(Consciousness as creative force in the quantum substrate)
Focusing consciousness on a quantum event determines its outcome. For instance, when we try to observe an electron, we force it to assume a definite position in space, and our consciousness produces the results of the measurement. So, in modern physics, consciousness acts like a creative force in the quantum foam from which the physical world emerges.
This background field of awareness is related to the concept of the “ground of being.” The phrase, which was popularized by the German philosopher Paul Tillich, is a way of thinking about “being” as something in which we are immersed or grounded without having to refer to the idea of a God in heaven directing our lives.
Christian mystic Meister Eckhart called the ground of being the Istigkeit (“Isness”) or eternal state of being, which—rather than non-being—is at the heart of all things.
They are conceptually born from each other. Even ultimates like “being” and “nonbeing” produce each other in this way.
(Ibn Arabi, Leibniz, and the monad across traditions)
The influential Islamic scholar Ibn Arabi (1165-1240), who wrote over 800 books, created a cosmological model of the Monad that become the dominant view in much of the Muslim world. He taught that all things belong to just one entity—the Monad. “We are through it,” he wrote, “but it is not through us.”
In his Monadology, Leibnitz explained that monads are indivisible and therefore can’t be created or destroyed. The soul-like monads are the basic units of awareness embedded in the fabric of consciousness in time and space. They have their own subjective perceptions and appetites that form the invisible basis of the physical world.
Einstein concluded that space and time are not separate but equivalent to each other and united them in a single continuum called “spacetime.”
We also see the cosmic trickster in the paradoxical phenomenon of quantum entanglement, in which two or more quantum particles created at the same time share the exact same behavior and physical characteristics even when separated by great distances.
(The unitary state as the natural condition of consciousness)
The shining awareness we share with it is our own being. In fact, the unitary state of consciousness is the natural state of consciousness. The daily confusion and struggle—the diminished awareness we call normal—is the aberration.
Personal consciousness moves back and forth between the clarity of pure being and the distractions, distortions, and delusions of the individual psyche.
- You become pure centerless awareness in a state of thought-free objectivity, in which there is complete knowledge or direct gnosis of reality. 6. The overall feeling is one of infinite security and bliss in which there is no fear or experience of time. 7. In describing the experience, it remains paradoxical and ineffable.
Yet modern physics tells us that there is really nothing “out there” to begin with. Everything in the universe sums up to zero. In that case, the only thing that remains are our mental images of this nothingness.
The Good is the highest of the immutable Forms which exist outside space and time before any substance appears. Forms are the purest universals and are the objective, essential basis of reality.