In the nonstop assault of cold-water enemas that is modern life, do you ever feel you are clinging to a pool noodle in a tsunami? Have you begun wearing a helmet, even to bed?
I used to, until a single comment put me on a path that changed my orientation to myself and the world.
Now, when I feel existential dread creeping in, I look to the stars — not the red-carpet kind, the ones that blanket the universe.
Fifteen years ago, I was lost in the desert of midlife amidst a sandstorm of anxiety and depression. I felt I’d wandered into the middle of nowhere, and wherever the hell I was, it wasn’t where I’d thought I was going.
After explaining this to a psychoanalyst, he asked if I believed in God. Through the gritted teeth of my implacable atheism, I responded that religion had ruined the world. He accepted that, but told me I needed to place myself within something larger. “It doesn’t need to be religion,” he said, “it could be as simple as the cosmos.”
“Simple” is doing some heavy lifting in that sentence. I didn’t know exactly what he meant, but I gave it a try and began to look outside my personal bubble.
What I discovered opened my mind and changed my worldview — or rather, my view of myself and the entire universe — forever.
Here’s what I found: The universe and everything in it, including us, is at once incomprehensibly complex and absurdly simple. In a very real sense, the whole damn thing and everything in it is an illusion.
Huh?
Yes, an illusion. That sounds kooky, but bear with me.
For centuries, various gurus and philosophers have maintained that life is an illusion and so is individuality — in reality, we are one with the universe and everything in it.
In a very real sense, modern physics has proven both concepts.
Everything is made of atoms, which are made of protons, electrons, and neutrons, which themselves are made of even smaller things like quarks, leptons, and gluons. Everything from your precious cat to Mt. Everest, from a styrofoam cup to the Andromeda Galaxy, is a slightly different arrangement of these very same particles. And they aren’t even what we’d normally call particles; thinking of them as little spheres swirling around each other is a sort of myth we use to help us visualize them.
Instead, they are minuscule excitations of electromagnetic energy, temporarily hovering together in slightly different configurations. From enormous planets and galaxies to your body and mine, there’s nothing in the universe but fluctuating gatherings of energy.
Even our thoughts, the stuff we’re using to read and write this article, are the product of vibrating electromagnetic energy that is temporarily making up our brains. On the subatomic level, our brains consist of exactly the same stuff as a bowling ball and the Rock of Gibraltar. (And plenty of us act like it.)
And what we call “solid matter” isn’t actually solid. In fact, the particles that make up everything aren’t even touching!
What? Yes, for reals.
None of the particles that make up your body is touching any other particle, nor are the particles of the floor you’re standing on or the chair you’re sitting on. You, and everything in and around you, are and have always been floating. You’ve never touched anything, not even yourself. (This is science; get your mind out of the gutter.)
Solidity, in the way most of us think of it, is an illusion.
And so is permanence. Nothing (other than electromagnetic energy) is permanent; diamonds are not forever, nor is this planet or this universe, or even the popularity of Taylor Swift.
The good news is that impermanence also pertains to the Four Billionaires of the Apocalypse (there are many, pick any four) that are using the rest of us as kindling as they burn down the planet. Those malevolent gasbags are all temporary illusions, too, and they and their ill-gotten power are going to dissolve like a packet of instant hot chocolate faster than the Founding Fathers can roll over in their graves.
Given what we know about the universe, what we call “reality” could be called an illusion of innumerable, fleeting groupings of energy that constantly shift and morph, much like teenagers at a shopping mall food court.
“…a web of interacting fields, patterns emerging and dissolving…everything connected to everything by the very medium it’s made of.” — Richard Feynman
And there’s more: The “empty space” between these “particles,” and between planets and stars in outer space, isn’t actually empty. Space is also a quivering field of the same electromagnetic energy. Famed physicist Richard Feynman described the universe and everything in it as a “web of interacting fields, patterns emerging and dissolving… everything connected to everything by the very medium it’s made of.”
Like I said: incomprehensibly complex and absurdly simple. And, as ancient thinkers have said: We really are one with the universe and everything in it, including each other — fluctuations of the same field of energy. Our differences are incidental.
In the sense that nothing is what we think it is, our stories of the universe and all the energy bundles within it are something of a myth that is forever rewritten with each turn of the pages of history. And we don’t control its direction as much as we think we do; we’re just vibrating along for the ride.
No wonder we invent stories to explain this bucking bronco of existence. We create myths in an attempt to understand the one we’re living inside.
“Place yourself within something larger,” said my therapist. He was right. It solved my habit of viewing my tiny speck of life under a microscope, and opened a never-ending portal of wonder.
How?
So, where did this illusion come from, and where do these revelations lead?
In science class, you may have been told that the entire universe and everything in it is an accident of chemistry: from the Big Bang to primordial soup, to apes with big brains, to space travel, to Artificial Intelligence. Wow. What a complicated and unlikely string of accidents.
