Georgi Y. Johnson's Blog: I AM HERE - Opening the Windows of Life & Beauty, page 20

The Big Freeze, Depression & Nondual Healing – Bart ten Berge

When we feel hopeless and vulnerable in an environment where we lack feeling connection, there is a risk of moving into depression. Depression is the freezing of feelings – good and bad – and this isolates us still further. Here, spiritual psychologist Bart ten Berge tells how it works and how important it is to feel the living feelings, in order to allow the vitality and power of life to move through the system.

In Nondual Healing, we treat depression as the energetic freeze around the “Dark Night of the Soul”, When there is a persistent refusal to address core contractions and trauma out of fear of falling into existential despair, the freeze spreads outwards, desentizing parts of personality and building rigid, isolating and defensive structures of ego.

As there is no free flow of energy, either from the inner core outwards into expression, or from the outside inward (due to protective shields of ego and personality structure), the condition can become chronic.

Most of us carry patches and layers of depression within ourselves – often manifesting as boredom, annoyance, loneliness and decrease in feeling connection. Healing involves the investment of consciousness in nondual aspects that allows connections to reform between inner and outer light (see below).

Memory of Birth – Russel Williams

DO YOU REMEMBER YOUR BIRTH?

Conventional psychology dictates that we have no conscious memory until late infancy, and this false parameter determines the depth of penetration in healing. Yet when we move not with chronological (left brain) memory but experiential memory, it becomes clear that atmospheres, feelings and sensations are imprinted at a formational layer on the psyche. All that is required is a willingness to let conscious mind, take the lead from the experiential zone of sentient (feeling) awareness

Born in 1921, Russel Williams had no formal education nor any religious affiliation. Yet through the purity of self inquiry and experiential integrity, he emerged in our generation as a teacher of teachers.

NOT I, NOT OTHER THAN I

An article about the book from our dear friend Steve Taylor

Russel Williams is a simple man. On the surface, you would think of him as a fairly typical man of his generation, although perhaps one who looks unusually young and sprightly for his 93 years. If you visited him at home with his wife Joyce, you wouldn’t find anything unusual there either. Again, it would strike you as a fairly typical house for a couple of their senior years.

Russel is not educated – he left school at the age of 11 (in 1932) and has had no formal education since. He’s not an intellectual; he hasn’t read a great many books, and in his teachings he only rarely refers to texts or other sources. Although he has been the president of the Buddhist Society of Manchester since 1974, and sometimes uses Buddhist terms or talks about the Buddha as an individual, he doesn’t consider himself a Buddhist. He certainly doesn’t ‘teach’ Buddhism in any formal sense.

As a result, Russel’s spiritual teachings are very ‘naked’ and pure – that is, they are very free of theories, concepts and categories. This gives his teachings a rare clarity and power. There is no system. There are no rituals or rules to follow, and no ideas to take on board. You don’t have to believe anything. You don’t have to accept anything. You don’t have to become anything. All you have to do is be.

Russel often says that he’s not interested in convincing people of anything. He encourages people to play with his teachings, to question them, to find out for themselves whether they are true. He doesn’t think of himself as a guru, and has no desire to accumulate followers or disciples. Everything he teaches stems very directly from a particular state of being, one which he experiences as his constant reality, and which he has done for almost 65 years. There are many different terms for this state: stillness, pure consciousness, emptiness of being, the essence of our being, our true nature…

Russel teaches us how to uncover this state – how we can nurture it, and remove some of the obstacles which stop its expression. He makes it clear that this is our natural state, and that it’s only due to confusion that we have lost access to it. He helps us to remove the confusion, to disentangle our minds from the mess of concepts and thinking habits which cloud them, so that we can become who we really are.

In this state, we are naturally one with everything, and with the universe itself. We are part of the Unmanifest. We are part of the pure consciousness which has given rise to the whole universe. That consciousness is our true nature, and when we rest within it, we feel a powerful sense of ease and contentment.

