Banter: Qualia as Direct Manifestation of God

Communication between J and Cosmin Visan:

Dear Cosmin

I read your articles in SGJ on the qualia problem with interest. It seems there is some overlap in our work. I’d only point out that just about all of your conclusions are inherent in the holographic principle of quantum gravity if it’s given a natural interpretation in terms of quantum computing and is interpreted in a way that is consistent with the testimony of enlightened beings, which is how consciousness comes into the equation. See my papers on What is Beyond Computation and On the Nature of Plato’s Cave.

Another issue is how to inform the physics community at large of your conclusions. In terms of the holographic principle, I initially thought the work of Amanda Gefter would be an entrance way, but unfortunately, Gefter has only hardened her physicalist attitude. Roger Penrose is another example. The irony is that if you combine the work of Gefter and Penrose in a consistent way, your conclusions become self-evident, and the physicalist attitude dissolves away into thin air, to paraphrase Shakespeare. Any ideas?

Cosmin’s reply:

I tried to read your papers, but unfortunately I’m not familiar with qubits and event horizons, therefore I cannot follow. I don’t even believe in a physical world, so things like “acceleration”, “energy” don’t mean anything to me. But here is a quote from your papers:

“Whatever the observer observes is a form of information that can be reduced to bits of information encoded on the computer screen.”

I don’t think it is like that. And the reason is trivial: How do you encode the duck-rabbit image in this way, given that the pixels are the same on the screen, yet the experiences in consciousness are multiple (duck, rabbit, etc., potentially an infinite number of them)?

Hi Cosmin

Thanks for your reply. My whole approach is to show that the concept of nonduality, as discussed by Shankara and Nisargadatta in the language of the Vedas, or by the Tao, or by Zen , or by Chuang-Tzu, or by Plato, or by Rumi, or by Osho, or by Jed McKenna, or by any other enlightened being who attempts to explain it, is Totally Consistent with modern theoretical physics as formulated in terms of the holographic principle, which I consider to be the most fundamental scientific principle we currently have available. It’s just not possible to understand the holographic principle without a discussion of an accelerated observer and its event horizon and the qubits of information encoded on the observer’s event horizon that becomes its holographic screen. That’s the price of admission for this kind of scientific understanding.

In terms of your other objection, I agree that understanding things at the level of quantities (mathematics) is limited due to the qualia problem. A qubit of information encoded on a holographic screen is a quantity, but we don’t directly perceive quantities; we directly perceive qualities. We have to infer the quantities from our perception of qualities. I address this issue at the end of the paper on Plato’s Cave where I discuss the qualia problem at length. The answer is that qualities are inherent in the light of consciousness that projects all the images of the observer’s holographic world from the observer’s holographic screen to its point of view. In scientific terms, the images are reducible to qubits (quantities), but the perception of the images is always in terms of qualities due to the illuminating effect of the light of consciousness. In technical terms, the qubits are entangled due to quantum entanglement, but the focus of the light of consciousness (as in the focus of attention of consciousness) is what disentangles the quantum state and allows for the perception of qualities. When Plato speaks about ascending to the source of the light (the void), which is the nature of spiritual enlightenment, he is speaking about ascending to the source of the light of consciousness.

I also do not believe in the existence of physical reality. A physical world is a holographic world, which is constructed like the computer-generated virtual reality of the Matrix through quantum computing. Ultimately, only consciousness exists. That ultimate existence can only be described in terms of negation as pure undivided, unlimited and unchanging nothingness (the void).

Cosmin’s reply:

Upon reading more of your work, it is not clear to me in what way you use the concept of “acceleration”. Is it the physical one? Because if it is, given that humans and amoebas have the same acceleration of planet Earth, how come they have such different consciousnesses?

I will keep coming with questions as I read. You say:

“There is only an illusion that the central form of a person that appears in the observer’s holographic world is able to perceive things in that world. That illusion is created as the observer emotionally identifies itself with that emotionally animated central personal form. The central form of a person is always emotionally animated relative to all other forms that appear in the observer’s holographic world. The observer only emotionally identifies itself with that emotionally animated personal form due to its perception of feelings of emotional self-limitation to that emotionally animated personal form as that personal form is emotionally animated relative to all other forms that appear in its world.”

How does the emotional attachment to this image of the body make us also able to move this image of the body? And is there a reason why we are only attached to just one body and not multiple?

Hi Cosmin

I use the word acceleration in exactly the same sense Einstein used the word when he formulated the principle of equivalence. Every force, like gravity, is equivalent to an acceleration. In relativity theory, it’s important to understand who is actually undergoing this acceleration and is observing the effects of forces like gravity. The answer is the observer, who can only be understood as a point of view, which I would call a point of consciousness, at the origin or central point of view of its own frame of reference or coordinate system, which in terms of the holographic principle, is the central point of view of its own holographic world.

In the language of Advaita Vedanta, the observer is Atman or the Self, which is also called I Am. In the language of the Tao, the observer is called the Tao. The accelerated motion of the observer is always relative to the motionless void, which in Advaita is called Brahman and in the Tao is called the void. That accelerated motion is how the observer’s event horizon arises, which arises within the void, and becomes the observer’s holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon. The observer’s holographic screen, which surrounds the observer’s central point of view as a bounding surface of space, is like a virtual reality movie screen that displays all the projected and animated images of the observer’s holographic world. The images are projected from the observer’s holographic screen to its point of view due to the illuminating effect of the light of consciousness and are animated in the flow of energy that arises from the observer’s own accelerated motion. The observer perceives both the images of the form of all things that appear in its holographic world and the flow of energy that animates those forms.

When you identify yourself with the form of a person that appears in your own holographic world, that personal form is only the central form that is being emotionally animated relative to all other forms. You emotionally identify yourself with that central personal form due to the feelings of emotional self-limitation to that personal form that you perceive as that form is emotionally animated relative to all other forms. The expression of those emotions arises from the focus of attention of your consciousness. You are able to emotionally animate the form of your body because that is what your attention is focused upon. Attention is Intention. When you focus your attention, you express emotions and intentions. This is possible because the quantum state of your holographic world is a state of potentiality that arises from the entanglement of qubits of information. When you focus your attention and express an intention, you are choosing a specific intention as you disentangle the quantum state. You are choosing to follow a specific path in the sum over all possible paths. This always occurs through the expression of emotions that keeps you emotionally self-identified with the central form of your body that is emotionally animated relative to all other forms. There is always a direct correlation between the point of view of the observer at the center of its own holographic world and the central form of a person that appears in that holographic world. Different observers only have different points of view. We only share a consensual reality because our respective holographic screens overlap like a Venn diagram and share information between our respective holographic worlds.

At the level of perceiving your own holographic world, you are the observer. When your accelerated motion relative to the motionless void comes to an end in an ultimate state of free-fall, which is to say when your emotions are no longer expressed, your own holographic world disappears from existence from your own point of view because you no longer have an event horizon, and only the void remains. This is the nature of spiritual enlightenment. Your individual consciousness, present at its own point of view at the center of its own holographic world, dissolves back into the ocean of undifferentiated consciousness, like a drop of water that dissolves back into the ocean. In this ultimate state of dissolution, you know yourself to be the void. The void is not only the source of your individual consciousness that perceives your own world, but is also the source of the light of consciousness that illuminates your own world. When Plato speaks about becoming spiritually enlightened and ascending to the source of the light, that’s what he is talking about.

It seems to me you have some naive ideas about the nature of spirituality. I would strongly recommend you read I Am That by Nisargadatta to purge yourself of these ideas. Reading the first few hundred pages should be sufficient. When you’ve fully digested what Nisargadatta says about spiritually, then come back to the holographic principle and correlate my interpretation of the holographic principle with what Nisargadatta says. The correlation is perfect. This correlation is how I was able to make progress in my interpretation of the holographic principle. I used Nisargadatta as my guide. I also found the Tao to be very helpful, especially the Gia-Fu Feng translation. I also found Osho and Jed McKenna to be very helpful. The Bhagavad Gita, Chuang-Tzu, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, and the Experience of No-Self by Bernadette Roberts are also very useful. I’d recommend you get your ideas about spirituality straight before you attempt to understand it scientifically. I could send you a synopsis of the above books, but I recommend you do the work for yourself and develop your own synopsis. I’ve found the holographic principle only makes sense if you first have the correct ideas about spirituality.

Cosmin’s reply:

But you didn’t answer the question. Given that humans and amoebas experience the same acceleration, why do they have different consciousnesses?

Hi Cosmin

I did answer your question. You’re just not ready to accept the answer.

You’re assuming consciousness is something personal. It isn’t. The form of a person is something that appears within consciousness, like an avatar in a virtual reality movie. The consciousness for the human avatar arises at its own point of view. The consciousness for the amoeba avatar arises at a different point of view. Each point of view undergoes its own accelerated motion in its own unique way, which is why those life-forms are animated in their own unique way. Acceleration includes all forces, not just gravity, or you could say that all other forces, like the electromagnetic force, are a disguised form of gravity. The varying emotional animations of the life-form of the person and the life-form of the amoeba represent the varying accelerated motions of the point of consciousness that is observing that particular life-form from its own point of view, like an avatar in a virtual reality movie. Each point of consciousness has its own avatar. The accelerated motions of each point of consciousness are different, and so the emotional animations of their respective avatars are different. My point of view is not the same as your point of view. My point of view undergoes its accelerated motion in its own way, and so my avatar is emotionally animated in its own way.

Cosmin’s reply:

What if you connect a human to a VR simulation? You can have the same qualia, but the acceleration of electrons in the computer would be different than the acceleration of electrons in the body. Same question for dreams.

Hi Cosmin

It seems to me that most of your confusion arises from your mistaken idea that there is an objective reality of the physical world out there that consciousness can perceive. This is the mistaken idea of local realism, which was resoundingly disproved by experiments on quantum entanglement and for which the Nobel prize was awarded. The scenario you describe is just another version of the Wigner friend paradox, which is only a paradox if we assume local realism, which is a mistaken assumption. There is no objective reality of the physical world out there that consciousness can perceive. In the vernacular of the Matrix, there is no spoon. The holographic principle tells us that there is only a holographic virtual reality world that appears to come into existence from the point of view of an observer due to the observer’s own accelerated motion. The observer can only be understood as a point of consciousness that gives rise to its event horizon due to its own accelerated motion, and its event horizon becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon. Everything the observer can observe in its own holographic world is a form of information that can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on its screen. The observer’s perception of all the forces that appear to occur in its own holographic world, including the gravitational, electromagnetic and nuclear forces, arises from its own accelerated motion. This is the natural consequence of the principle of equivalence in the context of the holographic principle. Do not try to bend the spoon. That is impossible. Only try to realize the truth. What truth? There is no spoon. Then you’ll see it is not the spoon that bends, but only yourself. The observer itself is creating all the apparent forces in its own holographic world due to its own accelerated motion. Different observers, each present at the central point of view of its own holographic world that arises due to its own accelerated motion, can only share a consensual reality due to information sharing that occurs when their respective holographic screens overlap like a Venn diagram.

This is the important distinction between a simulation and a construction. I do not use the word simulation because there is no objective physical reality of the world out there that actually exists and then is being simulated on a computer as a computer-generated virtual reality. The physical world is a holographic computer-generated virtual reality that only appears to exist from the point of view of an accelerating observer. The holographic principle explains how the observer creates its own quantum computer that gives rise to the construction and appearance of its own holographic virtual reality world through quantum computing in terms of the accelerating observer’s event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its event horizon. This creative process can be called a construction but not a simulation. The idea of a simulation only creates confusion. In reality, there is nothing to simulate. Instead of beginning with the assumption of the existence of a physical world, we begin with the assumption of the existence of an accelerating observer that is always present at the central point of view of its own holographic world that only appears to come into existence due to quantum computing that arises from the observer’s own accelerated motion.

In terms of the mistaken idea of local realism, a person is never an observer that makes a local observation of something in its world. A personal form is the central form of information that appears in the observer’s holographic world. There is only confusion because the observer is emotionally identifying itself with that personal form due to emotional feelings of self-limitation to that personal form as that form is emotionally animated relative to all other forms. In reality, the observer, present at the central point of view of its own holographic world, is the only observer of that holographic world. Perception always occurs in a subject-object relation, where the observer is the subject and its object of perception is a form of information that appears in its own holographic world. Everything that appears in that holographic world is entangled with everything else that appears in that world due quantum entanglement because all the qubits of information encoded on the observer’s holographic screen are entangled. The quantum state is a state of potentiality due to quantum entanglement. For the observer to actually observe something in its own holographic world, the quantum state of that holographic world must become disentangled. Actual observation always requires a choice in the sense of choosing to follow a particular path in the sum over all possible paths.

This brings us back to the qualia problem, which is best understood in terms of the light of consciousness. The observer must focus its attention on something in order to observe that thing. Focusing attention is a direct result of focusing the light of consciousness, which is how the quantum state becomes disentangled and actual observations occur. Each such actual observation is a choice in the sense of disentangling or reducing the quantum state of potentiality to an actual observable state. In the process of focusing the light of consciousness, what are quantities at the level of the quantum state (entangled qubits of information encoded on the observer’s holographic screen), are perceived in terms of their qualities.

The idea of local realism and the objective reality of the physical world is never a valid concept due to the way observation actually occurs in a subject-object relation. The subject is the observer, which is a point of consciousness at the center of its own holographic world. Objects of perception are forms of information that can be reduced to entangled qubits of information encoded on the observer’s own holographic screen. The process of observing an object is a choice that occurs as the light of consciousness is focused and the observer focuses its attention on that object. In the process, the quantum state is disentangled and the observer perceives qualities, not quantities. In the sense of the observer perceiving projected images, the light of consciousness is what projects and illuminates the images, just as the accelerated motion of the observer is what animates the images. This is inherently a non-local process. It is also inherently an unreal process, as the observer is only making observations of things in its own holographic virtual reality world.

In reality, only the consciousness of the observer really exists. The ultimate nature of that timeless existence is undifferentiated consciousness, which we call the void. The observer’s holographic virtual reality world is unreal and has no real existence. The observer’s holographic world only appears to come into existence from the accelerated point of view of the observer. When the observer’s accelerated motion comes to an end in an ultimate state of free-fall, the observer’s holographic virtual reality world disappears from existence from its own point of view, and only the void remains. In the words of the Bhagavad Gita: The unreal has no being; the real never ceases to be.

Cosmin’s reply:

Accelerated motion with respect to what? In physics, acceleration is space/time/time. Since space and time are just virtual constructs, what is the acceleration that you are talking about? This is why I asked you in a previous post if the acceleration that you talk about is the one from physics, namely space/time/time. And you said it is. But now you are contradicting yourself. You seem to make just random connections between concepts. So I ask again: What acceleration?

Hi Cosmin

As conceptualized in terms of conventional relativity theory, the observer’s accelerated motion does appear to take place in a space-time geometry. This appearance is only because we are mistakenly equating the observer with the form of a person who appears to make observations, which of course, is a paradox of self-reference, and cannot be the absolute truth. If you go back to the root of relativity theory in terms of the principle of equivalence, you’ll see that the observer is only a point of view at the origin of its own coordinate system or frame of reference. In terms of the holographic principle, the observer’s space-time geometry is purely a holographic effect of perception, like the kind of apparent geometry we observe in a virtual reality game displayed on a computer screen. That computer-generated geometry can appear to have curvature, but that apparent curvature is only an illusion of our perception. In the same way, the apparent space-time geometry of a holographic world also appears to have curvature, but that apparent curvature is only a holographic illusion of perception. That illusion of perception arises from the way all the projected and animated images of the virtual reality are related to each other in space and time, but even that space-time geometry is a perceivable aspect of the virtual reality.

The apparent space-time geometry of the observer’s holographic world can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on the observer’s holographic screen, which arises as the observer’s event horizon due to its own accelerated motion. Everything perceivable in a holographic world is reducible to qubits of information encoded on the observer’s holographic screen, including the space-time geometry of the observer’s holographic world. In reality, the observer’s accelerated motion cannot be within the space-time geometry of its holographic world, since that space-time geometry is just another thing that the observer perceives in its own holographic world. That space-time geometry is just another perceivable aspect of the observer’s own holographic world. As you’ve nicely stated, that space-time geometry is a virtual reality construct.

What is the observer’s accelerated motion really relative to? The answer is the void. The void cannot really be conceptualized, but for the purposes of this discussion, can best be conceptualized as an empty space of potentiality. This empty space of potentiality is motionless and unchanging. The void is like a motionless empty background space, within which all motion appears to take place. The observer’s accelerated motion is relative to the motionless void. The void is like an ocean of undifferentiated consciousness. In some mysterious way, the observer’s point of view, which is a point of consciousness, differentiates itself or separates itself from this ocean of undifferentiated consciousness. When this point of consciousness begins to undergo accelerated motion relative to the motionless void, the observer’s holographic world appears to come into existence. This occurs because the observer’s accelerated motion gives rise to its event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon. The observer’s event horizon is arising within the void.