And if you paid attention in Sunday School, you were probably told a magical guy in the sky took a week to write and produce this ludicrous sitcom we’re stuck in, and created a whole system of scoring, rewarding, and punishing its players like a game show.
But if you’re a thinker and a seeker, neither of those explanations may be ultimately satisfying or convincing.
Flipping It
What if neither is true: It isn’t an accident, and it wasn’t invented by a superhero in the sky? What else might have happened to put all this weird stuff here for us to muddle through?
What if we take the age-old premise that consciousness naturally emerged from the chemical “accident” of biology, and turn it around? What if consciousness was first? What if consciousness — whatever the hell it even is — created biology? What if it is the driving force behind the ongoing development of the universe? What if the tiny excitations of electromagnetic energy, sticking together in trillions of different ways, is consciousness?
I’m not talking about a magical person in the sky, or any kind of god, but an unimaginably immense force of awareness that all we conscious creatures are but crumbs of, and that creates things through which it can explore itself: a capital-C Consciousness.
“We are a way for the universe to know itself.” — Carl Sagan
This flipped paradigm is the premise of Consciousness Is All There Is: How Understanding and Experiencing Consciousness Will Transform Your Life, a fascinating book by MIT-educated neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and all-around smart guy Tony Nader. (His credentials are important because I’m more likely to believe someone with a brain cluster that vibrates better than mine than I am a random carnival barker on Instagram or TikTok.)
Seriously?
At first, this sounds fantastical. I thought so, too. But that’s only because we’ve been taught that biological life was created by a series of chemical accidents, and that biology eventually, somehow, became conscious. That’s equally fantastical if you think about it, but after centuries of that view, it’s easy to forget that those are unverifiable theories — no more than best guesses based on things we cannot observe, measure, or test.
This flipped paradigm concept does not deny science: The evolution of biology is certain; we see it all around us, and fossil and DNA evidence confirm it. But how chemicals went from inanimate to living, and how biology could have become aware of its experience, are questions currently well beyond the reach of science.
Fact: We don’t know what consciousness is or how life was first created. You can put together the same elements that make up a raccoon and zap them with electricity like Frankenstein’s monster, but you don’t get a masked rascal who will raid your trash in the middle of the night. You don’t even get a hat with a tail on it. You don’t get anything other than a higher electric bill.
You can only get conscious life from conscious life (which is why it’s more important to have access to birth control than a mad scientist laboratory).
On the Other Hand…
Let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s assume that consciousness somehow existed before all this other stuff — without knowing how or why or exactly what it is, let’s just say it did, in the same way we don’t know what caused the Big Bang or what came before it, we’re just pretty sure it happened.
If consciousness was first, then none of this insanely intricate, complex, unfathomable universe is an accident; it is the product of consciousness thinking things.
Hey! That’s something everyone’s consciousness actually does pretty much nonstop. I’m doing it now as I write this, and you’re doing it as you read it. Try to stop your consciousness from thinking for even a few seconds. It’s not possible. It doesn’t even stop when we sleep. (And there’s evidence it doesn’t stop when we die, either.)
Perhaps our thoughts don’t come from our brains, but pass through them. Maybe our consciousness comes from Consciousness, and our brains reduce and translate the big-C version into thoughts that are useful to mammals living in this particular earthly illusion. That may not be as mystical as it sounds; numerous neuroscientists have speculated about that and have posited that things like psychedelic drugs, dreams, and meditation may dampen those restraints of translation and allow us to temporarily experience consciousness — and reality — in a wider format.
Taking Sagan’s quote mentioned above one step further, Nader makes a convincing case that it isn’t just us observing the universe; each of us is a portal through which Consciousness explores itself.
Blasphemy!
Does this concept verge on the taboo subject of RELIGION? (God forbid!)
No. Religion is the product of combining spirituality with politics, and this is not that.
Spirituality is the innate sense shared by virtually all human societies and most individuals since prehistory: that there is something bigger than us, something deeper within us — the numinous without dogma.
Religion is the result of people taking that elusive feeling and creating dogma with laws, demands, punishments, myths, consequences, and superheroes in the sky who judge us.
The difference between spirituality and religion is the difference between a nut off a tree and a milk chocolate candy bar full of high fructose corn syrup and preservatives, with a few shards of nuts sprinkled on top.
Maybe the universe isn’t a conglomeration of accidents, but a living thing comprised of ongoing ideas within the powerful force of Consciousness. And maybe each of our individual consciousnesses is a tiny particle of the field of Consciousness that is thinking the universe into existence.
And inside each of us is another universe of trillions of subatomic particles hovering together to create a mammal called (your name here) with a mind that can contemplate and explore the universe and our place in it.
Whatever the case, opening my mind to this has led me to view this tragicomedy we’re cast members of as something of a temporary illusion that can be experienced with joy without white-knuckling the ride quite so frantically.
This contemplation has allowed me to stop my particular bronco of consciousness from bucking so often and begin nibbling the grass and enjoying the day.