all.
Without any doubt, that is who I am.
-Avadhuta Gita

I am not the mind. I am not the intellect or
intelligence. I am not the ego, nor am I a
deeper self or soul…I am Absolute
Awareness of Eternal Love and Bliss.
-Atma Shatakam

You are the Solitary Witness
of All That Is, forever free.
Your only bondage is not seeing This.
-Ashtavakra Gita

Lord! I’ve never known who I really am,
or You. I threw my love away on this
lousy carcass and never figured it
out: You’re me, I’m You. All I ever
did was doubt: Who am I?
Who are You? -Lal Ded

Believing appearances are real,
you cannot see their Source.
-Xinxin Ming

What discovering the quantum realm was like

In the early 1900’s, quantum mechanics revealed a staging area beneath space and time, where the physical universe resides as a mathematical language. Many of the physicists who made this discovery saw parallels with Eastern mysticism. And that’s when the physics community decided to pause all philosophical speculation, and focus strictly on verification. Fast forward to the 1950’s, when a shut up and calculate policy became established in universities across the West, effectively removing philosophy from physics. This has left them trapped in verification mode with no way out. It’s not from a lack of bright students keeping physics from advancing, but because all experiments to date have only verified that we are living in a dream world. …Neo.

Position and velocity are what you can
observe. But until you measure them, they
don’t exist. Only the wave function does.
-Sean Carroll

The scientific community remains faithful to the common sense view of a physically deterministic universe existing independent of observation. It’s quite obvious that physical processes created our world in space and time. Even Einstein’s general relativity needs matter to make gravity. But there’s a significant problem with this intuitive view. It’s an abductive heuristic proven wrong by the last century of experimentation. All matter is actually wave functions. Wave functions are not physical waves, but mathematical functions like y=x+3.

Tunneling map of unobserved electron wave functions entangled into standing waves.

A wave function is a spatial probability zone describing where a particle will emerge if observed. This, combined with how wave functions can reduce to near the size of particles (a process called decoherence), allows them behave in a way we attribute to particles (note how small the corral wave functions have become in the above image). When not observed, wave functions behave according to the strict determinism of mathematics, which we naively interpret as physical determinism. The quantum probability part we always hear about only happens at observation. But for the rest of the time, the universe develops according to the mathematical precision of quantum determinism, not to physical determinism.

Why would I make such an outrageous claim? Here’s the problem: There is no experimental evidence for objective collapse (of the wave function into particles of matter), and a century of evidence for subjective collapse. The weight of this evidence is summed up as the Measurement Problem. To rationalize this problem away, physicists came up with a clever trick. They altered the meaning of the word observer (from the Copenhagen interpretation) to include measurement, which doesn’t require an observer. That way, the environment collapses its own wave functions, allowing for physical determinism to proceed without observation.

But to pull this trick off, they need to conflate decoherence with collapse, which is akin to saying the refrigerator light stays on when you close the door. So, we are told the Big Bang was an explosion of particles in expanding space, when it was actually more like a storm in quantum fields. And they neglect to tell us how rocks are tightly entangled groups of wave functions that are only physical rocks in our experience…along with a history, dating back to the quantum storm of 13.8 billion BC. Crazy that. But this is what a century of experimentation keeps telling us. It’s a quantum universe. There is no objective, independent spacetime, and physical objects don’t have physical properties before they are observed.