Since the late 1950s, Russel has held regular talks at the premises of the Buddhist Society of Manchester. Initially these were held almost every evening, but over the last few decades, they have taken place twice a week, on Monday and Wednesday evenings. Apart from missing the occasional week due to ill health, the meetings continue from year to year, unbroken. They are free of charge – on principle, Russel has never made any money from his spiritual teachings. The meetings are also completely open – anyone is free to come, and no one has ever been turned away.

Russel has never promoted or publicised himself. You won’t find any of his talks advertised on the Internet or any videos of his on YouTube. Until now, he has never published any writings. He has always believed that he can be most effective working with small groups, helping to bring about change by intensively engaging with individuals.

I first suggested the idea of him writing a book several years ago. He was initially dismissive, saying that his teachings were most effective on a “feeling level”, and that this could never be captured in writing. He was happy to let me interview him and tell his story in my book Out of the Darkness, but said he had no desire to publish a book of his own. For a long time, I encouraged him to record the twice-weekly meetings, so that they could be transcribed and perhaps eventually published, but again, he was not enthusiastic.

However, three years ago I learned that Russel was now open to the idea of writing and publishing a book. Nearing the age of 90, he was aware that it might not be too long before he departed this Earth, and felt that it might be helpful to leave a record of his teachings. As a result, we began to record some of the meetings.

Knowing that Russel’s early life was filled with many tragic and dramatic events, I was keen for the book to be partly an autobiography. Even from a purely historical point of view, his life story is fascinating: the terrible hardship of his life during the 1920s and 30s (particularly after being orphaned by the age of 11), his experiences at Dunkirk and during the Blitz, and his wanderings after the war. This leads to the story of his sudden spiritual awakening – one of the most amazing examples of ‘transformation through suffering’ I have come across.

We decided that an autobiography and a book of teachings would complement each other well, which led to the idea of setting them out as alternate chapters. As a result, I began to spend time with Russel at his home in Atherton (near Manchester), recording his recollections and memories of his life. I typed the recordings up, edited them, then handed the printed pages to him, for corrections and additions.

I spent two years working on the book on/off, but it never felt onerous. It was a labour of love, and a privilege, both to spend time with Russel and to delve so deeply into his teachings.

I first heard about Russel back in 1997. I had become friendly with a fellow spiritual seeker called Tony, whom I met at a Gurdjieff group. One evening, in his flat, I asked him, “Do you think you’ve ever met anyone who is enlightened?”

“Well, there’s a man in Sale [a suburb of Manchester] who some people think is enlightened,” he told me. “Very few people know about him, although he’s been teaching for decades.”

I accompanied Tony to one of Russel’s meetings the following week. I was initially slightly sceptical. Russel didn’t look like a spiritual teacher. He wore large black-rimmed glasses, had combed-back white hair and was formally dressed in a jacket and white shirt and tie. He was hard of hearing, and spoke very quietly, but clearly. I was aware of a few other English spiritual teachers of his generation, such as Alan Watts, Douglas Harding and Bede Griffiths. But Russel seemed different to them. He definitely wasn’t from the upper echelons of the British class system. Although he had a fairly nondescript southern English accent, you could tell his background was humble and ordinary.

Like many people, I had quite an esoteric concept of spirituality and enlightenment. I associated those terms with Eastern traditions; they conjured up images of Indian gurus with long beards and long flowing robes, or monks with shaven heads. I had also been conditioned into thinking of enlightenment as a rare and unattainable state, something which only a few Indian or Tibetan adepts – and perhaps a few ascetic Christian mystics – had attained. So the idea that this ordinary looking 76 year old (as he was at that time) Englishman could be enlightened seemed a little bizarre.

However, Russel struck me immediately as an extremely wise person, who had found deep contentment and had a passionate desire to share it with others. I appreciated the purity and directness of his teachings straight away. I began to attend the meetings regularly, and after a while I noticed that after each visit, there was a powerful sense of well-being inside me – a feeling of lightness and calmness – which lasted for most of the next day and sometimes longer.

Nevertheless, it took me a few years to absorb the full power of Russel’s teachings and of his being. This was probably because I initially took an intellectual approach to his teachings, analysing and interpreting them in the light of other spiritual traditions and teachings. But gradually I began to switch off to the intellectual aspect, and to shift into more of a ‘feeling’ mode. I didn’t do this consciously; it was just a process which occurred naturally over the first years that I attended Russel’s talks.