Your question is what exactly is an acceleration if it’s not occurring in a space-time geometry? What does it mean to say the observer is undergoing accelerated motion relative to the motionless void? There really is no good answer to this question except to say this is how the observer’s holographic world is constructed. The observer’s accelerated motion is part of the construction process. As an empty space of potentiality, the void has the potential to place the observer in an accelerated frame of reference. Although this sounds odd, the idea of an acceleration as the time rate of change of movement through space over the course of time is really a secondary idea. The primary idea of acceleration is the accelerated expansion of space itself, which is the idea of dark energy. The void as an empty space of potentiality has the potential to express dark energy through the accelerated expansion of space, which always appears to expand relative to the central point of view of an observer. Fundamentally, all acceleration begins with the accelerated expansion of space itself, which places the observer in an accelerated frame of reference. The idea of an acceleration as the time rate of change of a movement through space over the course of time is a secondary idea.

The observer’s holographic world is characterized by a space-time geometry, which appears to have dynamical curvature due to the observer’s own accelerated motion. That dynamical curvature of the space-time geometry of the observer’s holographic world is what we call the force of gravity, which is purely a holographic effect of this construction process. Within the space-time geometry of the observer’s holographic world, the observer’s point of view appears to follow an accelerated world-line through that holographic world, but again, this is only a holographic illusion created by falsely equating the observer with the form of a person that appears in the observer’s holographic world. In reality, the observer is present at the central point of view of its own holographic world. The observer can only be understood as a point of consciousness that undergoes accelerated motion relative to the motionless void.

I hope you can appreciate the beauty of this geometric explanation, which is a consequence of the genius at work in Einstein’s formulation of relativity theory in purely geometric terms. The observer is a point of consciousness. The observer’s event horizon is a two dimensional bounding surface of space that arises due to the observer’s own accelerated motion and becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon. Within the space-time geometry of the observer’s holographic world, which is purely a holographic effect of perception, the observer appears to follow an accelerated world-line, but that is only because we are falsely equating the observer with the form of a person that appears in the observer’s holographic world. In reality, the observer’s accelerated motion is relative to the motionless void, and its event horizon is arising within the void. The void as an empty space of potentiality has the potential to create the space-time geometry of the observer’s holographic world.

This potentiality of the void to create geometry has important consequences when we try to understand how perception occurs in terms of disentangling the quantum state. The quantum state of the observer’s holographic world is entangled due to the entanglement of all the qubits of information encoded on its holographic screen. When the observer actually observes something in its holographic world, the quantum state is disentangled, which is a choice in the sense of choosing to follow an actual path in the sum over all possible paths. That choice disentangles the quantum state. This choice occurs because the observer is focusing its attention, which is a direct consequence of focusing the light of consciousness. The illuminating effect of the light of consciousness is what allows for the perception of qualities instead of quantities.

How is this choice made? In quantum theory, the choice is called a quantum state reduction, which is assumed to occur randomly. The only reason the quantum state has any predictability is because of random choice. The most likely path in the sense of quantum probability is the path of least action, which is the classical path, but the path of least action is only chosen if choices are made randomly. Random choice is what gives the quantum state its classical predictability.

This brings us to the problem of the normal flow of things. The path of least action, which is like the path that measures the shortest possible distance between two points in a curved space-time geometry, can be considered as the underlying basis for the normal flow of things. The reason things are flowing is because energy is being expressed. Where does this energy come from? The answer is that all energy comes from the void. The best way to understand how the void expresses energy is in terms of dark energy. In relativity theory, dark energy is understood as the accelerated expansion of space that arises due to a positive cosmological constant and always appears to expand relative to the central point of view of an observer. The observer at the central point of view of this accelerated expansion of space has its observations in space limited by its own cosmic event horizon. The farther out the observer looks into space, the faster space appears to expand away from the observer. At the observer’s cosmic horizon, space appears to expand away from the observer at the speed of light, and since nothing can move faster than the speed of light, nothing is observable to the observer beyond the limits of its cosmic horizon.

This scenario explains how an observer’s holographic world is initially constructed in the sense of the big bang event. The dark energy of the accelerated expansion of space is what puts the bang in the big bang. The expression of dark energy gives rise to the observer’s cosmic horizon, which becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon. That’s how the observer’s holographic world is constructed. In all theories of the big bang there is an assumption that the cosmological constant must transition to a lower value, which allows the observer’s holographic world to increase in size and cool in temperature as its cosmic horizon increases in size. In the sense of thermodynamics, only this transition of the cosmological constant to a lower value allows for the normal flow of things in the observer’s holographic world in the sense that heat tends to flow from hotter to colder objects.

What allows for this transition of the cosmological constant to a lower value? Theoretical physics really has no answer. In terms of the holographic principle, we have to assume a value for the cosmological constant to construct the observer’s holographic world, and then that value has to transition to a lower value for the observer’s holographic world to increase in size and cool in temperature. How are these values for the cosmological constant chosen? There is no answer in terms of the holographic principle, since a value for the cosmological constant must be chosen before the observer’s holographic world can be constructed.

This is where the concept of God’s will comes into the equation. In some mysterious way, the void is choosing a value for the cosmological constant, and is choosing a lower value when the cosmological constant transitions to a lower value. As an empty space of potentiality, the void has the potential to express dark energy through the accelerated expansion of space. This is what places the observer in an accelerated frame of reference and allows for the construction of the observer’s holographic world. Again, fundamentally speaking, all acceleration begins with the accelerated expansion of space itself, which in spiritual terms, is an expression of God’s will.

When we say that the quantum state of the observer’s world is being reduced or disentangled due to the choices that are made in a random way, we are really only describing the unbiased nature of God’s will. When we express our own individual will, that individual expression is typically personally biased because we are emotionally identifying ourselves with the form of a person that appears in our own holographic world. That personal bias in the focus of our attention leads to the expression of personally biased emotions, which keeps us emotionally self-identified with our own personal form due to emotional feelings of self-limitation to that personal form as that form is emotionally animated relative to all other forms.

If we want to break free of these feelings of personal self-limitation, we have to stop expressing our own personally biased individual will and stop expressing personally biased emotions. We have to lose that personal bias in the focus of our attention before we can stop emotionally identifying ourselves with the form of a person. When we express our own personally biased individual will, we are only creating an emotional disturbance in the normal flow of things. Only when we stop expressing our personally biased individual will can the flow of emotional energy through our own personal form come into alignment with the normal of energy through all things in our own holographic world, which leads to feelings of connection to all things rather than feelings of disconnection and self-limitation to a personal form. That’s why all spiritual traditions begin with the instruction to surrender to God’s will. Only when we surrender to God’s will can we stop expressing our own personally biased individual will as we stop expressing personally biased emotions and stop emotionally identifying ourselves with the form of a person. That’s always the first step in the process of awakening to the truth of what we really are.

To come back one last time to your question about the nature of the observer’s accelerated motion relative to the motionless void, which is a key aspect of how the observer’s holographic world is constructed, there are just some things that cannot be explained, but they can be experienced. Become spiritually enlightened and see for yourself how the observer’s accelerated motion relative to the motionless void is animating its own world, like the animated images of a movie. Become spiritually enlightened and see for yourself how the light of consciousness is illuminating the observer’s own world, like the projected images of a movie. Become spiritually enlightened and see all of this from the emptiness, silence and darkness of the void.

In the testimony of the Tao Te Ching:

In the silence and the void
Standing alone and unchanging
Ever present and in motion
I do not know its name
Call it Tao

Ever desireless, one can see the mystery
Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations
These two spring from the same source
This appears as darkness
Darkness within darkness
The gate to all mystery

Tao in the world is like a river flowing home to the sea

Returning is the motion of the Tao

It returns to nothingness
It leads all things back to the great oneness

In the testimony of Nisargadatta Maharaj:

To be born means to create a world around yourself as the center.
You are that point of consciousness.
By your movement the world is ever created.
Stop moving and there will be no world.

Nothing perceivable is real. Only the onlooker is real, call him Self or Atman. That which makes you think that you are a human is not human. It is a dimensionless point of consciousness.

All you can say about yourself is I Am.

At the root of my being is pure awareness, a speck of intense light. This speck, by its nature, radiates and creates pictures in space and events in time.

The person is never the subject. You can see a person, but you are not the person. You are always the Supreme, which appears at a given point of time and space as the witness, a bridge between the pure awareness of the Supreme and the manifold consciousness of the person.

Once you realize that there is nothing in this world which you can call your own, you look at it from the outside as you look at a play on the stage or a picture on the screen. To know the picture as the play of light on the screen gives freedom from the idea that the picture is real. In reality I only look. Whatever is done is done on the stage. Joy and sorrow, life and death, they are real to the man in bondage. To me they are all in the show, as unreal as the show itself.

The highest state of awareness is to be the point of light tracing the world.

Beyond the highest state of awareness is to be the source of light.

Be aware of being conscious and seek the source of consciousness.

In pure being consciousness arises.
In consciousness the world appears and disappears.
Consciousness is on contact, a reflection against a surface, a state of duality.
The center is a point of void and the witness a point of pure awareness; they know themselves to be as nothing.
But the void is full to the brim.
It is the eternal potential as consciousness is the eternal actual.

In reality there is only the source, dark in itself, but making everything shine with the light of consciousness.

Unperceived, it causes perception. Being nothing it gives birth to all being.

It is the immovable background of motion.

In pure consciousness nothing ever happens. Onto the screen of the mind destiny forever projects its pictures, and thus illusion constantly renews itself. The pictures come and go as light intercepted by ignorance. See the light and disregard the pictures.

To realize that is the end of all seeking. You come to it when you see all you think yourself to be as mere imagination and stand aloof in pure awareness. It is not difficult but detachment is needed. It is the clinging to the false that makes the truth so difficult to see. Discard what is not your own until nothing is left which you can disown. You will find that what is left is nothing.

Reality is essentially alone.
To know that nothing is, is true knowledge.

Awareness is beyond all.
Awareness is primordial; it is the original state.
Awareness is undivided, aware of itself.

The Supreme state neither comes nor goes. It is.
It is a timeless state, ever present.

In the timeless state there is no Self, no I Am, no witness.

The witness-consciousness is the reflection of the real in the mind. The real is beyond.

First we must know ourselves as witnesses only, dimensionless and timeless centers of observation, and then realize that immense ocean of pure awareness.

On the surface of the ocean of consciousness, names and forms are transitory waves. Only consciousness has real being, not its transformations.

The I Am in movement creates the world; the I Am at peace becomes the Absolute.

At the root of all creation lies desire.
The projecting power is imagination prompted by desire.
Desire and imagination foster and reinforce each other.

All limited existence is imaginary.
Even space and time are imaginary.
Pure being, filling all and beyond all, is not limited.
All limitation is imaginary.
Only the unlimited is real.

Desire for embodied existence is the root-cause of trouble.

One becomes self-conscious only when caught in the conflict between pleasure and pain, which demands choice and decision. The personal self by its very nature is constantly pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. The ending of this pattern is the ending of the self. The ending of the self with its desires and fears enables you to return to your real nature.

To imagine that you are in control is the aberration of the body-mind. There is a universal power that is in control. The illusion of personal control is in the mind only. Stand without desire and fear, relinquishing all control. This is the shortest way to reality.

The totality of all mental projections is the Great Illusion.
When I look beyond the mind I see the witness.
Beyond the witness is infinite emptiness and silence.

The Supreme reality is the void beyond being and non-being, beyond consciousness.

The timeless and spaceless reality is undifferentiated, the infinite potentiality, the source. It cannot be perceived, but can be experienced as ever witnessing the witness, perceiving the perceiver, the origin and end of all manifestation, the root of time and space.

Go back to that state of pure being, the I Am in its purity before it became contaminated with false self-identifications. Abandon them all. Focus the mind on pure being. In it all disappears: myself, the life I live, the world around me. Only peace and unfathomable silence remains.

For the path of return naughting oneself is necessary.
My stand I take where nothing is.
To the mind it is all darkness and silence.
It is deep and dark, mystery beyond mystery.
It is, while all else merely happens.
It is like a bottomless well, whatever falls into it disappears.

In the testimony of Osho:

We call Buddha the awakened one. This awakening is really the cessation of inner dreaming. When there is no dreaming you become pure space. This non-dreaming consciousness is what is known as enlightenment.

You fall into an abyss, and the abyss is bottomless: you go on falling. That is why Buddha has called this nothingness emptiness. There is no end to it. Once you know it, you also have become endless. At this point Being is revealed: then you know who you are, what is your real being, what is your authentic existence.

That Being is void.

The inner emptiness itself is the mystery.
When the inner space is there, you are not.
When you dissolve, the inner emptiness is there.
When you are not, the mystery will be revealed.
You will not be a witness to the mystery, you will be the mystery.

In the testimony of Chuang Tzu:

The man of Tao remains unknown.
Perfect virtue produces nothing.
No-self is true self
And the greatest man is nobody.

Nothingness

Cosmin’s reply:

This explanation doesn’t satisfy me. You are just making random connections to present day physics. In 100 years from now they will make no sense. Like Kant was proud that his Critique of Pure Reason was to eliminate metaphysics forever, only to then use his present-day physics to create the worst metaphysics possible, talking about biological beings as being just robots animated by mechanical forces.

Your theory for example doesn’t say anything about dreams. Based on your theory, we should also observe the expansion of the universe in dreams. Also, the only reason why we got to this idea about the universe in the first place is because we have visual qualia. A being without visual qualia will most likely never discover it. So either we are extremely lucky to have these qualia, or the theory is simply not correct. For example, the universe might not even be expanding or accelerating. This might be just an artifact of General Relativity. It’s not like that expansion was measured with a magical tool that is divorced from theories. The expansion was measured with tools designed with GR in mind. And GR might very well be wrong, given that it doesn’t work at the level of galaxies. So if you change GR with some other theory that can explain the rotation of galaxies, you might get rid of the accelerated expansion altogether. And so on.

Hi Cosmin

Wow. That’s a lot to digest. It seems to me that you want to throw out the baby with the bath water. I really have no problem with modern theoretical physics as currently formulated, and as far as I can see, it does a very good job of describing events in the physical world with a very high degree of mathematical accuracy and predictability. My only problem with modern theoretical physics is that I don’t see it as being anything fundamental. I see the physical world as a holographic world, which is very much like a computer-generated virtual reality. Instead of being something fundamental, I see the laws of physics as being like the computational rules that govern the operation of the quantum computer. This is a natural consequence of the holographic principle and how a holographic world is constructed in terms of quantum computing. As shown by Ted Jacobson, the laws of physics that govern events in a holographic world naturally arise from the holographic principle as thermodynamic equations of state. Jacobson was able to derive Einstein’s field equations for the space-time metric from the holographic principle using only the laws of thermodynamics. Instead of the laws of physics being fundamental, or even a physical world being fundamental in the sense of an objective reality, I see only consciousness as being fundamental. The physical world and the laws of physics arise together as aspects of a holographic virtual reality. Consciousness is more fundamental than the physical world or the laws of physics because consciousness is what is creating and perceiving the holographic virtual reality. This naturally happens as an observer. which is a point of consciousness that arises in the void, begins to move with accelerated motion relative to the motionless void, which gives rise to the observer’s event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon. That’s how the observer’s quantum computer is created. The observer’s holographic world then appears to come into existence due to quantum computing. Prior to the apparent existence of the observer’s holographic world is the existence of the observer itself as a presence of consciousness at the central point of view of its own holographic world, which always exists in an eternal now. Ultimately, the existence of the observer can be understood as arising from the timeless existence of the undifferentiated consciousness of the void.

This scenario is Totally Consistent with the testimony of enlightened beings. That’s why I’m perfectly happy with this explanation, since it explains the nature of how a physical world is created and governed by the laws of physics and also explains how that world is perceived by consciousness in a way that is totally consistent with the testimony of enlightened beings. I’m happy to put my trust in the testimony of enlightened beings and in the accuracy and predictability of the laws of physics. I really don’t need any other evidence, and I don’t feel the need to hypothesize some other explanation. This explanation suits me just fine. It may not explain every little detail, but it certainly goes a long way toward painting the big picture.

At this point, it’s probably best if we agree to disagree. It seems unlikely that either of us will be able to change the other’s mind given how firmly dug in and entrenched our own positions and ideas have become. If 100 years from now you turn out to be right, I’ll see you then. Won’t I be surprised to have egg on my face.