We are participators in bringing into being
not only the near and here, but the
far away and long ago. –John Wheeler

For two-thousand years, Western science assumed God created heaven and earth. Then, for 200 years and ending 100 years ago, the evidence pointed toward the nihilistic universe of materialism when they discovered that the world is not the center of the universe, but one planet among billions, spinning like a top while getting dragged around by a star in a galaxy of the Virgo supercluster. But now, a new science has seen past all that, and is pointing back toward a universal consciousness. Modern experiments tell us our consciousness acts like a catalyst, localizing wave functions into our experience of the physical world from an otherwise nonlocal realm. Why would that be? The simplest explanation is, our consciousness is this nonlocal consciousness, just localized into a body; compartmentalized and disassociated from the rest of ourselves (because we are always looking out toward our mind & body, we never notice our nonlocal inner nature). Top physicists realized this a century ago. Before it became taboo, this is how they talked about it:

As a man who has devoted his whole life
to the most clearheaded science, to the
study of matter, I can tell you as a
result of my research about the atoms
this much: There is no matter as such!
All matter originates and exists only
by virtue of a force…We must assume
behind this force the existence of a
conscious and intelligent Mind. This
Mind is the matrix of all matter.
–Max Planck

The universe is of the nature of a thought or
sensation in a universal Mind…The stuff of the
world is mind-stuff. –Sir Arthur Eddington

The universe does not exist “out there”,
independent of us. We are inescapably
involved in bringing about that which
appears to be happening…Today we
demand of physics some understanding
of existence itself. –John Wheeler

Is this loosening the grip your default worldview has on you? Then it’s good prep work for meditation.

WHAT ARE WE?

We are consciousness. Our mind and body are earthly accumulations. Scientists found the building blocks of our accumulations to be a mathematical language in the form of quantum wave functions. That there is a mathematical language giving rise to reality tells us there is consciousness on the other side of wave functions as well.

This explains why the universe is so mathematically oriented; why math works so well in the classical world. The world is so obviously mathematical, Pythagoreans were saying it 2,600 years ago. Everywhere you look, the world is built on the fine structure of mathematics. Sometimes, the same formula will even work in more than one area of physics. The famous Schrodinger equation of quantum mechanics is essentially a heat flow equation borrowed from classical physics. That’s nuts. A great example from our classical world is the Golden Ratio. It was always obvious, but when modern physics came along, it confirmed the world is indeed a mathematical construct. Modern-day physicists just don’t publish much on the subject:

…the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and that there is no rational explanation for it. -Eugene Wigner | The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics (1960)

If you think quantum mechanics sounds more like a simulation than a dream, I agree. It is a simulation (as opposed to a model), but it’s still a dream, because we are real. For all we know, wave functions are brainwaves. The real question is, is the consciousness that’s behind the simulation another being, or consciousness itself? Each component in the simulation is governed by a model (a wave function), which describes its location and shape within the rules (Hamiltonian) of the simulated environment (Hilbert space). It is a simulation for sure, but we are real. If it’s just a being like us behind the simulation, then there must be a real universe to house this being, and the simulation theory just inherited all the problems of materialism. If it’s that our consciousness is being piped into the simulation, then billions of us humans, along with the countless lifeforms of earth (can’t all be NPCs) must be accounted for outside the simulation, and that gets messy.

That’s why simulation theorists tend to argue the simulation itself generates our consciousness; which is akin to saying a simulated rainstorm on your PC can splash real water on your keyboard. But quantum mechanics tells us consciousness makes matter, not the other way around. Real brains can’t make consciousness, so simulated brains have got no chance.

Alternatively, the nondual dreamworld view that starts with consciousness, solves the First Cause Argument, the Hard Problem of Consciousness, the Measurement Problem, explains all phenomena, has far fewer assumptions than all the alternatives, and is personally verifiable. If your consciousness is what’s most real, then maybe consciousness is what’s most real.

So, what are we? Our experience here on earth is a mix of Consciousness & Information—Will & Representation, Shiva & Shakti, Purusha & Prakriti, God & Creation. We are that.

Why isn’t this common knowledge? Because no scientist will defend such a position. It’s counterintuitive, abstract, anthropocentric, and sounds like religious wishful thinking. It’s far more realistic to assume there must be some means of objective collapse, allowing the universe to physically unfold from the Big Bang.