I began to experience very powerful altered states of consciousness during the meetings, which I still experience nowadays. These are quite difficult to describe, but they usually begin with a feeling of stillness, and a sense of energy slowing down and intensifying inside me. Then there is a sense of light, glowing brighter until it seems to engulf all objects in the room in a golden radiance. All objects seem to lose separateness, to merge into the radiance. I no longer feel any separateness; the notions of inside and outside lose significance. My inside is also outside, and vice versa. There is a tremendous sense of serenity. When I look around the room, there is a feeling of complete unfamiliarity, as if this is the first time I’ve ever been in it, and as if all the people and the objects around me are completely new to me…

At that point I’ll give up trying to describe the state. For some reason, it seems to be most powerful – and to happen most easily – when Russel is talking to me and looking directly at me.

This is perhaps the most important aspect of Russel’s teaching: the power of his being, and the feeling of oneness and deep serenity he generates through his being. Almost everybody who attends the meetings experiences this – although it might manifest itself in different ways – and it’s probably the main reason why they keep coming back. (Some people have been regularly attending the meetings for 40 years or more. Even though I’ve been going for 17 years now, I still think of myself as a relative newcomer.)

Over the years, Russel’s teachings and his being have had a powerful cumulative effect on me. Looking back, I can sense that they have affected me in ways which I am only barely conscious of. They have seeped into my being and become a part of me. They have deepened, expanded and stabilised my spiritual experience. Thousands of people who have encountered Russel directly over the last few decades will vouch for the same. And hopefully many thousands more will have a similar experience through reading this book.

It’s a great privilege to introduce the teachings of this almost unknown figure – one of the most remarkable and powerful spiritual teachers of our time, and possibly of all time – to a wider audience.

Not I, Not other than I: The Life and Teachings of Russel Williams, Edited by Steve Taylor, published by O books.

Buy at Amazon UK.

Buy as Amazon USA.

10 Dogmas of Science – Rupert Sheldrake

In a talk hosted and later banned by TedX, Rupert Sheldrake outline the misconceptions of science enshrined in certain non-truths that are treated as fact.

More inquiries into spirituality & science

Spirituality of Life Crisis – Georgi

Spiritual emergency, mid-life crisis, the dark night of the soul. Georgi describes how the structures of character and ego can be under a powerful pressure to get out the way of the inner light.

 

Structures of self, according to nondual therapy. In a spiritual emergency, the pressure fron the inside-out becomes to great, so identity cracks open, causing a flood of consciousness – ecstasy, revelation and often a dark night of the soul prior to reintegration.

Strength & Vulnerability – Georgi

Vulnerability is the softening that allows consciousness to include all that’s appearing in our inner and outer world. The more we can allow vulnerability, the less we resist perception of that which is anyway happening. It is this awareness of what emerges through us that allows authentic response on behalf of the well-being of the whole. As such, vulnerability is our greatest strength.

Angels in the Dread Fields

There is an interesting feature of the polarity of heaven and hell. While from the vantage point of heaven, we are able to contain hell (in a way that we can even feel the beauty in painful experiences), from the perspective of hell, heaven is almost impossible to find.

The promise of infinite love or eternal light, even the soul of purpose, seems to have been ripped from experience, as if it were a mere illusion. The naked vibrations and discords of pain that underpin the atmosphere of dread are far louder and more apparently ‘real’ than any silent or invisible whisper of hope.

One who is caught in this field is hardly aware of the energy of dread, as there is a deep resonance with it. It is ironic that many of the occupants of the hell-zones are not aware of their suffering as there is such a depth of familiarity with it as the furniture of home. Solidified as “the reality”, the dread field has become the earth and sky of what’s possible, and living has generated to automated degrees of selfishness, jealousy and competition.

For many, when that ‘resonance’, or man-made harmony within discord is disturbed, there can be an incredible resentment, jealousy or even a despising of “others” caught in the fantasy of love, peace, innocence, purity, truthfulness or freedom.