Cosmin’s reply:

Sure, the testimony of the enlightened beings is fine, and is in line with my own conclusions about self-reference and its properties (like being no-thing and every-thing both at the same time, etc.). But I don’t think the connection to present day physics is right. For example it doesn’t say anything about biology. In your theory, it is a just-so fact that we just happen to be humans. We could have been rocks and your theory would have applied the same. You need to take into account the biological side of existence. The world that we perceive around us is an evolutionary world, meaning that the qualia that we have serve evolutionary purposes. Space and time themselves are qualia that serve evolutionary purposes, like survival and reproduction. Basing a physical theory on these 2 qualia is like basing it on the color red and the taste of chocolate. Saying something like “the holographic screen appears because chocolate tastes good”. Your theory is misguided because of not understanding what space and time are, namely evolutionary qualia.

Hi Cosmin

The question of biology goes back to the problem of God’s will. I see a biological body as an emotionally animated avatar that appears as the central form of information in the observer’s own holographic world. The emotional animation of the avatar is ultimately an expression of God’s will, which is expressing itself through the accelerated motion of the observer. The accelerated motion of the observer is the nature of emotional expression or desire. Nisargadatta says that this all begins with the desire for embodied existence. I see the desire for embodied existence as an expression of God’s will that the observer is expressing through its accelerated motion. At the level of qubits encoded on the observer’s holographic screen, the emotionally animated form of the observer’s body is holding together as a recognizable form and is self-replicating its form over a sequence of events due to the coherent organization of form, which can be attributed to the tendency of qubits to align together over a sequence of events. This tendency the qubits have to align together is a direct consequence of quantum entanglement. Roger Penrose showed that in spin networks entangled qubits tend to align together over a sequence of events, and showed this alignment of qubits results in a geometry of space. In terms of the holographic principle and the space-time geometry of an observer’s holographic world, this alignment of qubits encoded on the observer’s holographic screen is responsible for constructing that space-time geometry.

This alignment of qubits of information also allows for the coherent organization of form that allows forms to become self-replicated in form in a recognizable way over a sequence of events as forms are emotionally animated. At the same time the form becomes coherently organized, the flow of emotional energy also has to become organized in such a way as to allow for the self-replication of form. The form has to hold together as a recognizable form, which results from the interaction between the expression of emotions (the desire for embodied existence that is a consequence of God’s will) and the tendency for the coherent organization of form that arises from quantum entanglement.

This organizing effect of the tendency for coherent organization is always counterbalanced by the tendency for disorganization of form that arises from the flow of heat or thermal energy, which is the flow of kinetic energy that has become thermally randomized. The randomized flow of thermal energy always tends to disorganize forms and counterbalances the organizing effect of coherent organization. There is always an evolutionary interplay between the organizing effect of the coherent organization of form and the randomizing effect of thermal disorganization. This interplay between the organizing effect of coherent organization and the disorganizing effect of thermal disorganization plays itself out in what we call Darwinian evolution.

Darwinian evolution is best understood in terms of natural selection and the survival of the fittest body. Natural selection is selecting those bodies for survival that are best able to survive. In emotional terms, this fitness for survival is expressed in terms of fear and desire. The desire for survival (embodied existence) is always counterbalanced by the fear of body death and non-survival. Due to the nature of thermodynamics, this interplay of conflicting emotions has to play itself out in terms of the desire to eat and the fear of being eaten. In order to overcome the disorganizing effect of the random flow of thermal energy, the body must add organizing potential energy to itself. The body must eat other bodies in order to survive. At the same time, the body must avoid being eaten by other bodies. The desire to eat and the fear of being eaten are the primitive expressions of emotions that underlie Darwinian evolution and the survival of the fittest body. Those bodies that survive and reproduce their forms are the bodies that are best able to eat other bodies while they also avoid being eaten by other bodies.

This emotional interplay between the expression of fear and desire is at the heart of personal self-identification. The form of a person is the central form that appears in the observer’s holographic world, which the observer emotionally identifies itself with due to emotional feelings of self-limitation to the form of the body that result from the emotional animation of the body relative to all other forms. The observer’s attention is firmly focused on the survival of its body in the sense of the self-replication of that personal form in a recognizable way. The observer’s focus of attention on body survival is what allows for the expression of the emotions of fear and desire, which keeps the observer emotionally self-identified with the form of its body. The observer is under the sway of Darwinian evolution when the observer only focuses its attention on the survival of its body, which expresses itself in terms of the desire for body survival and the fear of body death. When the observer is under the sway of Darwinian evolution, the observer is defending the survival of the form of its body as though its existence depends upon it because the observer has emotionally identified itself with the form of its body. This is the essential nature of the problem of personal self-identification.

The problem of personal self-identification only arises because the observer is focusing its attention on defending the survival of its body as though its existence depends on it. That’s why self-defensive emotions are expressed, which leads to feeling of self-limitation to the form of the body and perpetuates personal self-identification. In the sense of qualia, that feeling of personal self-limitation to an embodied form is an emotional quality that arises from the observer’s focus of attention on defending its body survival as though its existence depends on it.

The only way the observer can overcome the problem of its personal self-identification with the form of its body is if the observer stops expressing self-defensive emotions. The observer has to lose that personal bias in the focus of its attention. That can only happen with a surrender to God’s will. The observer has to give up the expression of its own personally biased individual will and surrender to God’s will before it can stop identifying itself with the form of its body.

One last comment about the qualia problem. The way Darwinian evolution plays itself out is in terms of the pleasure-pain principle. Pleasure and pain are both emotional qualities. When we express desire, we are pursuing pleasure as we focus our attention on whatever is pleasurable. When we express fear, we are avoiding pain as we focus our attention on whatever is painful. Pleasure and pain are the emotional qualities that result from our attention being focused on defending body survival as we pursue what’s pleasurable and avoid what’s painful. This ties into Darwinian evolution because whatever promotes body survival, like eating, is pleasurable, while whatever threatens body survival, like being eaten, is painful. We have to eat in order to add organizing potential energy to our bodies, which allows us to overcome the disorganization of thermal disorder. Eating allows for body survival, but the flip side of the desire to eat is the fear of being eaten. This is inherently an emotional conflict that cannot be resolved at the level of the motion of bodies since we have to move toward whatever we want to eat while we move away from whatever wants to eat us. That’s the nature of living in a body-eat-body world. When we are under the sway of Darweinian evolution, we are in emotional conflict because we are pursuing pleasure, which promotes body survival, while at the same time we are avoiding pain, which threatens body survival. There is no way to resolve this conflict at the level of the motion of bodies. The only possible resolution is to stop emotionally identifying ourselves with the form of a body. That can only happen if we surrender to God’s will and stop expressing personally biased self-defensive emotions. We have to lose the personal bias in the focus of our attention that underlies the expression of individual will. That’s the only way we can break free from being under the sway of Darwinian evolution and the bondage of personal self-identification.

You are correct to attribute qualia to the perception of space and time. At the level of the quantum state, the space-time geometry of the observer’s holographic world can be reduced to entangled qubits of information, which are quantities, but when the quantum state is disentangled and the observer makes an observation of space and time, this perception is in terms of qualities. This happens because the observer is focusing its attention as it makes an observation, which inherently involves the illuminating and projecting effect of the light of consciousness, which gives rise to the perception of qualities. At the level of the quantum state, there are only qubits encoded on the observer’s holographic screen, but with a perception of its holographic world, the quantum state is disentangled and qualities are perceives, like the projected and animated images of a virtual reality movie being displayed on a movie screen. The perception of qualities arises from the illuminating effect of the light of consciousness that projects the images as the observer focuses its attention. Space and time are binding together into a space-time geometry due to the tendency the qubits have to align together over a sequence of perceivable events, which is a consequence of quantum entanglement. Every perceivable event is a choice the observer makes as it focuses its attention, which is the choice the observer makes to follow a particular path in the sum over all possible paths. That choice allows for the perception of qualities.

In the same way, at the level of the quantum state, the emotionally animated form of the observer’s body that appears in its holographic world can be reduced to qubits encoded on its holographic screen, but when the observer makes an observation of its life-form, the observer perceives qualities, not quantities. The observer’s life-form binds together into a recognizable self-replicating form over a sequence of perceivable events because the entangled qubits have a tendency to align together over a sequence of events, which is a consequence of quantum entanglement. At the level of the quantum state, this binding of qubits into a recognizable self-replicating life-form is a direct consequence of quantum entanglement. When the observer makes an observation of its life-form, the observer perceives qualities, not quantities, because of the illuminating and projecting effect of the light of consciousness that disentangles the quantum state as the observer focuses its attention and makes its choices. As its life-form is emotionally animated over a sequence of events, the observer perceives these emotional qualities.

I disagree with you that the perceived qualia of space and time in some way are responsible for the emergence of life. I see the perceived qualia of space and time as being no different in kind than the perceived qualia of an emotionally animated life-form. Both are reducible to entangled qubits of information encoded on an observer’s holographic screen that have a tendency to bind together into self-replicating forms over a sequence of perceivable events due to quantum entanglement. The perception of these forms is in terms of qualities, not quantities, because of the illuminating effect of the light of consciousness that projects the images of the forms from the observer’s holographic screen to its point of view whenever the observer focuses its attention and makes its choices, which is how the quantum state is disentangled. In the same way that images of space-time are animated, life-form images are emotionally animated over a sequence of events due to the animating effect of the observer’s own accelerated motion. That emotional animation is what allows the observer to perceive the emotional qualities of its life-form.

The perceived qualia of space and time may be correlated with the perceived emotional qualities of its life-form, but this is only a correlation, not a causation, just as the perceived electrical activity of the brain is correlated with perceived thoughts, but is not the causation. The ultimate causation for everything that appears to happen in the observer’s holographic world is the expression of God’s will, which places the observer in an accelerated frame of reference that gives rise to its accelerated motion relative to the motionless void and gives rise to its event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when qubits are encoded on its horizon. This can only happen because the consciousness of the observer, present at its own individual point of view at the center of its own holographic world, is separating and differentiating itself from the pure undifferentiated consciousness of the void whenever it focuses its attention on and observes its own holographic world. When that accelerated motion comes to an end in an ultimate state of free-fall and the observer’s holographic world disappears from existence from its own point of view, which can only happen when the observer totally withdraws its attention away from its holographic world and focuses its attention on the true nature of its own being, the observer’s individual consciousness must return to its source of pure undifferentiated consciousness.

This is all beautifully described in the testimony of enlightened beings, like Nisargadatta:

Everything is a play of ideas. In the state free from ideation nothing is perceived. The root idea is I Am. It shatters the state of pure consciousness and is followed by the innumerable sensations and perceptions, feelings and ideas which in their totality constitute God’s world. The I Am remains as the witness, but it is by the will of God that everything happens.

The I Am in movement creates the world; the I Am at peace becomes the Absolute.

Cosmin’s reply:

Reading your new reply I got inspiration for another question. You say that we identify with one body because of emotional attachment. What I wonder is why is this identification done to appear in 1st person perspective, as if from inside of the head? Why don’t we perceive the body from a 3rd person point of view, from behind the body like in a computer game?

Hi Cosmin

Your question is at the heart of spiritual enlightenment. In a state of personal self-identification, which is a state of delusion, the Self, which is the observer at the center of its own holographic world, is emotionally identifying itself with the emotionally animated form of a person that appears in its holographic world, which is the central form of information that appears in that world and that is emotionally animated relative to all other forms that appear in that world. The experience of self and other always occurs in a subject-object relation. The only true thing the Self can say about itself is I Am, but with personal self-identification, it mistakenly says “I am a person in the world I perceive”, which is the first person perspective. It mistakenly says this about itself because it really feels emotionally self-limited to the form of the person that appears in the world it perceives as that form is emotionally animated. That emotional animation arises from the motion of the Self as a point of consciousness, but as you correctly point out in terms of qualia, the perception of that emotional feeling has the emotional qualities of self-limitation.

When one becomes spiritually enlightened, which is synonymous with the end of that emotional expression as the accelerated motion of the Self relative to the motionless void comes to an end and its holographic world disappears from existence from its own point of view, personal self-identification also comes to an end. Only the void remains in a state of ultimate dissolution. In that ultimate state, there is no I Am and there is no person. Individual consciousness dissolves back into undifferentiated consciousness, which is why this ultimate state is called No-self. When the enlightened Self comes back to its world and again perceives that world, the consciousness of the Self has ascended to a higher level of consciousness, and the Self does indeed perceive that world from the third person perspective, just like an observer that perceives the form of its avatar that is being displayed on a computer screen in a virtual reality game. One not only sees the form of the person from a higher level of consciousness, like the projected and animated images of a movie displayed on a screen, but one also sees how the motion of the observer is animating the images and how the light of consciousness is projecting the images. One sees all of this from the perspective of the void, which is called non-dual awareness.

This is all beautifully described by Nisargadatta in I Am That:

To be born means to create a world around yourself as the center.
You are that point of consciousness.
By your movement the world is ever created.
Stop moving and there will be no world.

You are the source of reality, a dimensionless center of perception that imparts reality to whatever it perceives, a pure witness that watches what is going on and remains unaffected.
It is only imagination and self-identification with the imagined that encloses and converts the inner watcher into a person.
The person is merely the result of a misunderstanding.
In reality there is no such thing.
Feelings, thoughts and actions race before the watcher in endless succession.
In reality there is no person, only the watcher identifying itself.

You see yourself in the world, while I see the world in myself. To you, you get born and die, while to me, the world appears and disappears. It is your imagination that misleads you. There is a deep contradiction in your attitude which you do not see.

The source of consciousness cannot be an object in consciousness.

To know the source is to be the source.

I am like a cinema screen, clear and empty.
The pictures pass over it and disappear, leaving it as clear and empty as before.
The screen intercepts and reflects the pictures. These are lumps of destiny, but not my destiny; the destinies of the people on the screen.
The character will become a person when he begins to shape his life instead of accepting it as it comes-identifying himself with it.
All this I perceive quite clearly, but I am not in it.
I feel myself as floating over it, aloof and detached.
There is also the awareness of it all and a sense of immense distance as if the body and the mind and all that happens to them were somewhere far out on the horizon.
To myself I Am neither perceivable nor conceivable.
There is nothing I can point out and say “this I am”.

Nothing perceivable is real. Only the onlooker is real, call him Self or Atman. That which makes you think that you are a human is not human. It is a dimensionless point of consciousness.

All you can say about yourself is I Am.

At the root of my being is pure awareness, a speck of intense light. This speck, by its nature, radiates and creates pictures in space and events in time.

The person is never the subject. You can see a person, but you are not the person. You are always the Supreme, which appears at a given point of time and space as the witness, a bridge between the pure awareness of the Supreme and the manifold consciousness of the person.

Once you realize that there is nothing in this world which you can call your own, you look at it from the outside as you look at a play on the stage or a picture on the screen. To know the picture as the play of light on the screen gives freedom from the idea that the picture is real. In reality I only look. Whatever is done is done on the stage. Joy and sorrow, life and death, they are real to the man in bondage. To me they are all in the show, as unreal as the show itself.

To realize that is the end of all seeking. You come to it when you see all you think yourself to be as mere imagination and stand aloof in pure awareness. It is not difficult but detachment is needed. It is the clinging to the false that makes the truth so difficult to see. Discard what is not your own until nothing is left which you can disown. You will find that what is left is nothing.

In reality nothing happens. Nothing happens to space itself. In pure consciousness nothing ever happens. Onto the screen of the mind destiny forever projects its pictures, and thus illusion constantly renews itself. The pictures come and go as light intercepted by ignorance.

See the light and disregard the pictures.

I see only consciousness, and know everything to be but consciousness, as you know the pictures on the cinema screen to be but light.

It is enough to shift attention from the screen onto oneself to break the spell.

Go back to that state of pure being, the I Am in its purity before it became contaminated with false self-identifications. Abandon them all. Focus the mind on pure being. In it all disappears: myself, the life I live, the world around me. Only peace and unfathomable silence remains.

The timeless and spaceless reality is undifferentiated, the infinite potentiality, the source. It cannot be perceived, but can be experienced as ever witnessing the witness, perceiving the perceiver, the origin and end of all manifestation, the root of time and space.

Awareness comes as if from a higher dimension.

The witness that stands aloof is the watchtower of the real, the point at which awareness, inherent in the unmanifested, contacts the manifested.

Realization is sudden and irreversible. You rotate into a new dimension.

The Supreme reality is the void beyond being and non-being, beyond consciousness.

The Supreme state is the very center of consciousness and yet beyond consciousness.

The center of consciousness is That which cannot be given name and form, for it is without quality and beyond consciousness. It is a point in consciousness which is beyond consciousness. It is an opening in the mind, a void, through which the mind is flooded with light. It is but an opening for the light of consciousness to enter the mental space.