QUANTUM MECHANICS

Whatever exists, animate or inanimate, is born through the union of the field and its Knower.     -Bhagavad Gita

Matter (mass-energy) is a property of three quantum fields (up quark, down quark, electron) held together by a fourth quantum field (electromagnetic). Physicists have no idea what causes these fields, but they can predict wave function behavior so astonishingly well with mathematics, the wave functions themselves clearly are mathematical. And in this sense, they are deterministic (again, the quantum probability part only has to do with observation). So, the deterministic nature of our world is not physical, but mathematical. When this was first published (1926) the author was concerned about how probabilities are mathematical, not physical. This problem has never been resolved.

It really is mathematical. The quantum rules describing the universe (the Hamiltonian) only make sense if you think of them operating within a mathematical space (Hilbert space). In this realm, mass, charge, and spin magnitude are properties of quantum fields, not wave functions—the wave function only locates the particle in space, but the field it belongs to dictates the particles properties. So, what is a particle? The quantum realm is a variable-dimensional space (likely infinite dimensions), where imaginary numbers are real, and time doesn’t exist. Mass, charge, and spin magnitude are just numbers (constants) in formulas. A quantum field is a Hilbert space. The true state of the universe is a high-dimensional mathematical space. One example: The spin–orbit interaction parameter, must know and use the tensor-product structure of the Hilbert space in its formula. Just that there are interaction terms is proof the wave function itself (not our model of it) is a mathematical formula. The point is, science discovered the universe doesn’t physically exist when not observed, but instead exists mathematically! Why would that be? And how does mathematics turn into the spacetime matter we experience?

Physicists still like to say you don’t need an observer, just a measuring device to collapse the wave function into a particle. This is misleading. There is nothing intrinsically different from the sample and the measuring device. They are both matter. Matter naturally exists in superposition. If we were only matter, we would exist in superposition as well, but we don’t. So, there must be something intrinsically different about us (lifeforms); an extra-physical element that causes physicality. The obvious difference is, we are conscious. Why all the confusion about this? Consciousness must be a fifth element.

A measurement without an observer is just decoherence of the superposition, and not collapse of the wave function. Decoherence and collapse can appear to be the same from our perspective, in that a measuring device can measure a mathematically precise outcome while still in superposition, but one is physically in spacetime and the other is not. It’s more correct to think of the objects in the universe as fields of reduced quantum probabilities, rather than a collection of particles. Only the observed parts reduce to particles.

Classical systems have localized wave functions that approximately obey classical equations. -Sean Carroll on the Ehrenfest theorem

What does the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle tells us? It’s another proof that particles are a mathematical illusion. When observed, wave functions collapse into aspects of particles only; never complete particles. If you could know a particles exact velocity, it’s position would be a flat distribution across the universe—everywhere and nowhere. It’s confirmation that everything is wave functions, and particles are what happens when we interact with them.

What did we learn from the double-slit experiments? They conclusively demonstrate how light and matter operate in Hilbert space (a mathematical realm) until they are observed—proof that physical objects only exist in the experience of it. If you try to view the delayed-choice experiment from a classical spacetime perspective, it generates the paradox of retrocausality, telling us it’s an incorrect perspective. The results only makes sense if you think of light moving through the apparatus as a wave function, not yet in time or space. Likewise, sunlight in your room does not propagate through your room, but through Hilbert space. Matter rests in Hilbert space too. It only transitions into spacetime in the experience of it. The double-slit experiments prove the world is an illusion (maya).

We are mixed up about the word entanglement—how wave functions combine to make the classical-scale objects we experience. The quantum entanglement everyone talks about (SPDC entanglement) is when a single wave function is split into two particles, allowing them to relate to each other at paradoxically faster than light speeds. But the far more common version of entanglement is when different wave functions interact with each other to make all the classical-scale physical objects we know and love—like ripples on a pond interacting to make more complex patterns. They call this form of entanglement, decoherence, and it’s how unobserved history develops deterministically while remaining in superposition (not physically in spacetime).