A rage can break loose that intends to defile the holy places, rip the sanctimonious ones from their imaginary thrones, and educate the innocent in the hardship of the real world. This “real” world needs to be impressed, if needed, by force, on the gullible ones who have lost their connection with the ‘reality’ of suffering.

A key minefield in this, is in the split between male and female, which plays through family systems and the structures of patriarchy. As these forms are often passed on from generation to generation, leaving the dread field can be still more confusing as it can feel like betrayal.

In one sense, many enactments of cruelty and horror (such as today’s infamous ISIS), are embodying this raging scream of suffering, (in vain, heroic guise), screaming through the global media networks that physical life is fragile: we bleed; we can be hurt; we suffer the agony of neglect; injustice; sexual oppression; lies and propaganda. It’s a collective projection of the trauma of us all and the deeper horror is that everywhere it takes form, it creates more trauma, more dread and more division.

Hell is an isolated ward in a hidden asylum of our being, covered by masks of social conformity. Yet there are angels in the dread fields. They will not be seen, felt or sensed unless we reach out, in our despair, for help.

Assistance will come by virtue of form, which is pure, living presence. Angels of the dread fields both witness and open the senses to the experience of hell, yet they are not made of its energies. This is the I AM HERE of presence that can have an alchemical effect in releasing living quality from traumatic contractions. They are like rods of light, timelessly waiting for us to make that one critical movement of releasing the separate self: the prayer to the unknown; the surrender to the source; the calling towards a higher power to set us free; the allowance of source to move towards source.

This call from the gut of pure being towards the imperceivable, wider universe requires an allowance of the one energy that dread most abhors: the energy of helplessness. The admission of helplessness is the opening needed for help to come. This movement of surrender, the unconditional supplication into the darkness, ruptures the walls of the separate self. When these walls are fractured, the light of awareness shines through like a signal towards home. The angels are suddenly seen.

We can call them angels, but we can also call them real people. They are those who have been to hell and back themselves, and whose lives have been transformed through the natural arising of care. They care for the “other” because they have been the other. The awareness which suffered in hell is now the awareness that can stay in hell with another, releasing its walls which are based on isolation. It never leaves hell, it simply expands to include far wider and purer dimensions.

This awareness spontaneously answers the call of the awareness locked in trauma. In this, there is a live link set up out of the precincts of despair into the ‘heaven’ that can contain hell. Form cares for form through the shared unity of awareness. Compassion is born.

First Signs of Weird Quantum Property of Empty Space?

At the Quantum level, the stuff we call ‘matter’ vanishes and what is found instead is a play of energy, particles that are at once here and not here. On the quantum scale it’s been claimed that the future can change the past, that a wave is simultaneously also a particle, that we simultaneously dwell in a host of parallel dimensions, and that the simple effect of observation can have a direct impact on experimental results. Yet some scientists have claimed that this quantum stuff doesn’t scale up. The quantum effects in our biological systems or in larger dimensions of matter – such as bridge building – get ‘washed out’.

When Quantum Gets Universal

Now, the lid is off the box and Schrödinger’s cat is coming to greet us with the first ever observation of quantum effects playing out on a universal scale – in dimensions far greater than our whole planet. By studying light emitted from a dense and strongly magnetised neutron star using ESO’s Very Large Telescope, astronomers found the first observational indications of a strange quantum effect, first predicted in the 1930s.

This VLT study is the very first observational support for predictions of these kinds of QED effects arising in extremely strong magnetic fields.

The polarisation of the observed light suggests that the empty space around the neutron star is subject to a quantum effect known as vacuum birefringence. Mignani explains: “According to QED, a highly magnetised vacuum behaves as a prism for the propagation of light, an effect known as vacuum birefringence.”

Neutron stars are the very dense remnant cores of massive stars — at least 10 times more massive than our Sun — that have exploded as supernovae at the ends of their lives. They also have extreme magnetic fields, billions of times stronger than that of the Sun, that permeate their outer surface and surroundings.

These fields are so strong that they even affect the properties of the empty space around the star. Normally a vacuum is thought of as completely empty, and light can travel through it without being changed. But in quantum electrodynamics (QED), the quantum theory describing the interaction between photons and charged particles such as electrons, space is full of virtual particles that appear and vanish all the time. Very strong magnetic fields can modify this space so that it affects the polarisation of light passing through it.