To the mind the light of consciousness appears as darkness. It can be known only through its reflections. The highest state of awareness is to be the point of light tracing the world.

Beyond the highest state of awareness is to be the source of light.

In reality there is only the source, dark in itself, but making everything shine with the light of consciousness.

Unperceived, it causes perception. Being nothing it gives birth to all being.

It is the immovable background of motion.

Realization is in discovering the source and abiding there.

The experience of the inner void is an explosion into reality.

There is no journey to Supreme reality. One is undeceived only.

You see everything as it is. The world of illusions is left behind.

Cosmin’s reply

Why is the center inside the head and not on the back? Or on the toe?

Hi Cosmin

The best answer is that our body-based, emotionally energized self-referential thoughts, which is the basis for our ego or personal self-concept as mentally constructed in an emotional relationship between self and other, are primarily constructed in our brain, which is in our head. This emotional construction process of thoughts is highly correlated with the electrical activity of our brain, which is correlated with the behavior of neurons. This neuronal behavior has been selected by Darwinian evolution, natural selection, and the survival of the fittest body to defend body survival, which allows for the self-replication and reproduction of our body. When we express a self-referential thought and emotionally construct our ego in our mind, we are defending body survival. This happens through the expression of fear and desire as we pursue pleasure and avoid pain, but only happens because of personal bias in the focus of our attention. That personal bias arises from emotional feelings of self-limitation to the form of our body as personally biased emotions are expressed that leads to personal self-identification, which compels us to defend the survival of our body as though our existence depends on it. Once we are personally self-identified, this personal bias in the focus of our attention perpetuates the vicious cycle of personal self-identification through the expression of more personally biased and self-defensive emotions that leads to further feelings of self-limitation. We express fear and desire in a personally biased way as we pursue pleasure and avoid pain only because of this personal bias in the focus of our attention, which is how we make our choices in the sense of choosing which path to follow.. Due to personal bias in the way we make our choices as we defend body survival through this personal bias in the focus of our attention, we come under the sway of Darwinian evolution and we suffer from the bondage of personal self-identification.

This is all nicely explained by Nisargadatta:

One becomes self-conscious only when caught in the conflict between pleasure and pain, which demands choice and decision. The personal self by its very nature is constantly pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. The ending of this pattern is the ending of the self. The ending of the self with its desires and fears enables you to return to your real nature.

As long as you are locked up with your mind and ego, you cannot go further. Were you really at war with your ego, you would question its reality. You don’t question because you are not really interested. You are moved by the pleasure-pain principle, fear and desire, which is your ego. You are going along with your ego, not fighting against it. You are not even aware how totally swayed you are by personal considerations. Be in revolt against your ego, for the ego narrows and distorts. It is the worst of all tyrants. It dominates you completely.

As long as you take yourself to be a person, a body and a mind, separate from the stream of life, having a will of its own, pursuing its own aims, you are living merely on the surface and whatever you do will be short-lived and of little value, mere straw to feed the flames of vanity.

Self-identifications are patently false and the cause of bondage.

You create bondage when you desire and fear and identify yourself with your feelings.
You identify yourself with your desires and become their slave.
Your bonds are self-created as chains of attachment.

Your attachment is your bondage.

There is trouble only when you cling to something.
It is your desire to hold onto it that creates the problem. Let go.
When you hold onto nothing, no trouble arises.

Cut the knot of self-identification.

Freedom means letting go.
Spiritual maturity lies in the readiness to let go of everything.

Liberation is never of the person, it is always from the person.

As long as there is the sense of identity with the body, frustration is inevitable. It is because of your illusion that you are the doer.

As long as you have the idea of influencing events, liberation is not for you. The very notion of doership, of being a cause, is bondage.

There is no such thing as free will. Will is bondage. You identify yourself with your desires and become their slave.

To imagine that you are in control is the aberration of the body-mind. There is a universal power that is in control. The illusion of personal control is in the mind only. Stand without desire and fear, relinquishing all control. This is the shortest way to reality.

Some unknown power acts and you imagine that you are acting.

You are merely watching what happens.

You must begin by being the dispassionate observer.

Then only will you realize your full being.

Only in complete self-negation is there a chance to discover our real being.

The urge must come from within as a wave of detachment.

The way to truth lies through the destruction of the false. To destroy the false you must question your most inveterate beliefs. Of these the idea that you are the body is the worst.

Destroy the wall that separates; the I-am-the-body idea.

We have enclosed ourselves in a cloud of personal desires and fears, images and thoughts, ideas and concepts.

Everything is a play of ideas. In the state free from ideation nothing is perceived. The root idea is I Am. It shatters the state of pure consciousness and is followed by the innumerable sensations and perceptions, feelings and ideas which in their totality constitute God’s world. The I Am remains as the witness, but it is by the will of God that everything happens.

To be born means to create a world around yourself as the center.
You are that point of consciousness.
By your movement the world is ever created.
Stop moving and there will be no world.

The I Am in movement creates the world; the I Am at peace becomes the Absolute.

Investigate your world, apply your mind to it, examine it critically.
Scrutinize every idea about it.
Everything must be scrutinized and the unnecessary ruthlessly destroyed.
There cannot be too much destruction.
For in reality nothing is of value.

Give attention to the witness to break the spell of the known, the illusion that only the perceivable world is real.

To become free your attention must be drawn to the witness.

The witness is both real and unreal, the last remnant of illusion, the first touch of the real. The moment you say I Am, the entire universe comes into being.

Your world is created with the emergence of the I Am idea. In your world everything has a beginning and an end. Timeless being is entirely in the now.

Once you are well established in the now, you have nowhere else to go.

From my point of view everything happens by itself, quite spontaneously.

I do nothing. I just see them happen.

What begins and ends is mere appearance. The world can be said to appear but not to be. It is your memory that makes you think that the world continues. Memory creates the illusion of continuity. I see the world as it is, a momentary appearance in consciousness.

Ego is in resistance until the very end.

In the end you get fed up with the waste of time and energy.

When you refuse to play the game, you are out of it.

The world is but a mistaken view of reality, unreal to its core.

The world is but a show, glittering and empty. It is there as long as I want to see it and take part in it. When I cease caring, it dissolves. It has no cause and serves no purpose. It appears exactly as it looks, but there is no depth in it nor meaning.

As long as you believe that only the perceivable world is real you remain its slave.

To the Self the world is but a passing show. The world just sprouts into being out of nothing and returns to nothing. As long as the Self is merely aware, there is no problem.

You can stop it any moment by switching off attention.

You make it possible by giving it attention.

My life is a succession of events just like yours. Only I Am detached and see the passing show as a passing show, while you stick to things and move along with them.

There is no such thing as an expression of reality. Neither action nor feeling nor thought express reality. I know that life itself is only a make-believe.

I just watch events happening, knowing them to be unreal.

Externalization is the first step in liberation. Step away and look. Separate yourself and watch. The physical events will go on happening, but in themselves they have no importance.

Seeing that you are not the person you take yourself to be, step out and look from the outside.

It is disinterestedness that liberates.

If you lose interest, you break the emotional link that perpetuates the bondage.

The unreal appears to be real only because you believe in it. You impart reality to it by taking it to be real. Doubt it and it ceases.

If you seek reality you must set yourself free of all patterns of thinking and feeling. Even the idea of being human should be discarded. Abandon all self-identifications, abandon all self-concern, abandon every desire. Stop thinking of achievement of any kind. You are complete here and now. You need absolutely nothing.

Nothing stands in the way of your liberation here and now except for your being more interested in other things. You must see through them as mere mental errors.

As long as you are interested in your present way of living, you will shirk from the final leap into the unknown.

Moments when one feels empty and estranged are desirable moments, for it means the soul has cast its moorings and is sailing for distant places.

The search for reality is the most dangerous of all undertakings for it will destroy the world in which you live.

At this point, it seems like we are far off the topic of the holographic principle. The only point I’m trying to make is that all valid scientific knowledge is consistent with the holographic principle, which in turn is totally consistent with the testimony of enlightened beings. Unless you have more questions about the holographic principle, I suggest we wrap up this discussion for another day and put this puppy to bed. If it turns out that 100 years from now you’re proven right about physics and the holographic principle is proven wrong, I’ll see you then.

References:

Cosmin Visan (2023) Qualia as Direct Manifestation of God. Scientific GOD Journal, 14(1)

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On the Nature of Plato’s Cave

The business of philosophy, like theoretical physics, is about the conceptualization of reality. Philosophers, like theoretical physicists, conceptualize reality in terms of their ideas about reality. The problem is these concepts are based on their observations of the physical world, and the holographic principle tells us that the physical world is a holographic world that is constructed through quantum computing. The physical world is just like a computer-generated holographic virtual reality world that is being displayed on a computer screen. Everything observable in the physical world is a form of information that is reducible to qubits of information encoded on the screen, and these forms are projected like images from the screen to the point of view of the observer outside the screen. Even the flow of energy that animates the forms is perceived as the projected images are animated in the flow of energy. This construction of physical reality as a holographic world is due to quantum computing that occurs due to the observer’s own accelerated motion that gives rise to its event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon, which in effect creates the observer’s own quantum computer. Even the flow of energy through the quantum computer arises from the observer’s own accelerated motion.

The Observer, the Screen, and the Images of Things in its Holographic World

The problem with both philosophy and theoretical physics is that the conceptualization of reality based on the observer’s observations of the physical reality of a holographic world is fraught with logical contradictions. The number one logical contradiction is a paradox of self-reference that arises when the observer emotionally identifies itself with the emotionally animated form of a person that appears in its holographic world. The person is only the central form of information that appears in that world, like the form of an avatar that appears in a virtual reality world displayed on a computer screen. Emotional self-identification of the observer with the form of a person only occurs due to its perception of emotional feelings of self-limitation to that personal form as that form is emotionally animated relative to all other forms that appear in its holographic world. This conceptualization of reality, based on the observer’s observations of the physical reality of a holographic world, is doomed to fail due to these inherent logical contradictions.

Review of the Holographic Principle

The holographic principle is based on the phenomena of event horizons. The most generic kind of event horizon is called a Rindler horizon that arises due to an observer’s own accelerated motion. The nature of an event horizon only requires the idea of an observer that undergoes accelerated motion and the invariance of the speed of light, which is the maximal rate of information transfer in three dimensional space. The speed of light is the maximal rate of information transfer in a computer network. A light ray that originates on the other side of the observer’s event horizon can never reach the accelerating observer as long as the observer continues to undergo its accelerated motion. The holographic principle is built on this idea of the observer’s accelerated motion that gives rise to its event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon.

 Accelerating Observer’s Event Horizon

The big question is how is information encoded on the observer’s event horizon? The answer is that information is encoded in terms of quantized bits of information called qubits. A qubit is understood to be mathematically represented in terms of a matrix, like a Pauli spin matrix that represents a spin variable that can only be observed in either a spin up or spin down state. The spin variable encodes measurable information in a binary code of 1’s and 0’s like a computer switch that is either on or off. This measurable information arises from the eigenvalues of the matrix. In quantum theory, the Pauli spin matrix is formulated in terms of an SU(2) matrix, which also gives a mathematical representation of rotational symmetry of the surface of a sphere. The eigenvalues of the matrix, which are the nature of the measurable information encoded by the matrix, are entangled due to quantum entanglement, which is a mathematical reflection of this rotational invariance. At the level of qubits, quantum entanglement is only reflecting that information is being encoded on the surface of a sphere in a rotationally invariant way.

Qubit of Information Encoded on the Surface of a Sphere

This way of encoding quantized bits of information on the surface of a sphere is called a matrix model. A matrix is a two dimensional array of numbers that must be defined on a two dimensional surface. The next big question is where does the surface of the sphere come from? The answer the holographic principle gives is that the surface of the sphere arises as an observer’s event horizon due to the observer’s own accelerated motion.

The idea of qubits of information being the fundamental underlying basis for quantum theory has recently received a great deal of attention, including the award of a Nobel prize for experiments in quantum entanglement. The big question these experiments have not answered is exactly where is this information encoded? The holographic principle answers this question in terms of the surface of an event horizon that arises due to an observer’s own accelerated motion. Every accelerating observer will have its observations of events in space limited by an event horizon. In the generic case, this event horizon is called a Rindler horizon. The basic idea of the holographic principle is that the observer’s event horizon becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon. The most general way to formulate the holographic principle is in terms of a matrix model.

The upshot is that an observer’s event horizon can become its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon, which is mathematically formulated in terms of a matrix model. The way the holographic works is that each qubit of information is encoded on a Planck size area element defined on the surface of the horizon, like bits of information encoded on the pixels of a computer screen. The number of qubits of information encoded on the horizon is given in terms of the surface area, A, of the horizon as n=A/4ℓ², where the Planck area, ℓ²=ħG/c³, is given in terms of Planck’s constant, the gravitational constant and the speed of light. Since a qubit of information is the smallest amount of measurable information that can be measured, this explains why a Planck-size event horizon, which encodes a single qubit of information, is the smallest possible event horizon. Larger event horizons encode more qubits of information.

Holographic Principle

The holographic principle is telling us that every observer observes events in its own holographic world from the central point of view of that world. Although those events appear to occur in three dimensional space and to be governed by the laws of physics as formulated in three dimensional space, in reality, the information for all those events is reducible to qubits of information encoded on the observer’s own event horizon, which is the two dimensional bounding surface of that space. The observer’s event horizon arises due to its own accelerated motion and becomes its holographic screen when its horizon encodes qubits of information. Everything the observer can observe in its own holographic world is a form of information that’s reducible to qubits of information encoded on its own holographic screen. Those forms of information are projected like images from the observer’s screen to its own point of view at the center of its own holographic world. Even the flow of energy that animates the images can be understood in terms of the energy of the observer’s own accelerated motion.

Where does the observer come from? The answer that John Wheeler proposed is that the observer and its holographic world are a self-excited circuit. Wheeler developed this idea of the observer and the world it perceives as a self-excited circuit when he tried to scientifically understand the nature of an observer and its world in terms of information.

Universal Observer as a Self-Excited Circuit

There is actually a great deal of merit in this idea of the observer and the world that it perceives as a self-excited circuit since perception always occurs in a subject-object relation. The observer is the subject and whatever it perceives in its world is an object of perception. In terms of the holographic principle, the observer always arises at the central point of view of its own holographic world, and whatever it perceives in that world is a form of information that can be reduced to information encoded on its own holographic screen. The observer’s holographic screen is an event horizon that arises due to the observer’s own accelerated motion. The observer’s event horizon becomes its holographic screen when its horizon encodes qubits of information.

John Wheeler understood this process as similar to what an observer can observe on a computer screen. The computer screen encodes bits of information on pixels. That information is encoded in a binary code of 1’s and 0’s. Whatever the observer observes is a form of information that can be reduced to bits of information encoded on the computer screen. These forms of information are projected like images from the screen to the observer’s point of view outside the screen and are animated in the flow of energy that flows through the computer. Everything the observer can observe is a projected form of information animated in the flow of energy. Wheeler called this idea “It from bit”.

The idea of the observer’s holographic screen as similar to a computer screen is the essential nature of the holographic principle. Information is encoded on the observer’s holographic screen in terms of qubits of information, and the observer’s screen always arises as its event horizon due to its own accelerated motion.

In the sense of the subject-object relation of perception, the observer is the subject and its object of perception is a form of information that is reducible to qubits of information encoded on its holographic screen. Perception only occurs as that form of information is projected like an image from the observer’s screen to its central point of view. The observer not only perceives the form of things, but also the flow energy that animates things. There is only an illusion that the form of a person that appears in the observer’s world is able to perceive things in that world. The form of a person is only the central form of information that appears in the observer’s world, like the form of an avatar that appears in a computer-generated virtual reality world. In reality, there is no person, only the projected and animated images of a virtual reality world that only appears to exist due to the observer’s own accelerated motion.

This illusion that the form of a person that appears in the observer’s world is able to make local observations of things in that world is why the concept of local realism is not a valid concept, as confirmed by experiments on quantum entanglement. Spooky action at a distance only reflects that an observer makes observations in its own holographic world. Observation is never really local in nature, but rather is global in nature as an observer makes observations of things in its own holographic world. The observer can only be understood as the central point of view of that world, and the observable form of all things are forms of information projected like images from the observer’s own holographic screen to its central point of view. Perception is holographic projection, which is inherently global and non-local in nature.

There is only an illusion that the central form of a person that appears in the observer’s holographic world is able to perceive things in that world. That illusion is created as the observer emotionally identifies itself with that emotionally animated central personal form. The central form of a person is always emotionally animated relative to all other forms that appear in the observer’s holographic world. The observer only emotionally identifies itself with that emotionally animated personal form due to its perception of feelings of emotional self-limitation to that emotionally animated personal form as that personal form is emotionally animated relative to all other forms that appear in its world.