Quantum applies to all scales. The very reason why scientists were looking into quantum scales was to see what matter is made of. In that endeavor, they were successful. But what they found was crazymaking. The building blocks of matter turned out to be an elegant mathematical language operating outside of spacetime. And that’s why they’d rather limit their quantum talk to the strange phenomena happening at quantum scales. But the Bell’s inequality experiments of the 1980’s strongly suggested, and now Leggett-Garg inequality experiments of the early 2000’s have confirmed, it’s a quantum universe at all scales. Quantum mechanics explains many classical scale phenomena not explainable by classical physics—everything from how the sun works, to magnets. The force we know as magnetism is caused by the spin of individual electrons in atoms and is in all normal matter, but it can bleed into classical scales when enough of the electron spins are set into alignment, as in magnetized iron. Magnetism is literally a quantum force bleeding into classical scales. But then, so are all the forces of nature. Classical physics is just a mathematical shortcut to model the behavior of large-scale quantum objects. It’s much easier to model an ocean wave with a simple wave formula than by trying to keep track of all its wave functions. So, the way we think about quantum is all wrong. At what size would we even make the break between quantum and classical? In certain conditions, matter can maintain quantum coherence and behave as a single wave function at classical scales. Typically, the more wave functions involved, the less likely they will all be waving coherently together (resulting in decoherence), but there are examples of large-scale coherent objects, such as lasers, superfluids, superconductivity, and Bose Einstein condensates.

To sum things up, information in a mathematical language is currently thought to be the building blocks of all physical objects. Unobserved matter, and even its history, never physically exists, except as qualia in experience. What does that do to your worldview?

The rest of this segment just gets into greater detail. Here’s a quick YouTube describing the nature of our world:

What Is a Field? – Instant Egghead #42 | YouTube 2:21

This next YouTube beautifully details how a single wave function collapses into particles as they are observed, and how the wave function progresses after collapse. However, be advised: They say the detector is collapsing the quantum states, but that is only decoherence, not collapse. In reality, the detector, as well as its detection history, remain in superposition until collapsed by observation (the Heisenberg chain breaks at observation). 

Visualization of Quantum Physics (Quantum Mechanics) | YouTube 14:33

Science has long been wanting to tell us that beneath the surface, we are all one. Below is a Cambridge professor explaining how all the universe reduces to quantum fields (19 minutes into his Faraday’s Fields talk).

Quantum Fields: The Real Building Blocks of the Universe – with David Tong | YouTube 1:00:17

So, these fields contain information, which collapse when observed by the “light” of consciousness. And any lifeform will do. This scientific conclusion was formalized as the von Neumann–Wigner interpretation of the Copenhagen interpretation (also see 2 minutes into Dean Radin’s talk).

For example, the moment before a photon registers in your awareness, its wave function (in Hilbert space) may span many light years in spacetime. It could have collapsed into the eye of a distant observer on another planet (hypothetically speaking), but the moment it collapsed into your eye, it instantly became unavailable to any other observer, and the entire history of its trajectory became a spacetime event. The only way this information could be conveyed across light years in an instant is if it wasn’t actually a thing in spacetime. Everything in the universe is like this. Before it is observed it is only information in Hilbert space, and not really a thing in the universe.

This quantum substrate has long been described by saints and sages (meditators). For example, the Bhagavad Gita devotes a chapter to quantum fields, and the Spanda Karika (sacred tremor) is a 9th century text about wave functions.

