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. Time is a function of the observer, not the universe. 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.

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

Our dreams are a corollary to the waking world; a daily reminder of our true nature. In a dream we have an avatar body that lives in a dreamworld full of subjects and objects that all seem quite real. But upon waking we realize all those places, all those people, were just happening in our one consciousness. Our waking selves are much like this; disassociated parts of our own universal consciousness looking out into its own mathematically stabilized dreamscape. We’ve lived so long in this dreamscape, we’ve forgot we are the dreamer. Sometimes people wake up from this dream. We call them saints and sages.

Our consciousness has been compartmentalized down into individual egoic selves (dream avatars), 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

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. 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. -Pratyabhijnahrdayam

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. -Vijñānabhairava

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

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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 point back toward the mystics.

The similarity to Eastern spirituality 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 that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense. That was a great help for me. –Werner Heisenberg

Saying the universe exists only 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 well past time for scientists to live up to their authority as purveyors of the truth and tell us what they’ve found. But that would mean conceding their authority back to religion, which is scary. Plus, it could make hippies seem wiser than the scientists.