In no significant way is this state of affairs different from an observer’s perception of the projected and animated images of a computer-generated virtual reality world that’s being displayed on a computer screen. In effect, the observer itself creates its own quantum computer that gives rise to the appearance of its own computer-generated holographic virtual reality world. The quantum computer is created due to the observer’s own accelerated motion that gives rise to its event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon. The laws of physics for the observer’s holographic world are the computational rules that govern the operation of the quantum computer. Even the energy that flows through the quantum computer can be understood as arising from the energy of the observer’s own accelerated motion.

If every observer observes events in its own holographic world from the central point of view of that world as events are displayed on its own holographic screen, then how do we explain the nature of a consensual reality shared by many observers? The answer is information sharing. In effect, a computer network is created when holographic screens overlap like a Venn diagram and share information. Every observer is at the central point of view of its own holographic world, but those holographic worlds can share information when their respective holographic screens overlap and share information, which allows many observers to share in a consensual reality.

Information Sharing Among Overlapping Holographic Screens

The holographic principle is a way of reformulating quantum theory in terms of the observer. Instead of a wave-function that describes the behavior of point particles in some space-time geometry, the holographic principle reformulates quantum theory in terms of an accelerating observer and its event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon. Everything in the observer’s holographic world, which not only includes all the point particles of that world, but also the space-time geometry of that world, can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on the screen. Everything is a form of information, and the perception of anything is like an image projected from the screen to the observer’s own point of view. Even the perception of the flow of energy, which arises from the observer’s own accelerated motion, can be understood in terms of the animation of the images.

Plato’s Cave

In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato conceptualized the nature of reality not on the basis of any observations of the physical reality of the world, but based on the direct experience of the ultimate reality of consciousness. Plato described the physical reality of the world as a holographic world in terms of images displayed on the wall of the Cave, which Plato described as shadows cast on the wall of the Cave, just like the projected images of a virtual reality world displayed on a computer screen. The wall of Plato’s Cave is a holographic screen that arises as an observer’s event horizon due to the observer’s own accelerated motion, which becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon. Plato described prisoners who observe the projected images of that holographic world, which are the shadows cast on the wall of the Cave. The prisoner is an observer. The observer becomes a prisoner when it emotionally identifies itself with the central form of information of a person that appears in its own holographic world. This emotional self-identification occurs as the observer perceives emotional feelings of self-limitation to the form of the person as that personal form is emotionally animated relative to all other forms that appear in its holographic world. Plato also described the observer freeing itself from its emotional bondage of personal self-identification and ascending to the source of light that projects the images.

Plato based this conceptualization of reality not on any observations of the physical reality of a holographic world, but on the direct experience of the ultimate reality of consciousness. The direct experience of the ultimate reality of consciousness is called spiritual enlightenment. Plato was able to conceptualize reality in this way because he underwent a process that led to spiritual enlightenment. When one becomes spiritually enlightened, one’s individual consciousness, present as the observer at the central point of view of the holographic world one perceives, dissolves back into its source of undifferentiated consciousness like a drop of water that dissolves back into the ocean.

This undifferentiated source of consciousness is called the void. The void is the primordial nature of existence. The void is what exists when everything else disappears from existence. A holographic world can disappear from existence because that world is only created due to an observer’s own accelerated motion that gives rise to its event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon. Everything the observer can perceive is a form of information displayed on its own holographic screen. Those forms are projected like images from its screen to its own point of view at the center of its own holographic world. Even the flow of energy that animates the images arises from the observer’s own accelerated motion. When that acceleration comes to an end in an ultimate state of free-fall, the observer no longer has an event horizon or a holographic screen, and so its holographic world disappears from existence from its own point of view. All the projected images of that world disappear from existence. Even the flow of energy that animates the images comes to an end. Even the individual consciousness of the observer, present at the central point of view of its own holographic world, dissolves back into its source of pure undifferentiated consciousness, like a drop of water that dissolves back into the ocean. All that remains in this state of dissolution is the timeless, undivided and unlimited existence of the void.

This ultimate state of dissolution always occurs in an ultimate state of free-fall, when the observer’s own accelerated motion relative to the motionless void comes to an end. In an ultimate state of free-fall, one no longer has a holographic screen that displays images of one’s own holographic world, and so that holographic world disappears from existence from one’s own point of view. Only the void remains. In this ultimate state of dissolution, one’s consciousness ascends to a higher level, and one sees the nature of one’s own holographic world like a virtual reality movie being displayed on a computer screen as all the images of the movie are projected from the screen to one’s own point of view and are animated in the flow of energy. This experience of the ascension of consciousness can be called depersonalization, since once one sees things in this way, one can no longer emotionally identify oneself with the central form of a person that appears in one’s own holographic world. One can only know oneself to be a presence of consciousness at the central point of view of the holographic world that one perceives. Ultimately, one can only know the true nature of one’s timeless existence as the void.

Nothingness

When one becomes spiritually enlightened, one not only sees one’s own world from the ascended level of consciousness of the observer, like a movie that one is watching, but one also sees the nature of oneself as the observer at the central point of view of that holographic world. One sees how the accelerated motion of the observer relative to the motionless void is energizing and animating all the images of that world, like the images of movie. One also sees how the light of consciousness, emanating from the central point of view of the observer, is illuminating all the projected images of that world, like the light of a movie projector. One sees all of this from the perspective of the silence, emptiness and darkness of the void.

One sees how one’s individual consciousness that is present at the central point of view of the holographic world one perceives, which is called I Am or the Self, is differentiated from the undifferentiated consciousness of the void, which is called No-self. One sees that ultimately, when one’s individual consciousness dissolves back into its source of pure undifferentiated consciousness, the true nature of the Self is No-self. In an ultimate state of dissolution, there no longer is an experience of self and other. All is One.

The experience of self and other is only possible in a holographic world when the observer emotionally identifies itself with the central form of a person that appears in that world. This experience of self and other always occurs in a subject-object relation of perception, and only the observer can have that experience in its own holographic world when it emotionally identifies itself with the form of a person that appears in that world.

In reality, the void cannot be conceptualized except in terms of negation as absolute nothingness, which is unlimited, undivided and unchanging. Only a holographic world that is characterized by limitation, division and change can ever be conceptualized. That conceptualization is the very nature of a holographic world, which is characterized by forms of information and the flow of energy. As absolute nothingness, the void is formless. As absolute nothingness, the void is timeless and motionless. The course of time, like the flow of energy, only appears to exist in an observer’s holographic world due to the observer’s own accelerated motion relative to the motionless void that gives rise to its event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon. In the absolute nothingness of the void, there are no events and nothing ever appears to happen. There is only absolute nothingness.

In some mysterious way, the individual consciousness of the observer, present at its own point of view, must separate itself from the undifferentiated consciousness of the void before its holographic world can appear to come into existence. Individual consciousness only refers to the observer’s individual point of view. The observer’s holographic world only appears to come into existence from its own point of view when the observer begins to undergo accelerated motion relative to the motionless void, which is how its event horizon arises that becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon. When the observer’s accelerated motion comes to an end in an ultimate state of free-fall, its holographic world disappears from existence from its own point of view, and only the void remains. In the sense of a dissolution, the individual consciousness of the observer, present at its own point of view at the center of its own holographic world, dissolves back into the nothingness of the undifferentiated consciousness of the void like a drop of water that dissolves back into the ocean. Individual being dissolves back into its source of pure undivided being.

The vast majority of philosophers have absolutely no idea what Plato is describing in the Allegory of the Cave because Plato based his conceptualization of reality on the direct experience of the ultimate reality of consciousness, while almost all other philosophers can only develop their concepts based on their perception of a holographic virtual reality world, and that perception is fraught with logical contradictions about the nature of consciousness. The number one logical contradiction is a paradox of self-reference that arises with the assumption that consciousness is personal in nature that directly leads to personal self-identification. This is why Plato is almost universally misunderstood.

Everyone who is not spiritually enlightened and who attempts to conceptualize reality only based on their observations of the physical reality of a holographic world is at a great disadvantage due to the logical contradictions that inevitably arise from that conceptualization. The number one logical contradiction is the paradox of self-reference that is created when the observer emotionally identifies itself with the form of a person that appears as the central form of information in its own holographic world, which is always emotionally animated relative to all other forms and leads to emotional feelings of self-limitation to that personal form. Plato did not have this disadvantage because of spiritual enlightenment, and was therefore able to conceptualize things based on the direct experience of the ultimate reality of consciousness.

This disadvantage one has of conceptualizing reality only based on the observations of the physical reality of a holographic world is best demonstrated by all the concepts that arise in philosophy and theoretical physics when one is not spiritually enlightened. When one is not spiritually enlightened, one typically takes the position of a physicalist, and one denies the existence of a spiritual reality beyond physical reality.

A good example of a physicalist is Roger Penrose. Based on the Godel incompleteness theorems, Penrose understands that consciousness cannot be computational in nature. The nature of consciousness must be beyond computation. This is easily seen with the holographic principle, which describes the nature of a holographic world in terms of quantum computing. Everything the observer can observe in its own holographic world is a form of information that can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on its own holographic screen, which arises as an event horizon due to its own accelerated motion. Those forms are projected like images from the observer’s screen to its own point of view outside the screen. The consciousness of the observer exists at a point of view outside the screen and cannot be computational in nature since it cannot be reduced to qubits of information encoded on the screen.

In spite of Penrose’s understanding that consciousness must be beyond computation, Penrose is not willing to give up his physicalist mindset. Penrose is desperately searching for a physical explanation for consciousness, even though he acknowledges that this explanation cannot be computational in nature. Penrose has settled on the idea of objective reduction as the non-computational nature of consciousness. Penrose hypothesizes that there are complex structures in the brain that generate consciousness when they undergo a non-computational reduction of their quantum state. The idea of the reduction of the quantum state is based on the idea that the quantum state is highly entangled in nature due to quantum entanglement, which is best understood in terms of the entanglement of qubits of information encoded on a holographic screen. The quantum state can be formulated in terms of a superposition or sum over all possible observable states. When an actual observation occurs, the sum over all possible observable states, which is a state potentiality, is reduced to an actual observable state. In the process of observation, the entangled quantum state of all possible observable states is disentangled, and only a single observable state is actually observed. Imagine a menu of possibilities from which you have to make an order. What actually shows up on your plate is what you ordered. Potentiality is inherent in having a choice about what to order. The quantum state can also be formulated in terms of a sum over all possible paths, and potentiality is inherent in the choice you make about which path to follow. When you follow a particular path, you make particular observations of whatever you observe as you follow that path. In this way, the entangled quantum state of potentiality is reduced to an actual observable state.

Quantum State as the Sum over all Possible Paths

Quantum state reduction requires disentanglement of the entangled quantum state, which leads to an observation of an actual observable state. Penrose hypothesizes that this process occurs in the brain and generates consciousness as the quantum state of complex brain structures are reduced by a non-computational mechanism, like the fractal nature of Penrose tiling. Non-computational only means the process cannot be programmed on a computer. Reducing the quantum state by such a non-computational mechanism would allow consciousness to be physical but non-computational in nature.

The reason Penrose tiling cannot be programmed on a computer is because with each tiling, a decision must be made about where to place the tile, and that decision making is an aspect of consciousness, just like the decision about which path to follow. Penrose tiling cannot be programmed on a computer because each decision about where to place the next tile requires seeing the whole geometry, and no computer algorithm can see the nature of the geometry. Only consciousness can see the nature of the geometry.

Penrose tiling is indeed a non-computational mechanism, but can only explain the nature of consciousness at the level of circular reasoning. We have to assume an aspect of consciousness, which is decision making, to explain the nature of consciousness. We have to use our consciousness to explain the nature of our consciousness. What kind of an explanation is that? All attempts to explain the nature of consciousness in physical but non-computational terms are fraught with the same problem. We have to assume some aspect of consciousness before we can explain the nature of consciousness.

It appears there is no possible way to explain the nature of consciousness in physical terms unless we begin with the assumption that consciousness exists. There is no way of avoiding the a priori existence of consciousness. In terms of the holographic principle, we have to assume the existence of consciousness in terms of the observer and its accelerated motion before we can explain how an observer’s holographic world appears to come into existence. Consciousness must exist prior to the apparent existence of an observer’s holographic world. Once we understand the nature of physical reality in terms of an observer’s holographic world, there is no way of avoiding the conclusion that consciousness must exist prior to the appearance of that holographic world.

Penrose’s idea about consciousness being physical but non-computational in nature is an interesting idea, but this is not what enlightened beings tell us about the ultimate reality of consciousness, which is spiritual in nature. The reason Penrose is pushing this idea is because he is a physicalist and denies the existence of a spiritual reality beyond physical reality. The reason Penrose is a physicalist is because he only has the experience of physical reality. That’s where all his concepts come from.

Only enlightened being have the experience of a spiritual reality beyond physical reality. When Plato conceptualized the Allegory of the Cave, this was based on the direct experience of the ultimate reality of consciousness. Plato was only describing what was being directly experienced, which is the ultimate reality of consciousness. There is no other way to describe this ultimate reality except in spiritual terms.

How exactly does quantum state reduction work at a spiritual level? How is the entangled quantum state disentangled? This question is closely related to the qualia problem. All of our physical theories about the nature of the world, including the holographic principle, are formulated in terms of quantities. In quantum field theory, we speak about the frequency or the wavelength of a photon, which is a quantum of electromagnetic radiation. With the holographic principle, we speak about qubits of information encoded on an observer’s holographic screen. The holographic principle is more fundamental than quantum field theory because the qubits of information encoded on an observer’s holographic screen are more fundamental in terms of the dynamical degrees of freedom that underlie all the events that can be perceived in the observer’s holographic world than a photon of quantized electromagnetic radiation that appears in the observer’s holographic world.

The problem is that these physical descriptions of the observer’s holographic world are given in terms of quantities, like the wavelength of a photon or a qubit of information, but that is not how we perceive the world. The qualia problem is pointing out that we do not perceive quantities, like the wavelength of a photon, but qualities, like the color of light. The wavelength of a photon is a quantity, but when we perceive light, we perceive a quality, like the color red. There is no possible way in which any of our physical theories can make this transition from a quantity to a quality.

What is the solution to the qualia problem? The answer comes back to the problem of quantum state reduction. The quantum state is always an entangled state. At the level of quantum field theory, all the photons that appear in an observer’s holographic world are entangled. At the level of the holographic principle, all the qubits of information encoded on an observer’s holographic screen are entangled. At the level of qubits, quantum entanglement simply reflects that the qubits are defined in terms of the eigenvalues of a matrix that is defined on an observer’s event horizon. Quantum entanglement simply reflects that the qubits are defined in a rotationally invariant way on the surface of the observer’s event horizon.

When the observer makes an observation of its holographic world, the entangled quantum state for that world is disentangled. In terms of ordinary quantum theory, the entangled sum over all possible observable states is reduced to an actual observable state or the entangled sum over all possible paths is reduced to an actual path. In terms of qubits of information encoded on an observer’s holographic screen, the entangled qubits are disentangled whenever an observation is made. Physical theories can never explain how observation occurs through disentanglement of the quantum state because by their very nature, all physical theories are computational in nature and can only describe quantities, not qualities. There is no possible way that a physical theory based on computation can ever change a quantity into a quality. There is no possible solution for the qualia problem in any of our physical theories about the physical world.

What is the solution for the qualia problem? The answer we have to accept is a spiritual solution, which is inherently a non-physical solution. The answer is inherent in the Allegory of the Cave when Plato described ascending to the source of the light. The light is what is projecting the shadows on the wall of the cave. What exactly is this light in spiritual terms? The answer is the light Plato refers to is the light of consciousness, which is spiritual in nature. The source of the light is the void, which is also spiritual in nature. The light of consciousness emanates from the observer’s own point of view at the center of its own holographic world. The light of consciousness is what illuminates that world and allows for the projection of all images of that world from the observer’s holographic screen to its central point of view as an observation of that world is made. The key aspect of the light of consciousness is that it must be focused, as in the focus of attention, whenever an observer makes an observation of its holographic world. Focusing the light of consciousness is like focusing the light of a movie projector. The light of consciousness allows for the projection of all the images of a holographic world.

In terms of the holographic principle, the light of consciousness is what disentangles the quantum state of the observer’s holographic world as the observer makes an observation of that world. The nature of observation is holographic projection, which occurs as the observer perceives the form of things that appear in its own holographic world. Those forms are projected like images from the observer’s holographic screen to its central point of view, and in the process of that holographic projection, the entangled quantum state of that world is disentangled. Since this holographic projection can only occur as the observer illuminates that world and focuses its own light of consciousness on that world, the process of disentangling the quantum state and observing that world is inherently a spiritual process that requires the light of consciousness.