The sacred tremor,
the very place of creation and return,
is completely limitless because
its nature is formless.
-Spanda Karika

Returning is the motion of the Tao.
Yielding is the way of the Tao.
The ten thousand things are born of being.
Being is born of not being.
-Tao Te Ching

Without effort the [Self] encompasses both
the movable and the unchanging,
the manifest and the unmanifest.
-Avadhuta Gita

Universal Consciousness unfolds
the universe on its own screen…
[It] brings about all emanation
and reabsorption of the universe.
-Pratyabhijna Hridayam

Though all the galaxies emerge from him,
he is without form and unconditioned.
-Tejobindu Upanishad

That which has form is not real.
Only the formless is permanent.
Once this is known, you will not
return to illusion.
-Ashtavakra Gita

O Seeker, form does not differ from emptiness…
All appearances are emptiness…
No mind, no fear.
The imagined world is seen through.
Nirvana.
-Heart Sutra

THE THEORY OF RELATIVITY

To be is to be perceived.
–George Berkeley

The salient point of Einstein’s theory of relativity is that spacetime only exists relative to observers—that there is no objective universe out there. This is not how the scientific community interprets it. They would say the relativity part only applies to our perception of spacetime, not to spacetime itself (it’s not ontic, but merely epistemic). I disagree, and side with physicist’s like John Wheeler. Essentially, the two postulates of special relativity say all the laws of physics are relative and conform to each observer. Why would that be?

The word “relativity” is just a science way of saying “subjectivity,” since the relative means relative to observers. Relative/absolute translates to subjective/objective. So, if all the laws of physics are subjective, then none of the laws are objective. A universe is governed by its laws. If there are no objective laws, there can’t be an objective universe.

If there’s no objective universe, then there is no objective causality, and Einstein came up with thought experiments to prove it. He noted, if spacetime always renders properly for every observer, paradoxes should occur in objective reality, proving it doesn’t really exist. This is explained to us in the form of Einstein’s thought experiments, but what is always left out is the main point: If they are correct, our common sense notion of an objective, physical spacetime must be wrong. We now know them to be correct.

Relativity was published before quantum mechanics, so it uses a classical framework. But we now know that framework is a mere approximation of the actual underlying quantum processes. Spacetime is warped by gravity, and gravity is caused by matter, but matter is entangled wave functions, so spacetime is warped by entangled wave functions.

I am not other than Light. The universe manifests at my glance. -Ashtavakra Gita

Einstein’s fabric of spacetime is the veil of Maya. And since this was such an outrageous claim for any scientist to argue, Einstein spent the rest of his long career trying to refute it. In fact, he tried so hard to falsify relativity, he altered the scientific method.

Perhaps the closest Einstein ever got to formally discussing the ontological implications of relativity was in his last publication on space, an introduction to the book, The Concepts of Space, by a close colleague of his, Max Jammer, where Einstein explains Jammer’s view on the nature of space:

…the whole of physical reality could
perhaps be represented as a field…
the introduction of an independent
(absolute) space is no longer necessary.
That which constitutes the spatial
character of reality is then simply
the four-dimensionality of the field.
-Albert Einstein

In the book, Jammer describes Einstein as having this same view, though in a more scientific language (see example on p. 172-173).

Einstein’s relativity demonstrates how the laws of physics conform to our personal continuum of causal reality; that there is no objective universe out there. This ancient Buddhist quote most eloquently describes the implications of Einstein’s relativity:

What appears as a world of
apparently external phenomena, is
the play of energy of sentient beings.
There is nothing external or separate
from the individual. Everything that
manifests in the individual’s field
of experience is a continuum.
-Pratītyasamutpāda

CONCLUSION

Science went tumbling down the rabbit hole with relativity and quantum mechanics, back in the early 1900’s. They literally found a paradoxical realm beneath space and time. Paradoxes that can be resolved only by abandoning their core belief in the idea of an objectively physical universe. Einstein’s relativity of simultaneity paradox tipped the philosophical needle back toward ontological idealism 120 years ago. But such an extraordinary shift in worldview required extraordinary evidence, so science set out to verify. Now it’s 120 years later, and they never found any evidence to refute it. All they’ve managed to do is accumulate a centuries worth of extraordinary evidence in support of it. Maybe it’s time to give up on the nihilistic worldview of the 1700’s, and accept the uplifting new science of the 1900’s.