Among the many predictions of QED, however, vacuum birefringence so far lacked a direct experimental demonstration. Attempts to detect it in the laboratory have not yet succeeded in the 80 years since it was predicted in a paper by Werner Heisenberg (of uncertainty principle fame) and Hans Heinrich Euler.

Source

This effect can be detected only in the presence of enormously strong magnetic fields, such as those around neutron stars.

Roberto Turolla (University of Padua, Italy).

 

This artist’s view shows how the light coming from the surface of a strongly magnetic neutron star (left) becomes linearly polarised as it travels through the vacuum of space close to the star on its way to the observer on Earth (right). The polarisation of the observed light in the extremely strong magnetic field suggests that the empty space around the neutron star is subject to a quantum effect known as vacuum birefringence, a prediction of quantum electrodynamics (QED). This effect was predicted in the 1930s but has not been observed before. The magnetic and electric field directions of the light rays are shown by the red and blue lines. Model simulations by Roberto Taverna (University of Padua, Italy) and Denis Gonzalez Caniulef (UCL/MSSL, UK) show how these align along a preferred direction as the light passes through the region around the neutron star. As they become aligned the light becomes polarised, and this polarisation can be detected by sensitive instruments on Earth.

An Unbothered Bliss – Georgi Y. Johnson

When did we forget

an unreflected wonder of light

the unbothered bliss

of wet air on skin

the uncomposed mystery

of a human hand?

How did we learn

ourselves as separate

from the water,

unbounded sky

and temporal horizon?

Who fooled us in belief

that the inside stops

and an outside begins?

Come home, in naturalness

my lovely

every step in peace

identical to peace,

Peace.

Come home, beauty,

to the space

you never left.

Mind the Voices – 3 Speakers Inside the Head

There are many voices in the mental field. Some echo an inner calling, some could seem to be telepathic, and some repeat the mantra of suffering of humanity as a whole, as it evolves from generation to generation, and one is the voice of inner calling – often called the ‘still small voice’. How to discern between them?

As we become mindful of our thoughts and feelings, the quality, tone and nature of the mental chatter we uncover can be curious, amusing, and sometimes deeply rooted in ancient wounds. Here, we take a look at three qualities of the inner voice – qualities that bring into question the very notion of a separate, individual mind.
1. Very Old Programs

Some of the voices we hear in our heads are old programs, like repeating records, often acquired at a young age. These voices tend to be flat, hypnotic and repetitive.

One dirty, old record of mine is “Nobody likes you.” It’s a quite a classic. Unconditional to progress, elated states of being, success, achievement and periods of adoration, it goes on with its stubborn mantra.

These kind of destructive mantras are based on egoic defense and duality, and they often fan the fire behind the spiritual quest, the intellectual quest, the moral quest, and much of the activities of a life-time. Without any relation to intelligence or spiritual development, these broken records continue at a subliminal layer of mind, with banal repetition, even at times when being “liked” is utterly irrelevant. Their grip can’t be easily theorized away, as they are also often hereditary and alive in our cells.

One could wonder how many empires have been built, how many genocides conducted and how many wars fought and lost (and lost and lost), due to the repetition of similar unrealized root mantras of “normal” minds. Having identified such programs, if we continue to believe their subtle lunacy, we trot our way to familiar halls of hell. From the back-stage of conscious mind, these (seemingly) inane sentences are often actually directing our lives and energy force as humans.

For me, the tone of this voice is thin, bitter and slightly spiteful. It’s not my voice, and can be male or female. But it’s close to home, internalized at the root of mental form.

2. The Edited Conversation

Other voices we hear in our heads can be the supposed replay of conversations. Yet in this rattle, do we listen to the subtle, creative way we alter the tone, and employ censorship in order to satisfy our own personal agenda of separation?

These voices are the work of audio imagination, recomposing memory in subtle ways and with artful deletions in an attempt to regain inner peace through the a forcing of the feeling of being “OK”, right, or even marvellous.