At the level of decision making, as in the decision about which path to follow, focusing the light of consciousness is what allows a decision to be made, which also allows the quantum state to be disentangled. In that decision making process, the quantum state is disentangled as actual forms are perceived. At the level of an entangled quantum state, the forms of information are entangled and can only be characterized in terms of the numerical quantities of the entangled qubits of information encoded on an observer’s holographic screen. When the quantum state is disentangled and actual forms are perceived, those perceived forms are characterized by qualities. The perception of the qualities of forms requires focusing the light of consciousness, which allows a decision to be made as the quantum state is disentangled and actual forms are perceived.

This is the solution to the qualia problem. Although the quantum state of the observer’s holographic world is formulated in terms of quantities, specifically in terms of qubits of information encoded on the observer’s holographic screen, the observer’s observation of that world is always in terms of qualities, and those qualities are inherent in the way the light of consciousness must be focused in order to disentangle the quantum state and allow for the perception of forms in terms of their qualities. This is inherently a spiritual solution to the qualia problem.

How can we be certain that this is the correct solution? The answer is spiritual enlightenment, which is the direct experience of the ultimate reality of consciousness. When one becomes spiritually enlightened, one sees that the observer, which is present at the central point of view of its own holographic world, is animating that world through its own accelerated motion, just like the animated images of a movie. One sees that the observer’s accelerated motion is what gives rise to its holographic screen that displays all the images of its holographic world, just like the images of a movie displayed on a screen. One sees that the light of consciousness that emanates from the observer’s central point of view is illuminating that world and projecting all the images of that world from the observer’s holographic screen to its central point of view, like the light of a movie projector. One sees this from the silence, emptiness and darkness of the void.

All Seeing Eye

Scientific References

Tom Banks and Willy Fischler (2018): Why the Cosmological Constant is a Boundary Condition. arXiv:1811.00130

Raphael Bousso (2002): The Holographic Principle. arXiv:hep-th/0203101

Amanda Gefter (2014): Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn (Random House)

Amanda Gefter (2012): Cosmic Solipsism. FQXi Essay

Brian Greene (2000): The Elegant Universe (Vintage Books)

Gerard ‘t Hooft (2000): The Holographic Principle. arXiv:hep-th/0003004

Ted Jacobson (1995): Thermodynamics of Space-time. arXiv:gr-qc/9504004

J Madore (1999): Non-commutative Geometry for Pedestrians. arXiv:gr-qc/9906059

Juan Maldacena (1997): The Large N Limit of Superconformal Field Theories and Supergravity. arXiv:hep-th/9711200

Roger Penrose (2005): The Road to Reality (Alfred A Knopf)

Roger Penrose (2000): The Large, the Small and the Human Mind (Canto)

Roger Penrose Interview: New Scientist, Nov 14, 2022

Lee Smolin (2001): Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (Basic Books)

Leonard Susskind (2008): The Black Hole War (Little, Brown and Company)

Leonard Susskind (1994): The World as a Hologram. arXiv:hep-th/9409089

A. Zee (2003): Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell (Princeton University Press)

Anton Zeilinger (1999): Experiment and the Foundations of Quantum Physics. Rev. Mod. Phys. 71, S288.

Additional References

The Bhagavad-Gita (1909): Edwin Arnold trans. (Harvard Classics)

The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (1968) Burton Watson trans. (Columbia)

Noam Chomsky on Curt Jaimungal’s podcast Theories of Everything (Apr 12, 2022)

Antonio Damasio (1999): The Feeling of What Happens (Harcourt Brace)

N. Gregory Hamilton (1988): Self and Others (Jason Aronson)

Jed McKenna (2002, 2004, 2007): Spiritual Enlightenment Trilogy (Wisefool Press)

Jed McKenna (2013): Jed McKenna’s Theory of Everything (Wisefool Press)

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1973): I Am That (Acorn Press)

Osho (1974): The Book of Secrets (St Martin’s Griffin)

Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki (1957): Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (Tuttle Publishing)

Bernadette Roberts (1993): The Experience of No-Self (State Univ of New York Press)

Eckhart Tolle (1997): The Power of Now (New World Library)

Lao Tsu (1989): Tao Te Ching. Gia-Fu Feng trans. (Vintage Books)

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Beyond Computation

Q; Hey you had a blog post a few years ago called the real time traveler and in it you said that you interviewed a student or partner of Leonard Susskind on the holographic principle. Who was this scientist again? I can’t find that post again anywhere.

A: Several years ago, I communicated with Amanda Gefter, who interviewed Lenny Susskind about the holographic principle extensively for her book Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn. Gefter’s basic idea was that an observer creates in its own holographic world due to the information that’s encoded on the observer’s de Sitter cosmic horizon that arises from dark energy and the accelerated expansion of space, which in relativity theory is understood as a positive cosmological constant. In relativity theory, the accelerated expansion of space always expands relative to the central point of view of an observer. At the observer’s cosmic horizon, space appears to expand away from the observer at the speed of light, and so nothing is observable to the observer beyond the limits of its cosmic horizon.

Accelerated Expansion of Space

Accelerated Expansion of the Universe

When the observer’s cosmic horizon encodes information for its own holographic world, its horizon becomes its holographic screen. Everything observable in the observer’s own holographic world is reducible to information encoded on its holographic screen. Everything observable in the observer’s holographic world is like a holographic image projected from its screen to its point of view at the center of its own holographic world.

The Observer, the Screen, and the Images of Things in its Holographic World

Susskind actually agrees with this idea, but has found no way to implement the idea in terms of theoretical physics. Due to this impasse, Susskind concentrates all of his efforts on understanding the AdS/CFT correspondence, which is the kind of holographic world created with a negative cosmological constant in anti-de Sitter space, which arises from the accelerated contraction of space. Anti-de Sitter space has a conformal boundary, and information can be encoded on that boundary in terms of an SU(N) conformal field theory. In the large N limit, this information encoded on the conformal boundary of anti-de Sitter space is equivalent to gravity in anti-de Sitter space. The way this works is that the information encoded on the 10-dimensional conformal boundary of anti-de Sitter space by a supersymmetric SU(N) conformal field theory in the large N limit is equivalent to 11-dimensional supergravity in anti-de Sitter space. When we understand the extra dimensions are being compactified, 11-dimensional supergravity explains all the laws of physics in terms of Einstein’s field equations for the space-time metric, which is the nature of the gravitational field, along with Maxwell’s equations for the electromagnetic field and the Yang-Mills equations for the nuclear fields. The matter fields, as described by Dirac’s equation for the electron and quark fields, naturally arise from supersymmetry. In other words, the laws of physics in 11-dimensional anti-de Sitter space are equivalent to the information encoded by a supersymmetric SU(N) conformal field theory defined on the 10-dimensional conformal boundary of anti-de Sitter space. The AdS/CFT correspondence is an explicit demonstration of the holographic principle.

Unfortunately, we do not live in anti-de Sitter space. We live in an exponentially expanding universe as characterized by de Sitter space and the accelerated expansion of space. This is confirmed by direct observation. When we look out at distant galaxies, the farther away the galaxy, the faster the galaxy appears to accelerate away from us. The limits of our observations are defined by a cosmic horizon at which point galaxies appear to move away from us at the speed of light. The Nobel prize was awarded for this discovery of observational cosmology.

Accelerating Universe

Susskind accepts that the de Sitter cosmic horizon is the nature of the observer’s holographic screen that defines its holographic world when information is encoded on its horizon. The stumbling block is to formulate this in terms of theoretical physics. There is no analogue of the AdS/CFT correspondence that generalizes to de Sitter space.

The basic problem comes down to the nature of the observer. In de Sitter space, the observer is always at the central point of view of its own de Sitter cosmic horizon. The observer’s holographic world is only defined when its horizon encodes information for everything observable in its holographic world and becomes its holographic screen.

The problem of the observer is the problem that Gefter confronted in her book. Gefter defined the observer as an accelerating frame of reference. In relativity theory, the observer is defined as the origin or central point of view of a space-time coordinate system, which becomes an accelerating frame of reference when that coordinate system undergoes accelerated motion. In terms of the principle of equivalence, the nature of gravity is understood as arising from the observer’s own accelerated motion.

Principle of Equivalence

An accelerating observer always observes events in its own space-time geometry in terms of the curvature of that space-time geometry. The curvature of that space-time geometry is the nature of the gravitational field as formulated by Einstein’s field equations for the space-time metric. The situation in de Sitter space is very similar, except the curvature of that space-time geometry is being generated by the accelerated expansion of space. The expression of dark energy in terms of the accelerated expansion of space, like any other expression of mass or energy, is a generator of gravity in terms of the curvature of that space-time geometry. Dark energy generates gravity. The odd thing about this process is that the expression of dark energy is always counterbalanced by the expression of gravity. The negative potential energy of gravity always exactly cancels out the expression of positive dark energy. The negative potential energy of gravitational attraction exactly cancels out the expression of positive dark energy, and so the total energy of this process exactly adds up to zero. This is actually confirmed by observations of the universe. A universe with a total energy of zero is asymptotically flat, which is confirmed by direct observations of the universe.

This is one of the puzzles that Gefter had to confront when she explored the nature of the observer. The observer is best understood as arising at the central point of view of its own holographic world that is defined in terms of information encoded on its own cosmic horizon that arises due to dark energy and the accelerated expansion of space.

The big question that Gefter asked herself is: Where does the observer come from? The answer that Gefter eventually settled on is that the observer and its holographic world are a self-excited circuit. John Wheeler proposed this idea of the observer and the world it perceives as a self-excited circuit when he tried to scientifically understand the nature of an observer and the world that it perceives in terms of information.

Universal Observer as a Self-Excited Circuit

There is actually a great deal of merit in this idea of the observer and the world that it perceives as a self-excited circuit since perception always occurs in a subject-object relation. The observer is the subject and whatever it perceives in its world is an object of perception. In terms of the holographic principle, the observer always arises at the central point of view of its own holographic world, and whatever it perceives in that world is a form of information that can be reduced to information encoded on its own holographic screen. The observer’s holographic screen is an event horizon that arises due to the observer’s own accelerated motion, which in the case of the expression of dark energy is the accelerated expansion of space. The observer’s event horizon becomes its holographic screen when its horizon encodes information.

John Wheeler understood this process as similar to what an observer can observe on a computer screen. The computer screen encodes bits of information on pixels. That information is encoded in a binary code of 1’s and 0’s. Whatever the observer observes is a form of information that can be reduced to bits of information encoded on the computer screen. These forms of information are projected like images from the screen to the observer’s point of view outside the screen and are animated in the flow of energy that flows through the computer. Everything the observer can observe is a projected form of information animated in the flow of energy. Wheeler called this idea “It from bit”.

The idea of the observer’s holographic screen as similar to a computer screen is the essential nature of the holographic principle. Information is encoded on the observer’s holographic screen in terms of bits of information. The big question was how this information encoding occurs when the holographic screen is a de Sitter comic horizon.

Gefter began to search for such an explanation and found it in the work of Tom Banks, who initially called the idea matrix theory, and then changed the name to holographic space-time. Banks and Susskind are colleagues, and collaborated on the initial paper on matrix theory before the AdS/CFT correspondence was discovered. Their respective interests then diverged as Banks became focused on de Sitter space while Susskind focused his attention only on anti-de Sitter space.

Banks assumed the observer’s holographic screen is ultimately defined on a de Sitter cosmic horizon. This is inherently an observer-centric and observer-dependent formulation of the holographic principle since the observer is at the central point of view of its own holographic world that is defined on its own de Sitter cosmic horizon.

The big question is how is information encoded on the observer’s cosmic horizon? The answer is that information is encoded in terms of quantized bits of information called qubits. A qubit is understood to be mathematically represented in terms of a matrix, like a Pauli spin matrix that represents a spin variable that can only be observed in either a spin up or spin down state. The spin variable encodes measurable information in a binary code of 1’s and 0’s like a computer switch that is either on or off. This measurable information arises from the eigenvalues of the matrix. In quantum theory, the Pauli spin matrix is formulated in terms of an SU(2) matrix, which also gives a mathematical representation of rotational symmetry of the surface of a sphere. The eigenvalues of the matrix, which are the nature of the measurable information encoded by the matrix, are entangled due to quantum entanglement, which is a mathematical reflection of this rotational invariance. At the level of qubits, quantum entanglement is only reflecting that information is being encoded on the surface of a sphere in a rotationally invariant way.

Qubit of Information Encoded on the Surface of a Sphere

This way of encoding quantized bits of information on the surface of a sphere is called a matrix model. The next big question is where does the surface of the sphere come from? The answer the holographic principle gives is that the surface of the sphere arises as an observer’s event horizon due to the observer’s own accelerated motion.

The idea of qubits of information being the fundamental underlying basis for quantum theory has recently received a great deal of attention, including the award of a Nobel prize for experiments in quantum entanglement. The big question these experiments have not answered is exactly where is this information encoded? The holographic principle answers this question in terms of the surface of an event horizon that arises due to an observer’s own accelerated motion. In terms of an observer’s cosmic horizon that arises due to the expression of dark energy, that accelerated motion is understood in terms of the accelerated expansion of space. Even without the expression of dark energy, any accelerating observer will have its observations of events in space limited by an event horizon. In the generic case, this event horizon is called a Rindler horizon.

Accelerating Observer’s Event Horizon

The nature of an event horizon only requires the idea of an observer that undergoes accelerated motion and the invariance of the speed of light, which is the maximal rate of information transfer in three dimensional space. The speed of light is the maximal rate of information transfer in a computer network. A light ray that originates on the other side of the observer’s event horizon can never reach the accelerating observer as long as the observer continues to undergo its accelerated motion. The holographic principle is built on this idea of accelerated motion, whether that accelerated motion arises from the observer’s own accelerated motion or the accelerated expansion of space.

The basic idea of the holographic principle is that the observer’s event horizon, whether a de Sitter cosmic horizon or a Rindler horizon or some combination of the two, becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon. The most general way to formulate the holographic principle is in terms of a matrix model, which is the way Tom Banks has formulated the holographic principle. Unlike the AdS/CFT correspondence that only applies in anti-de Sitter space, the idea of a matrix model can also be formulated in de Sitter space.

The upshot is that an observer’s event horizon can become its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon, which is mathematically formulated in terms of a matrix model. The way the holographic works is that each qubit of information is encoded on a Planck size area element defined on the surface of the horizon, like bits of information encoded on the pixels of a computer screen. The number of qubits of information encoded on the horizon is given in terms of the surface area, A, of the horizon as n=A/4ℓ², where the Planck area, ℓ²=ħG/c³, is given in terms of Planck’s constant, the gravitational constant and the speed of light. Since a qubit of information is the smallest amount of measurable information that can be measured, this explains why a Planck-size event horizon, which encodes a single qubit of information, is the smallest possible event horizon. Larger event horizons encode more qubits of information.

Holographic Principle

The idea Tom Banks had about formulating the holographic principle in de Sitter space in terms of a matrix model, where the observer is at the central point of view of its own holographic world that is defined in terms of qubits of information encoded on its own holographic screen that arises as its cosmic horizon, is a natural extension of the idea that Ted Jacobson had about the thermodynamics of space-time. Jacobson considered an accelerating observer and its Rindler horizon. Jacobson assumed that the observer’s world was defined in terms of qubits of information encoded on the observer’s Rindler horizon. In terms of thermodynamics, this way of encoding qubits on the observer’s horizon is the nature of holographic entropy. The qubits are the fundamental dynamical degrees of freedom for the observer’s world. In terms of qubits as the fundamental basis for quantum theory, a qubit is the nature of entropic information. Holographic entropy is simply given in terms of the number of qubits encoded on the observer’s event horizon as S=kn. Jacobson needed one more piece of the puzzle, which is the amount of thermal energy carried by each dynamical degree of freedom at thermal equilibrium.

Thermodynamics tells us that at thermal equilibrium, each dynamical degree of freedom carries the same amount of thermal energy, which is given in terms of temperature as E=kT. In a holographic world, these dynamical degrees of freedom are qubits of information encoded on the observer’s event horizon. Jacobson was able to specify this thermal energy in terms of the Unruh temperature of the Rindler horizon, which is simply given in terms of the observer’s acceleration, a, as kT=ħa/2πc.