Premises:

• We can be more certain about conscious than anything else.
• Something can’t come from nothing.
• Consciousness is more fundamental than mass, energy, space, & time.

Conclusion:

• Consciousness creates the universe.

Why is there something, and not nothing? All life is the result of a singular consciousness localizing into organisms in a universe of its own creation. We are this consciousness, temporarily masquerading as humans …so, love your neighbor as yourself, because they are.

What if there was another level of being awake, where you realize the physical world is also a dream? A physical dream.

The world is illusory.
Brahman alone is real.
The world is Brahman.
-Ramana Maharshi

Thinking of reality as a dreamscape hardly sounds like science, but this is essentially what the founders of quantum mechanics discovered a century ago. Our modern physics community has yet to advance this culturally uplifting discovery despite how the last hundred years of experiments have only confirmed that consciousness is fundamental—all there really is.

Peter Russell | The Reality of Consciousness | YouTube 38:21

This is going to sound strange, but it shouldn’t. Consciousness is the only medium in which time flows. The physical world we know, including space and time, only exists as qualia in conscious experience, and otherwise is just a quantum sea of information, not in space or time. We make time (spacetime) in our own experience.

And there are plenty of other clues that this is a consciousness-based reality. Some are more obvious, like how the moon perfectly eclipses the sun, or the miracle of child birth, but there’s also many more subtle hints to find along the way. Like how the universe is so precisely tuned for life, or how spiral galaxies are vortices yet spin like wheels, or the impossible migration of nerve cells in a developing brain, or how epigenetic memories can pass through our single-cell life stage. We accept the world we are born into, but saints, scholars, and scientists have devoted their lives to a more clear-eyed view, and this is what they are telling us.

People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
–Albert Einstein

In a dream, we look out into the dreamworld from a first-person perspective and interact with other people, and upon waking realize we were actually all the people and objects of the dream. It’s the same with the physical world. Our individual selves are just disassociated parts of our own universal consciousness looking out into the same dreamscape. The world appears the same to everyone because we’re all in the same dream. Sometimes people wake up from the dream. We call them saints and sages.

Our consciousness has been compartmentalized down into individual egoic selves, and meditation helps us to re-associate with our true Self (the dreamer). When we look out into the world, it’s confusing, because everything is inside out.

Shakti opens her eyes and the universe is reabsorbed in pure consciousness; she closes them and the universe is manifested within her. -Spanda Karika

Modern science has long confirmed all this. Consider these quotes from notable physicists of the early to mid 1900’s:

Where does Space-Time come from? Is there any answer except that it comes from consciousness? –John Wheeler

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. –Max Planck

Consciousness cannot be accounted for in
physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely
fundamental. –Erwin Schrödinger

The very study of the physical world leads to the conclusion that the concept of consciousness is an ultimate reality. -Eugene Wigner

The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine. –Sir James Jeans

How is this different from what the saints and sages (meditators) have been saying for millennia?

In the absolute sense, subject and object are nothing other than the space of profound consciousness. -Spanda Karika

Universal consciousness is the cause of the universe. -Pratyabhijna Hrdayam

Matter derives from mind not mind from matter. –Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation

The world you perceive is made of consciousness: what you call matter is consciousness itself. -Nisargadatta

What appears as a world of apparently external phenomena, is the play of energy of sentient beings. -Pratītyasamutpāda

The world in which we live is a play of universal Consciousness.
-Swami Muktananda | Play of Consciousness

Consciousness is everywhere, there is no differentiation…What you call universe is an illusion, a magical appearance. To be happy, consider it as such. -Vijñāna-bhairava

[Buddha said,]
My dreamlike form
Appeared to dreamlike beings
To show them the dreamlike path
That leads to dreamlike enlightenment.
-Bhadrakalpa Sutra

According to relativity and quantum mechanics, the nature of the universe is built around the observer. So why is today’s scientific view so antithetical to the primacy of consciousness when their own data has revealed it to be so? One reason may be because in the 1700’s, science claimed authority over the church as purveyors of the highest truth, and relativity and quantum mechanics calls all that into question. The smart thing for them to do now is to continue trying to falsify it, while avoiding any philosophical discussions, for as long as they can.