These voices are also the kind of static in the mind that can be released through deeper attention or to listening more openly to the nature or atmosphere of the silence beyond them. If they are left to party, they will compose whole future scenarios as well as recomposing past ones. In all this, they are decomposing self esteem, vitality, and living connection to the truth of sensory perception. They distract and manipulate. They close down the senses, and as such, are hardly audible in quality or tone. Yet when heard, they do have a distinct atmosphere of distraction, denial and delusion.

Often, we can experience a variety of voices. There is the one that is adult within our minds, that judges, condemns and issues orders of censorship on the one that is childish. Many self judgements and repressions of authentic feeling arise from an attempt to identify exclusively with the adult one, and to keep the shameful one under wraps. Many choose to believe in the inner disciplinarian, that demands the kind of perfection from living form which is never going to happen.

3. The Still Small Voice

Then, beneath all this cacophony, there is the Still Small Voice. But it won’t necessarily speak, especially not if we don’t believe in it enough to listen. We need to invite it with questions and be prepared to listen either to the answer, or to the quality of the silence.

The more we open our ears to this Still Small Voice, and begin to trust it, the more we open the inner communication line to the undercurrent of our own minds. In this dimension, time and space are not absolute, meaning it is possible from here, to receive a far deeper guidance about what is needed in terms of direction, (without it needing to make ‘rational’ sense).

Acting on this voice has saved my life more than once. Today, I try to speak from there as much as possible; simply because it articulates a deeper truth and wisdom; one that no structure of ego or individual “personhood” could ever oversee.

The key, as always, is in the receptivity, in the listening – listening not only to the words, but the tones. Listening not only for the meaning but for the harmony. Listening not only for the attitude but for the purity of unconditional care in the inner articulation. Let this be our compass.

There is (funnily enough) a stillness in the Still Small Voice. A stillness that oversees cause and effect through an interconnectedness of being in a way that our small minds could never anticipate. It is not for by chance that the animals in Thailand moved to higher ground hours before the people on the day of the Tsunami. They had access to information that people have long been programmed to ignore.

Modern psychiatry tends to swiftly categorize individuals according to parameters that are hardly understood by science, let alone by its representatives. In no time, they are coercing a range of medications to numb the mind – drugs that have a variety of long-term damaging effects and that at best only repress symptoms rather than treating causal layers of discomfort.

Unfortunately, the very phenomena of thought, intuition, and the insanity of the hypnotic messages of judgement and condemnation shared with our environment are hardly understood, but perpetuated by many in the psychiatric profession. The judgment of the psychiatrist often resonates with the judgement of society towards mental “instability” and in turn affirms the lesser voices of mind – such as the one that reiterates again and the again that the individual has no worth, that there is separation, rejection and condemnation.

In this, many beautiful minds are deprived of their greatest strength, the clarity that can emerge through the development of an open receptivity in which there is an ability to truly listen to the guidance of the Still Small Voice, through which individual and collective wisdom can emerge. In the meantime, it can be surreal to watch people in their lives, locked into a half-listening to their own inner voices, as if they lived in a private bubble, disconnected from the living miracle of the world available beyond the mist of almost-thought.

Also on I AM HERE: The Still Small Voice is Speaking. Are we sane enough to listen?

Why You and the Universe are One. Deepak Chopra & Menas Kafatos

By Deepak Chopra, MD, Menas Kafatos, PhD

Opinion piece first published in SFGATE.

It takes a lot to overturn the accepted view of reality, but it doesn’t take a lot to begin. The accepted view of reality holds that human beings exist in the context of a vast physical universe “out there.” Only an extreme mystic would doubt this description, but all of us should. Sir John Eccles, a famous British neurologist and Nobel laureate, declared, “I want you to realize that there exists no color in the natural world, and no sound – nothing of this kind; no textures, no patterns, no beauty, no scent.” What Eccles means is that all the qualities of Nature, from the luxurious scent of a rose to the sting of a wasp and the taste of honey, are produced by human beings. Erwin Schrödinger, one of the main founders of quantum mechanics, said essentially the same thing when he declared that photons, quanta of light, have no color, such properties arise in the biology of perception.