The Unruh temperature is given in terms of the thermal energy of the thermal radiation carried away from the observer’s event horizon, E=kT, as observed by the accelerating observer. This emitted thermal radiation is also called Hawking radiation. The Unruh temperature is calculated in quantum field theory in terms of the separation of virtual particle-antiparticle pairs at the event horizon as observed by the accelerating observer. The virtual particle-antiparticle pairs are created out of nothing due to quantum uncertainty in energy, and normally annihilate back into nothing in a short period of time, but at the event horizon they can appear to separate from the point of view of the accelerating observer, which gives the event horizon an apparent temperature due to the horizon’s emission of thermal radiation that carries heat toward the observer.

Hawking Radiation

With these values for the holographic entropy and the Unruh temperature of the event horizon, Jacobson was then able to use the laws of thermodynamics, which says that ΔE=TΔS=kTΔn, to derive Einstein’s field equations. Since holographic entropy, S=kn, is given in terms of the number of qubits encoded on the surface area of the event horizon as n=A/4ℓ², this simply says that at thermal equilibrium, as the event horizon changes in surface area, the amount of thermal energy inherent in the observer’s holographic world also changes since there is a change in the number of qubits of information encoded on the event horizon. At thermal equilibrium, each qubit carries the same amount of thermal energy given in terms of the observer’s own acceleration as E=kT=ħa/2πc.

This simple relationship allowed Jacobson to derive Einstein’s field equations for the space-time metric from the laws of thermodynamics. As the surface area of the observer’s event horizon changes, there is a corresponding change in the amount of energy inherent in the observer’s holographic world, which corresponds to a change in the dynamical curvature of the space-time geometry of that holographic world as is specified by Einstein’s field equations for the space-time metric.

Einstein’s Field Equations for the Space-time Metric

Einstein’s field equations for the space-time metric are not really fundamental, but are more like a thermodynamic equation of state that describes gravitational events in the observer’s holographic world when things are near thermal equilibrium. Once we have Einstein’s field equations, we can then deduce all the field equations for the standard model of particle physics using the usual unification mechanisms of supersymmetry and extra compactified dimensions of space. At the level of field theory, the final result of unification looks like 11-dimensional supergravity, just as it does in the AdS/CFT correspondence. All the quantum fields that correspond to particle physics arise from Einstein’s field equations as extra components of the space-time metric due to supersymmetry and extra compactified dimensions of space. Just like Einstein’s field equations, none of these quantum fields are really fundamental, but instead only have the limited validity of thermodynamic equations of state that describe events in the observer’s holographic world when things are near thermal equilibrium.

The holographic principle is telling us that every observer observes events in its own holographic world from the central point of view of that world. Although those events appear to occur in three dimensional space and to be governed by the laws of physics as formulated in three dimensional space, in reality, the information for all those events is reducible to qubits of information encoded on the observer’s own event horizon, which is the two dimensional bounding surface of that space. The observer’s event horizon arises due to its own accelerated motion and becomes its holographic screen when its horizon encodes qubits of information. Everything the observer can observe in its own holographic world is a form of information that’s reducible to qubits of information encoded on its own holographic screen. Those forms of information are projected like images from the observer’s screen to its own point of view at the center of its own holographic world. Even the flow of energy that animates the images can be understood in terms of the energy of the observer’s own accelerated motion.

In the sense of the subject-object relation of perception, the observer is the subject and its object of perception is a form of information that is reducible to qubits of information encoded on its holographic screen. Perception only occurs as that form of information is projected like an image from the observer’s screen to its central point of view. The observer not only perceives the form of things, but also the flow energy that animates things. There is only an illusion that the form of a person that appears in the observer’s world is able to perceive things in that world. The form of a person is only the central form of information that appears in the observer’s world, like the form of an avatar that appears in a computer-generated virtual reality world. In reality, there is no person, only the projected images of a virtual reality that appears due to the observer’s own motion.

The illusion that the form of a person that appears in the observer’s world is able to make local observations of things in that world is why the concept of local realism is not a valid concept. Observation is never really local in nature, but rather is global in nature as an observer makes observations of things in its own holographic world. The observer can only be understood as the central point of view of that world, and the observable form of all things are forms of information projected like images from the observer’s own holographic screen to its central point of view. Perception is holographic projection.

There is only an illusion that the central form of a person that appears in the observer’s holographic world is able to perceive things in that world. That illusion is created as the observer emotionally identifies itself with that emotionally animated central personal form. The central form of a person is always emotionally animated relative to all other forms that appear in the observer’s holographic world. The observer only emotionally identifies itself with that emotionally animated personal form due to its perception of feelings of emotional self-limitation to that emotionally animated personal form as that personal form is emotionally animated relative to all other forms that appear in its world.

In no significant way is this state of affairs different from an observer’s perception of the projected and animated images of a computer-generated virtual reality world that’s being displayed on a computer screen. In effect, the observer itself creates its own quantum computer that gives rise to the appearance of its own computer-generated holographic virtual reality world. The quantum computer is created due to the observer’s own accelerated motion that gives rise to its event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon. The laws of physics for the observer’s holographic world are the computational rules that govern the operation of the quantum computer. Even the energy that flows through the quantum computer can be understood as arising from the energy of the observer’s own accelerated motion.

If every observer observes events in its own holographic world from the central point of view of that world as events are displayed on its own holographic screen, then how do we explain the nature of a consensual reality shared by many observers? The answer is information sharing. In effect, a computer network is created when holographic screens overlap like a Venn diagram and share information. Every observer is at the central point of view of its own holographic world, but those holographic worlds can share information when their respective holographic screens overlap and share information, which allows many observers to share in a consensual reality.

Information Sharing Among Overlapping Holographic Screens

The holographic principle is a way of reformulating quantum theory in terms of the observer. Instead of a wave-function that describes the behavior of point particles in some space-time geometry, the holographic principle reformulates quantum theory in terms of an accelerating observer and its event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon. Everything in the observer’s holographic world, which not only includes all the point particles of that world, but also the space-time geometry of that world, can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on the screen. Everything is a form of information, and the perception of anything is like an image projected from the screen to the observer’s own point of view. Even the perception of the flow of energy, which arises from the observer’s own accelerated motion, can be understood in terms of the animation of the images.

In the ordinary quantum theory and quantum field theory of point particles, the quantum state can either be formulated in terms of a wave-function or as a sum over all possible paths. Each path is weighted with a probability factor that depends on the action for that path, P=exp(iA/ħ), where the action is given in terms of kinetic and potential energy as an integral along the path, A=∫dt(KE−PE). This probability factor is the essence of the wave-function and specifies wave motion in terms of Euler’s formula exp(iθ)=cosθ+isinθ. The wave-function, ψ(x,t), specifies the quantum probability with which a point particle can be measured at position x at time t as the particle follows its trajectory x=x(t). The most likely path in terms of quantum probability, which is the classical path, is the path of least action, which is like the path that measures the shortest possible distance between two points in a curved space-time geometry. In relative theory, the analogue of the action is called the proper-time, and least action maximizes proper-time.

Quantum State as the Sum over all Possible Paths

Quantum theory, whether formulated in terms of the wave-function or as a sum over all possible paths, allows for the expression of potentiality. A path is never determined, but can only be specified in terms of its quantum probability. Classical physics only seems to be deterministic because it only considers the path of least action. At every decision point, there is always a choice to be made about which path to follow. The expression of potentiality is inherent in the choices we make about which path to follow.

The holographic principle totally reverses this process of quantization. Instead of a wave-function, we start with the idea of an accelerating observer and its event horizon, which becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on the horizon. The expression of potentiality arises from quantum entanglement, which is a consequence of the way qubits are defined in terms of the eigenvalues of a matrix that in turn is defined on the surface of the event horizon. By their very nature, entangled qubits allow for the expression of potentiality, which is the essential difference between classical and quantum computing. Fundamentally, quantum theory is based upon the mathematical structure of qubits encoded on an accelerating observer’s event horizon.

The wave-function is not fundamental, but is a derived concept that arises from the laws of thermodynamics when things are near thermal equilibrium. Einstein’s field equations for the gravitational space-time metric, Maxwell’s equations for the electromagnetic field, the Yang-Mills equations for the nuclear fields, and Dirac’s equation for the electron and quark fields are all examples of wave-functions, but only have the limited validity of thermodynamic equations of state that describe events in a holographic world.

We have one last important question to answer, which is Gefter’s original question: Where does the observer come from? There must be a source of the observer. If we think of the observer as the consciousness present at the central point of view of its own holographic world, then there must be a source of this perceiving consciousness. The really big question is what is the source of the observer’s consciousness?

The reason this is a big question is because the perceiving consciousness of the observer cannot arise from something that appears in the holographic world that the observer perceives, like the central form of a person that appears in that world. The source of consciousness cannot be an object in consciousness. Perception always occurs in a subject-object relation, where the observer is the subject and its object of perception is a form of information that appears in its holographic world. That object of perception cannot be the source of the observer’s consciousness. To make that assumption would be to create a paradox of self-reference that would make the whole explanation logically inconsistent. Logical consistency of the explanation demands that the observer’s consciousness cannot arise from something that it can observe.

The basic problem is that consciousness cannot be computational in nature as Roger Penrose has pointed out. In a holographic world, everything the observer can observe is a form of information that’s reducible to qubits of information encoded on the observer’s holographic screen. All observable forms of information are computational since they can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on the observer’s screen, but the observer’s consciousness cannot be computational since it is what perceives the forms of information. The forms must be projected like images from the observer’s holographic screen to its point of view outside the screen. Since the observer’s consciousness exists outside the screen, it cannot be reduced to qubits of information encoded on the screen without creating a logically inconsistent paradox of self-reference. This is the basic idea underlying the Godel incompleteness theorems. An observer that observes forms of information that are being displayed on a computer screen from its point of view outside the screen cannot be reduced to bits of information encoded on the computer screen, and so the observer’s consciousness cannot be computational in nature. The forms of information are all computational in nature, but not the observer’s consciousness.

If the source of consciousness cannot arise from something that the observer can perceive in a subject-object relation of perception, then where does the observer’s consciousness come from? If the source of consciousness cannot arise from an object of perception, then where does the observer’s consciousness come from? This is the stumbling block that has prevented all real progress in terms of understanding the holographic principle. This is a stumbling block since we have to begin by assuming the a priori existence of a source for the observer’s consciousness before we can discuss how its holographic world appears to come into existence. That source of the observer’s consciousness must exist prior to the apparent existence of its holographic world.

This problem arises from how a holographic world is created. A holographic world only appears to come into existence due to an observer’s accelerated motion that gives rise to its event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon. The observer itself can only be understood as the perceiving consciousness present at the central point of view of its own holographic world that is able to undergo accelerated motion, which gives rise to its event horizon. To make sense of this scenario, we have to begin with the assumption of the existence of a source for the observer’s consciousness. There must be a source of the observer’s perceiving consciousness that has an a priori existence that exists prior to the apparent existence of its holographic world. Before the observer’s holographic world can appear to come into existence, the source of the observer’s consciousness must exist.

This is a stumbling block to any real understanding of the holographic principle because the assumption of the a priori existence of a source of the observer’s consciousness smacks of spiritualism, which is exactly what it is. Virtually everybody that works in the scientific field of the holographic principle is a physicalist, and the idea of a spiritual reality that is beyond physical reality is anathema to the physicalists. Lenny Susskind, Tom Banks and Amanda Gefter are all physicalists, and they all vehemently deny the existence of a spiritual reality that is beyond physical reality. The big problem that they face is that they also accept that physical reality is constructed as a holographic world.

Once you accept that physical reality is constructed as a holographic world, you’re in a real pickle when you try to understand the nature of consciousness. The source of consciousness cannot be an object in consciousness. In the sense of a subject-object relation of perception, the source of the observer’s perceiving consciousness cannot be an object of perception that appears in its own holographic world, which is understood as a form of information that’s reducible to qubits of information encoded on its own holographic screen that arises as an event horizon due to its own accelerated motion as a point of consciousness at the center of its own holographic world. Where does that consciousness come from? It’s fine to say that the subject-object relation of perception arises as a self-excited circuit, but we still have to explain the source of consciousness.

The physicalists will never really understand the holographic principle because they deny the existence of a spiritual reality beyond physical reality. That spiritual reality is the only possible source of consciousness. There is no other possible explanation for the source of consciousness. All other possible explanations suffer from the logical inconsistency of a paradox of self-reference. If we want to maintain logical consistency, we have to assume the existence of a source of consciousness that is beyond physical reality, which is best called spiritual reality. In the words of Sherlock Holmes, when you’ve eliminated everything that is impossible, whatever remains must be the truth.

What exactly is this spiritual reality beyond physical reality that is the source of the observer’s consciousness? The simple answer is that this spiritual reality is the primordial nature of existence. It is what exists when everything else disappears from existence. The observer’s holographic world can only disappear from existence when the observer stops accelerating. When the observer’s accelerated motion comes to an end, the observer enters into an ultimate state of free-fall. When the observer enters into an ultimate state of free-fall, the observer no longer has an event horizon that encodes qubits of information and becomes its holographic screen. In an ultimate state of free-fall, everything in the observer’s holographic world disappears from existence from its own point of view, and nothing remains.

The nothingness that remains when the observer’s holographic world disappears from existence is called the void. The void is the source of the observer’s consciousness, which is a differentiated state of consciousness that arises at the central point of view of its own holographic world. That holographic world only appears to come into existence from the observer’s own point of view due to the observer’s own accelerated motion relative to the motionless void. The existence of the void is timeless and unchanging, which is to say it is motionless. The void is unlimited. It has no boundary. The bounding surface of an event horizon can only arise from the point of view of an accelerating observer. The void is also undivided. As the source of the observer’s perceiving consciousness, the void can only be understood as undifferentiated consciousness.

Nothingness

In reality, the void cannot be conceptualized except in terms of negation as absolute nothingness, which is unlimited, undivided and unchanging. Only a holographic world that is characterized by limitation, division and change can ever be conceptualized. That conceptualization is the very nature of a holographic world, which is characterized by forms of information and the flow of energy. As absolute nothingness, the void is formless. As absolute nothingness, the void is timeless and motionless. The course of time, like the flow of energy, only appears to exist in an observer’s holographic world due to the observer’s own accelerated motion relative to the motionless void that gives rise to its event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon. In the absolute nothingness of the void, there are no events and nothing ever appears to happen. There is only absolute nothingness.

The void is the primordial, timeless nature of existence. The course of time, like the flow of energy, only appears to exist in an observer’s holographic world. Forms of information only appear to exist in an observer’s holographic world. The void, as the source of the observer’s perceiving consciousness, is the nature of timeless being, which can only be understood as undifferentiated consciousness. The individual consciousness of the observer, present at the central point of view of its own holographic world, is the nature of individual being, which is called I Am or the Self. As absolute nothingness, the void is the nature of undivided and unlimited timeless being, which is also called No-self.

In some mysterious way, the individual consciousness of the observer, present at its own point of view, must separate itself from the undifferentiated consciousness of the void before its holographic world can appear to come into existence. Individual consciousness only refers to the observer’s individual point of view. The observer’s holographic world only appears to come into existence from its own point of view when the observer begins to undergo accelerated motion relative to the motionless void, which is how its event horizon arises that becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon. When the observer’s accelerated motion comes to an end in an ultimate state of free-fall, its holographic world disappears from existence from its own point of view, and only the void remains. In the sense of a dissolution, the individual consciousness of the observer, present at its own point of view at the center of its own holographic world, dissolves back into the nothingness of the undifferentiated consciousness of the void like a drop of water that dissolves back into the ocean. Individual being dissolves back into its source of pure undivided being. This experience of dissolution is called spiritual enlightenment.

There are still a few loose ends that need to be tied together regarding the holographic principle. Just as the undifferentiated consciousness of the void is the source of the individual perceiving consciousness of the observer present at the central point of view of its own holographic world, the void is also the source of the energy that underlies the observer’s accelerated motion that gives rise to its event horizon, and the source of the information encoded on the observer’s event horizon that becomes its holographic screen. The void as the source of all these things helps clear up the mystery of the normal flow of thermal energy through the observer’s holographic world, which is closely related to the mystery of the cosmological constant and the big bang.

The best theory we have of the big bang is called inflationary cosmology, which assumes that early in the history of the universe the cosmological constant transitions from a higher to a lower value. The value of the cosmological constant sets the size of the observer’s holographic world in terms of the radius of its cosmic horizon due to the accelerated expansion of space. The cosmic horizon defines the limits of the observer’s own observable world since nothing is observable beyond the limits of its horizon. The larger the value of the cosmological constant, Λ, the smaller the radius, R, of the observer’s cosmic horizon, as (R/ℓ)²=3/Λ. Current observation indicates the value of Λ is about 10⁻¹²³, which corresponds to a radius of the cosmic horizon of about 40 billion light years. In terms of thermal energy, the smaller the radius of the observer’s cosmic horizon, the higher its Unruh temperature, as kT=ħc/2πR.