But the link to Eastern religion is obvious. Even the preeminent physicist Erwin Schrödinger wrote about the Upanishads (from What is Life in 1944 to My View of the World in 1964). By the 1960’s, Hippies learned of these experiments, and ideas about vibrations and universal consciousness infused into popular culture, eventually becoming the New Age movement.

After these conversations with Tagore, some of the ideas [from the Upanishads] that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense. That was a great help for me.
–Werner Heisenberg

Saying the universe only exists in the experience of it is an extraordinary claim, but after a century of trying to disprove it, science has amassed an extraordinary amount of evidence in favor of it. It’s time now for scientists pull their heads out of the sand and move on. But when they do, old hippies will say, we told you so, and so will the church.

Just as quantum mechanics revealed the subjectivity of matter and energy, relativity revealed the subjectivity of space and time. You might say, physics is now investigating Kant’s noumena—the substrate of reality we weren’t meant to see. What insights can be gained by this?

Below is a beautiful NOVA documentary highlighting an experiment that went to the ends of the known universe to rule out local hidden variables (hidden variables are a last-ditch effort of the materialist view). Why go to such trouble? Because, saying there’s a quantum realm which gives rise to space and time, but only when observed, is an extraordinary claim, and they needed extraordinary evidence.

Einstein’s Quantum Riddle | Full Documentary | NOVA | PBS | YouTube 53:18

To be full of things is to be empty
of God. To be empty of things is to
be full of God. –Meister Eckhart

Knowledge is bondage.
-Shiva Sutras

Silence is the language of god,
all else is poor translation.
-Rumi

Entering into the unitive state,
he attains the goal of evolution.
-Paramahamsa Upanishad

For one gains by losing
and loses by gaining.
-Tao Te Ching

Silent meditation is unique in that it’s the only activity which points us back toward our true nature. The only thing masking the infinite is that we are always looking at our minds and senses. Meditation is looking back toward consciousness itself.

The spiritual path has two parts: preparation and practice. The prep is mostly about purifying yourself, if need be, and the practice is meditation.

Meditation is immediacy without concepts. It’s about the witness paying attention while taking a rest from all thoughts, and emotions. You need only be present. When done as a daily practice, it can even deconstruct subconscious egoic programs along the way, helping with the prep work. It’s been the enlightenment method of choice for centuries because it really works.

There’s so much more to us hiding just below the surface that they call it grace. Meditation makes you much more available to grace, and if you meditate with a true guru your chances are better, because they are conduits for grace.

Swami Girijananda Meditating

There are many techniques which are
supposed to lead us to God, but, of
all these, meditation is the one
recognized by all the saints and sages
because only in meditation can we see
the inner Self directly.
-Swami Muktananda | Meditate

Unity obtains when the activities
of mind have ceased. The witness then
abides in its true nature. Otherwise,
the witness is identified with the
activities of mind and is just another
thought-form itself.
-Yoga Sutras

The Self is realized in a higher state
of consciousness when you have broken
through the wrong identification that
you are the body…
-Kena Upanishad

In the depths of meditation, sages saw
within themselves the Lord of Love, who
dwells in the heart of every creature.
-Shvetashvatara Upanishad

If your goal in meditation truly is enlightenment, be advised, the greater the shift in perspective, the more destabilizing it can be for your psyche if the necessary prep work hasn’t been done. What you’re asking for is bigger than anything of this world, and it’s very personal. You might want to prep first by, among other things, loosening your grip on your worldview, because that’s going to shift in unexpected ways. If your goal is still enlightenment, note that being “enlightened” means dropping your body; you likely don’t want that. What you’re most likely looking for is more of a temporary enlightenment experience that sticks with you for the rest of your life. This is the real next step, and it’s called a spiritual awakening.