Those are remarkable statements, all the more because they are all-inclusive. The most distant galaxies billions of light years away, have no reality without you, because everything that makes any galaxy real— with the multitude of stars with their heat, emitted light, and masses, the positions of the distant galaxies in space and the velocity that carries each distant galaxy away at enormous speed—requires a human observer with a human nervous system. If no one existed to experience heat, light, mass, and so on, nothing could be real as we know it. If the qualities of Nature are a human construct arising from human experiences, the existence of the physical universe “out there” must be seriously questioned–and along with it, our participation in such a universe.

When you break experience down into its tiniest ingredients, the physicality of everything begins to vanish. The story we keep telling ourselves depends on reality “out there” having a physical explanation, but it doesn’t. For example, we depend on sight to navigate through the world. No matter what you see “out there”—an apple, cloud, mountain, or tree—light bouncing off the object makes it visible, but how? No one knows. What makes seeing totally mysterious can be summed up in a few undeniable facts:

Photons, the quanta of light, are invisible. They aren’t bright, even though you see sunlight as bright.
The brain has essentially zero light inside it, being a dark mass of oatmeal-textured cells enveloped in a fluid that is not terribly different from sea water. (There are extremely faint traces of photon activity in the brain, but the optic nerve doesn’t transmit photons to the visual cortex.)
Because there is no light to speak off in the brain, there are no pictures or images, either. When you imagine the face of a loved one, nowhere in the brain does that face exist like a photograph. How do action potentials in neuron electric firings become conscious awareness, no one knows.

At present no one can explain how invisible photons being converted to chemical reactions and faint electrical impulses in the brain creates the three-dimensional reality we all take for granted. Brain scans pick up the electrical activity, which is why an fMRI contains patches of brightness and color. So something is going on in the brain. But the actual nature of sight itself is mysterious. One thing is known, however. The creation of sight is done by you. Without you, the entire world—and the vast universe extending in all directions—can’t exist.

Expand this known fact to everything you experience, and every quality of life requires human participation. “Requires” means two things, first, that experience is the ground state of everything, including the activity of doing science, and second, that every quality is a human construct derived from experiences of individuals in human species. Another species with a different nervous system would participate in the universe in a way completely unknown to us with our human nervous system.

Physics has had decades to process the insight of John Archibald Wheeler, the eminent American physicist, general relativist and quantum physicist, who originated the notion of a “participatory universe,” a cosmos in which all of us are embedded as co-creators, replacing the accepted universe “out there,” which is separate from us. Wheeler used the image of children with their noses pressed against a bakery window to describe the view that kept the observer separate from the thing being observed. But in a fully participatory universe, the observer and the thing observed are one.

You are one with the universe because you experience Nature in your awareness, and there is no other source for reality as we know it. If anything is real that cannot enter human consciousness, we will never know it. How would we even know it? Even if we resort to abstract mathematics which might infer the existence of realities beyond our ability to sense them or measure them, we should realize that mathematics itself, albeit the most refined one, is tied to human observers. It takes a mathematician to understand mathematics. To summarize,

The universe we live in is a human construct, including everything in it.
All activity takes place in consciousness. If you want to point at where the stars are, there is no physical location, because consciousness isn’t a “thing.”
The brain isn’t the seat of consciousness but acts more like a radio receiver, and perhaps emitter, translating conscious activity into physical correlates. (The radio receiver metaphor describes the feedback loop between mind and brain, which are actually not separate but part of the same complementary activity in consciousness.)
To understand our true participation in the universe, we must learn much more about awareness and how it turns mind into matter and vice versa.

These are difficult truths for mainstream scientists to accept, and some would react to them with skepticism, disbelief, or anger. But following the other track of explanation, beginning with physical objects “out there,” fails utterly to explain how we are conscious to begin with. That’s why in scattered pockets, some physicists are beginning to talk about a conscious universe, where consciousness is a given throughout Nature. In fact, the founders of quantum mechanics a century ago agreed more with this view, having understood that quantum mechanics implies observation and agency of mind. In our upcoming book You Are the Universe, we call it the human universe, emphasizing where the whole construct comes from. As we will see in future posts, once you realize that you and the universe are one, the whole journey of being human shifts radically.