How a Convenient Fiction Won Out over Reality

By Deepak Chopra, MD, FACP, FRCP

The spiritual view of life is trapped between two opposite words, physics and metaphysics, the study of the physical world and the study of what might lie beyond the physical. Given a choice between physics and metaphysics, almost everyone would make the scientific choice, physics. The trap for spirituality is that the two choices are made to seem mutually exclusive.

This is a modern habit that is deeply ingrained — hardly anyone even mentions metaphysics — but relying on the physical world as the foundation of reality has run into serious problems. Unable or unwilling to return to metaphysics, people are stuck without a viable model of reality.

Putting reality on a firm foundation is one of humanity’s driving forces, and ever since the ancient Greeks it was supposed that the world is like a sandcastle on the beach. If you reduce the sandcastle to grains of sand, you know where it comes from. Reduce any physical object, and if you reduce far enough, your search leads to the atom and beyond.

The problem is the “beyond” part, because over a century ago quantum physics discovered that there is nothing like a minuscule grain of sand from which everything is built. Atoms can be envisioned as a tiny nucleus surrounded by orbiting electrons. This is a reassuring picture since it makes the atom seem like a miniature solar system. However, this model isn’t the same as reality.

The subatomic particles, or quanta, that make up an atom are not bits of solid matter. The best visualization in physics for how matter exists is a rippling field of activity, with particles being the intersection between two or more waves in the field. This visualization is just a stab at giving substance to a mystery that physics can only grasp through mathematical formulas. Everything in modern physics occurs in a mathematical space that doesn’t remotely resemble the physical world.

What this means is that matter, if understood as grains of sand building up bigger and bigger structures, is just a useful fiction. But the building block theory of reality, however useful, leaves out the very thing that builds models and invents technology: the mind. Grains of sand have no potential for building a sandcastle without the mind to invent sandcastles. Without explaining the mind, you cannot explain creativity, curiosity, invention, emotion, aspirations, fears, wishes, dreams, and every other aspect of being human.

There was always an illusory side to this whole acceptance of the physical world as the foundation of reality. The five senses are fooled by the mirage of matter, which means that the story they tell is just a useful fiction, too. (You long ago set aside countless little deceptions delivered by your senses. For example, when you are very tired your body feels heavier, even though you haven’t actually gain weight.)

At bottom, we all navigate between objective facts and subjective experience knowing full well that they aren’t two separate domains but an entangled whole that is very hard to explain. This wholeness is known as reality. What is it made of? One of the greatest quantum pioneers, Werner Heisenberg, held that atoms and subatomic particles do not exist as material things but as response by Nature to whatever the experimenter is asking. Change your questions, and Nature obliges with an answer that fits your point of view. We can call this explanation perspectivism.

Undeniably there can be no perspectives without consciousness. So reality comes down to consciousness, which is the very opposite of a building block. Instead of being tiny and separate like a grain of sand, consciousness is a field extending infinitely everywhere. Modern physics disparages all metaphysics, but it likes the model of a field, which is why from a physics viewpoint reality consists of ripples in the quantum field, the gravity field, and a few other basic fundamental fields.

The advantage of a field is that it allows you to conceive of Nature as a whole. But we can’t conceive of consciousness on its own. Consciousness is where conceptions come from, including scientific models. It is the irreducible “stuff” of ideas, emotions, invention, curiosity, and all the other things created in the mind. You might struggle with the fact that time, space, matter, and energy are also created in consciousness, but there is actually no other way to explain wholeness.

You can’t have one foundation for the physical world and another foundation for the mental world. Science has long recognized this, which is why so much weight was put on the atom. It was hoped that somehow tiny grains of sand would explain the mind if only they got tiny enough. Many working scientists still assume that this hope will come true one day, but it won’t, for the simple reason that matter is just as conceptual as Alice in Wonderland. Alice knew she was in an imaginary world and devoted herself to getting back to the real world. We are in the real world, being conscious, while applying our efforts to justify an imaginary one.

This ingrained mental habit has to change if we want to become totally real again, in other words totally conscious. The search for reality is forced to go beyond the physical world, which is why the ancient Greeks added the prefix “meta,’ which means beyond, to the root word “physics.” The two are meant to define the whole of reality, not to split it into two separate domains. If this sketch intrigues you, the full argument is given in my book Metahuman, where going beyond becomes the basis of individual awakening and global change at the same time.

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