So, how does an awakening experience happen? There are things you can do to make yourself more available, but ultimately grace must come to you. How? A practice of silent mediation works best, if you can. Seeking grace is like going surfing. To surf a wave, you really should do the necessary prep work (learn to read waves and the hazards; learn how to pop up to your feet, learn how to swim, etc.). Then you need to gear up and go out into the ocean, and sit and wait. You can’t make a wave come to you. All you can do is sit in a good spot in the right conditions, and wait. Grace is like a wave that breaks just right for you to catch. And if you do catch it, it’s all about you adjusting to it—it doesn’t adjust to you. Sitting in thoughtless meditation near a guru makes you especially available to grace. And if you catch that wave, it’s going to be a wild ride, but nothing you can’t handle.

Here’s an ancient strategy for finding the method that best suites you. First, realize that you already are what you’re looking for, and your “spiritual journey” is complete. If that doesn’t work, try silent meditation (looking toward consciousness itself). If your mind wanders too much for that, add a mantra meditation, or watch your breath to focus the noise. If months go by, and your mind still won’t quiet down, maybe a yoga class with a short meditation will work. If not, maybe just get back to the business of living, and come back to this later. For a few people, realization is instantaneous. But for the rest of us, it requires a little patience.

How to meditate.

Tao is self-evident to one with no preferences. When like and dislike are absent, the Real is obvious and clear. Make the slightest distinction, however, and it appears disguised as heaven and earth. -Xinxin Ming

The goal of meditation isn’t to achieve something, but to reveal the ground-stuff of your being, by getting all the noise out of the way.

I have lived on the lip of insanity,
wanting to know reasons,
knocking on a door.
It opens.
I’ve been knocking from the inside.
-Rumi

When first trying to meditate, most people find it hard not to think. Parts of our brain are always trying to process some emotion, and our consciousness keeps getting distracted. Meditation is about learning how to extend the time between our worldly thoughts. Adyashanti would say something like, if you take your foot off the gas pedal, eventually the car will come to a stop.

The amount of practice it will take to go thoughtless for short periods depends on how much attention our thoughts are requiring. Practice makes perfect, and if one practices even a few minutes a day, it will get easier. Meditation is like taking the ultimate break from the day; to step out for a second. Relax, maybe starting at the base of the spine, and just practice being aware without thoughts.

The more you process those thoughts, the easier it gets, until eventually a thoughtless state becomes a familiar resource you can easily drop into. Spending time there each day will refresh you, but it will also make you much more available to Grace.

Here is an excellent introduction to why people meditate, with a little at the end on how to meditate.
Why Meditate | Joel Morwood | Vimeo 10:31

It cannot be perceived by the mind, because it makes the mind think. Still, the Self can be known, and to know it we do not need the help of the mind or the senses. -Swami Muktananda | I Am That

And being asked by the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God cometh, [Jesus] answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation…the kingdom of God is within you. -Luke 17:20-21 | KJV

That which makes the mind think but cannot be thought by the mind, that is the Self indeed. This Self is not someone other than you.
-Kena Upanishad

The Self is one, though it appears to be many. Those who meditate upon the Self…see the Self in everyone… -Chandogya Upanishad

The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye is one eye… –Meister Eckhart

God sleeps in the rock, dreams in the plant, stirs in the animal, and awakens in man. -Ibn Arabi

Wake up from this dream of separateness.
-Shvetashvatara Upanishad

So all of us who have had that veil removed can see and reflect the glory of the Lord. And the Lord—who is the Spirit—makes us more and more like him as we are changed into his glorious image. -2 Corinthians 3:18 | NLT