Early In the history of the big bang, the cosmological constant took on a very high value corresponding to a small radius of the observer’s cosmic horizon and a high Unruh temperature. Inflationary cosmology assumes that the cosmological constant transitions from a higher to a lower value, which increases the radius to the observer’s cosmic horizon and lowers its Unruh temperature. By this mechanism, the observer’s holographic world appears to increase in size. Simultaneously, this allows heat to flow from hotter to colder objects as the Unruh temperature decreases, which explains the normal flow of thermal energy through the observer’s holographic world. The normal flow of thermal energy is literally directed in the direction of the accelerated expansion of space as the cosmological constant transitions to a lower value and the observer’s holographic world increases in size and cools in temperature.

This expansion also allows entropy to increase as the observer’s cosmic horizon increases in radius and surface area, which allows more qubits of information to be encoded on the horizon. This increase in entropy as heat flows in a thermal gradient is the nature of the second law of thermodynamics, which says that forms of information tend to become more disordered due to the randomizing effects of the flow of thermal energy as heat flows from hotter to colder objects. The disorganizing effects of thermal disorder are always counterbalanced by the organizing effects of coherent organization as forms hold together, but eventually thermal disorganization wins out and forms fall apart. The flow of heat in a thermal gradient also explains the nature of time’s arrow as things tend to become more thermally disordered. Time’s arrow is literally directed in the direction of the accelerated expansion of space and the expansion of the observer’s holographic world. When the cosmological constant transitions to its final value of zero, the radius of the observer’s cosmic horizon increases to infinity and its Unruh temperature cools to absolute zero. When the flow of heat ultimately comes to an end, the course of time also comes to an end, which is called the heat death of the universe.

Normal Flow of Thermal Energy through the Observer’s Holographic World

There is a big puzzle in this scenario that does not have a scientific explanation. How exactly is the value of the cosmological constant set and what allows for its transition to a lower value? In terms of the holographic principle, there is no scientific answer. In some sense, the value of the cosmological constant is a boundary condition that sets the conditions for the construction of a holographic world. Inflationary cosmology is based on quantum field theory, but quantum field theory cannot explain the nature of the cosmological constant since all field theories only arise in a holographic world as thermodynamic equations of state that only describe events in that world when things are near thermal equilibrium. We have to assume a value for the cosmological constant before we can even construct that holographic world and discuss the laws of physics in that world as formulated in terms of field theories.

In the same way, there is no scientific explanation in terms of the holographic principle for why the cosmological constant transitions to a lower value. Each transition of the cosmological constant would in effect create a new big bang event, which occurs when the universe is far away from thermal equilibrium, and unlike the Unruh temperature, which assumes thermal equilibrium, cannot be calculated in quantum field theory, which is only valid for small fluctuations around thermal equilibrium. Theoretical physics can never explain the value of the cosmological constant or why it transitions to a lower value in terms of the holographic principle since we have to assume a value for the cosmological constant before we can construct a holographic world. In the sense of a boundary condition, the cosmological constant is what sets the radius of the observer’s cosmic horizon, which is the bounding surface of space that sets the limits of the observer’s own observable holographic world.

Just as the undifferentiated consciousness of the void in some mysterious way is the source of the individual consciousness of the observer at the central point of view of its own holographic world, the void is also the source of the dark energy that’s inherent in the cosmological constant, which must take on a non-zero value before the observer’s holographic world can even appear to come into existence. The dark energy of the cosmological constant is ultimately what energizes the observer’s own holographic world and puts the bang in the big bang event. The dark energy of the cosmological constant is also what gives rise to the observer’s cosmic horizon that becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on the horizon. The void is also the source of this information encoding. In some mysterious way, the whole thing begins as the undifferentiated consciousness of the void differentiates itself into the individual consciousness of the observer at the central point of view of its own holographic world, expresses the dark energy that underlies the accelerated expansion of space that places the observer in an accelerated frame of reference and gives rise to the observer’s cosmic horizon, and encodes qubits of information on the observer’s cosmic horizon that becomes its holographic screen. It all has to begin with the void. The void is the source of the whole thing. The void is the nature of the spiritual reality that is beyond the physical reality of an observer’s holographic world. There is no scientific explanation for the creation of the whole thing other than to call it God’s will.

Ultimately, the individual consciousness of the observer must return to its primordial state of undifferentiated consciousness. Individual being must reunite itself with pure undivided being. Individual consciousness, present at the central point of view of its own holographic world, must dissolve back into its source of undifferentiated consciousness like a drop of water that dissolves into the ocean. This dissolution always occurs in an ultimate state of free-fall as the accelerated motion of the observer’s own point of view relative to the motionless void comes to an end. In that dissolution, the course of time and the flow of energy come to an end. In that dissolution, the observer’s holographic world disappears from existence from its own point of view and nothing remains. That nothingness is the nature of timeless being, which is the primordial nature of existence.

Nothingness

Footnote on String Theory

Why isn’t string theory a fundamental description of reality? The answer is string theory is computational, and can only apply to the computational construction of a holographic world. String theory, like field theory, only applies at the level of a holographic world. String theory is closely related to field theory, which is seen in a 10-dimensional supersymmetric SU(N) gauge theory generating string theory in the large N limit, and in the low energy limit of string theory being 11-dimensional supergravity. This connection explains why string theory is holographic. String theory, like field theory, only gives the computational rules that govern events in a holographic world. That computation arises from qubits of information encoded on a holographic screen, which arises as an observer’s event horizon due to its own accelerated motion. When that acceleration comes to an end in an ultimate state of free-fall, all computation also comes to an end, and only the void remains. String theory, like field theory, cannot apply in the ultimate reality of the void that is beyond the computational virtual reality of a holographic world. The simple answer is that computation does not apply to the void. The void as the source of a computational holographic virtual reality world is beyond computation.

Bottom Line: What is Beyond Computation?

Putting together the Roger Penrose argument that Consciousness is beyond computation (see the New Scientist interview from last year) and the Holographic Principle of Quantum Gravity, which describes the nature of the Universe in terms of Quantum Computing, tells us that the Source of Consciousness, which is Beyond Computation, must be the Void.

Scientific References

Tom Banks and Willy Fischler (2018): Why the Cosmological Constant is a Boundary Condition. arXiv:1811.00130

Raphael Bousso (2002): The Holographic Principle. arXiv:hep-th/0203101

Amanda Gefter (2014): Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn (Random House)

Amanda Gefter (2012): Cosmic Solipsism. FQXi Essay

Brian Greene (2000): The Elegant Universe (Vintage Books)

Gerard ‘t Hooft (2000): The Holographic Principle. arXiv:hep-th/0003004

Ted Jacobson (1995): Thermodynamics of Space-time. arXiv:gr-qc/9504004

J Madore (1999): Non-commutative Geometry for Pedestrians. arXiv:gr-qc/9906059

Juan Maldacena (1997): The Large N Limit of Superconformal Field Theories and Supergravity. arXiv:hep-th/9711200

Roger Penrose (2005): The Road to Reality (Alfred A Knopf)

Roger Penrose (2000): The Large, the Small and the Human Mind (Canto)

Lee Smolin (2001): Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (Basic Books)

Leonard Susskind (2008): The Black Hole War (Little, Brown and Company)

Leonard Susskind (1994): The World as a Hologram. arXiv:hep-th/9409089

A. Zee (2003): Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell (Princeton University Press)

Anton Zeilinger (1999): Experiment and the Foundations of Quantum Physics. Rev. Mod. Phys. 71, S288.

Additional References

The Bhagavad-Gita (1909): Edwin Arnold trans. (Harvard Classics)

The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (1968) Burton Watson trans. (Columbia)

Noam Chomsky on Curt Jaimungal’s podcast Theories of Everything (Apr 12, 2022)

Antonio Damasio (1999): The Feeling of What Happens (Harcourt Brace)

N. Gregory Hamilton (1988): Self and Others (Jason Aronson)

Jed McKenna (2002, 2004, 2007): Spiritual Enlightenment Trilogy (Wisefool Press)

Jed McKenna (2013): Jed McKenna’s Theory of Everything (Wisefool Press)

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1973): I Am That (Acorn Press)

Osho (1974): The Book of Secrets (St Martin’s Griffin)

Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki (1957): Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (Tuttle Publishing)

Bernadette Roberts (1993): The Experience of No-Self (State Univ of New York Press)

Eckhart Tolle (1997): The Power of Now (New World Library)

Lao Tsu (1989): Tao Te Ching. Gia-Fu Feng trans. (Vintage Books)

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Questions and Answers

Q; Hey you had a blog post a few years ago called the real time traveler and In it you said that you interviewed a student or partner of Leonard Susskind on the holographic principle. Who was this scientist again? I can’t find that post again anywhere.

A: Several years ago, I communicated with Amanda Gefter, who interviewed Lenny Susskind about the holographic principle extensively for her book Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn. Gefter’s basic idea was that an observer creates in its own holographic world due to the information that’s encoded on the observer’s de Sitter cosmic horizon that arises from dark energy and the accelerated expansion of space, which in relativity theory is understood as a positive cosmological constant. In relativity theory, the accelerated expansion of space always expands relative to the central point of view of an observer. At the observer’s cosmic horizon, space appears to expand away from the observer at the speed of light, and so nothing is observable to the observer beyond the limits of its cosmic horizon.

Accelerated Expansion of Space

Accelerated Expansion of the Universe

When the observer’s cosmic horizon encodes information for its own holographic world, its horizon becomes its holographic screen. Everything observable in the observer’s own holographic world is reducible to information encoded on its holographic screen. Everything observable in the observer’s holographic world is like a holographic image projected from its screen to its point of view at the center of its own holographic world.

The Observer, the Screen, and the Images of Things in its Holographic World

Susskind actually agrees with this idea, but has found no way to implement the idea in terms of theoretical physics. Due to this impasse, Susskind concentrates all of his efforts on understanding the AdS/CFT correspondence, which is the kind of holographic world created with a negative cosmological constant in anti-de Sitter space, which arises from the accelerated contraction of space. Anti-de Sitter space has a conformal boundary, and information can be encoded on that boundary in terms of an SU(N) conformal field theory. In the large N limit, this information encoded on the conformal boundary of anti-de Sitter space is equivalent to gravity in anti-de Sitter space. The way this works is that the information encoded on the 10-dimensional conformal boundary of anti-de Sitter space by a supersymmetric SU(N) conformal field theory in the large N limit is equivalent to 11-dimensional supergravity in anti-de Sitter space. When we understand the extra dimensions are being compactified, 11-dimensional supergravity explains all the laws of physics in terms of Einstein’s field equations for the space-time metric, which is the nature of the gravitational field, along with Maxwell’s equations for the electromagnetic field and the Yang-Mills equations for the nuclear fields. The matter fields, as described by Dirac’s equation for the electron and quark fields, naturally arise from supersymmetry. In other words, the laws of physics in 11-dimensional anti-de Sitter space are equivalent to the information encoded by a supersymmetric SU(N) conformal field theory defined on the 10-dimensional conformal boundary of anti-de Sitter space. The AdS/CFT correspondence is an explicit demonstration of the holographic principle.

Unfortunately, we do not live in anti-de Sitter space. We live in an exponentially expanding universe as characterized by de Sitter space and the accelerated expansion of space. This is confirmed by direct observation. When we look out at distant galaxies, the farther away the galaxy, the faster the galaxy appears to accelerate away from us. The limits of our observations are defined by a cosmic horizon at which point galaxies appear to move away from us at the speed of light. The Nobel prize was awarded for this discovery of observational cosmology.

Accelerating Universe

Susskind accepts that the de Sitter cosmic horizon is the nature of the observer’s holographic screen that defines its holographic world when information is encoded on its horizon. The stumbling block is to formulate this in terms of theoretical physics. There is no analogue of the AdS/CFT correspondence that generalizes to de Sitter space.

The basic problem comes down to the nature of the observer. In de Sitter space, the observer is always at the central point of view of its own de Sitter cosmic horizon. The observer’s holographic world is only defined when its horizon encodes information for everything observable in its holographic world and becomes its holographic screen.

The problem of the observer is the problem that Gefter confronted in her book. Gefter defined the observer as an accelerating frame of reverence. In relativity theory, the observer is defined as the origin or central point of view of a space-time coordinate system, which becomes an accelerating frame of reference when that coordinate system undergoes accelerated motion. In terms of the principle of equivalence, the nature of gravity is understood as arising from the observer’s own accelerated motion.

Principle of Equivalence

An accelerating observer always observes events in its own space-time geometry in terms of the curvature of that space-time geometry. The curvature of that space-time geometry is the nature of the gravitational field as formulated by Einstein’s field equations for the space-time metric. The situation in de Sitter space is very similar, except the curvature of that space-time geometry is being generated by the accelerated expansion of space. The expression of dark energy in terms of the accelerated expansion of space, like any other expression of mass or energy, is a generator of gravity in terms of the curvature of that space-time geometry. Dark energy generates gravity. The odd thing about this process is that the expression of dark energy is always counterbalanced by the expression of gravity. The negative potential energy of gravity always exactly cancels out the expression of positive dark energy. The negative potential energy of gravitational attraction exactly cancels out the expression of positive dark energy, and so the total energy of this process exactly adds up to zero. This is actually confirmed by observations of the universe. A universe with a total energy of zero is asymptotically flat, which is confirmed by direct observations of the universe.

This is one of the puzzles that Gefter had to confront when she explored the nature of the observer. The observer is best understood as arising at the central point of view of its own holographic world that is defined in terms of information encoded on its own cosmic horizon that arises due to dark energy and the accelerated expansion of space.

The big question that Gefter asked herself is: Where does the observer come from? The answer that Gefter eventually settled on is that the observer and its holographic world are a self-excited circuit. John Wheeler proposed this idea of the observer and the world it perceives as a self-excited circuit when he tried to scientifically understand the nature of an observer and the world that it perceives in terms of information.

Universal Observer as a Self-Excited Circuit

There is actually a great deal of merit in this idea of the observer and the world that it perceives as a self-excited circuit since perception always occurs in a subject-object relation. The observer is the subject and whatever it perceives in its world is an object of perception. In terms of the holographic principle, the observer always arises at the central point of view of its own holographic world, and whatever it perceives in that world is a form of information that can be reduced to information encoded on its own holographic screen. The observer’s holographic screen is an event horizon that arises due to the observer’s own accelerated motion, which in the case of the expression of dark energy is the accelerated expansion of space. The observer’s event horizon becomes its holographic screen when its horizon encodes information.

John Wheeler understood this process as similar to what an observer can observe on a computer screen. The computer screen encodes bits of information on pixels. That information is encoded in a binary code of 1’s and 0’s. Whatever the observer observes is a form of information that can be reduced to bits of information encoded on the computer screen. These forms of information are projected like images from the screen to the observer’s point of view outside the screen and are animated in the flow of energy that flows through the computer. Everything the observer can observe is a projected form of information animated in the flow of energy. Wheeler called this idea “It from bit”.

The idea of the observer’s holographic screen as similar to a computer screen is the essential nature of the holographic principle. Information is encoded on the observer’s holographic screen in terms of bits of information. The big question was how this information encoding occurs when the holographic screen is a de Sitter comic horizon.

Gefter began to search for such an explanation and found it in the work of Tom Banks, who initially called the idea matrix theory, and then changed the name to holographic space-time. Banks and Susskind are colleagues, and collaborated on the initial paper on matrix theory before the AdS/CFT correspondence was discovered. Their respective interests then diverged as Banks became focused on de Sitter space while Susskind focused his attention only on anti-de Sitter space.

Banks assumed the observer’s holographic screen is ultimately defined on a de Sitter cosmic horizon. This is inherently an observer-centric and observer-dependent formulation of the holographic principle since the observer is at the central point of view of its own holographic world that is defined on its own de Sitter cosmic horizon.

The big question is how is information encoded on the observer’s cosmic horizon? The answer is that information is encoded in terms of quantized bits of information called qubits. A qubit is understood to be mathematically represented in terms of a matrix, like a Pauli spin matrix that represents a spin variable that can only be observed in either a spin up or spin down state. The spin variable encodes measurable information in a binary code of 1’s and 0’s like a computer switch that is either on or off. This measurable information arises from the eigenvalues of the matrix. In quantum theory, the Pauli spin matrix is formulated in terms of an SU(2) matrix, which also gives a mathematical representation of rotational symmetry of the surface of a sphere. The eigenvalues of the matrix, which are the nature of the measurable information encoded by the matrix, are entangled due to quantum entanglement, which is a mathematical reflection of this rotational invariance. At the level of qubits, quantum entanglement is only reflecting that information is being encoded on the surface of a sphere in a rotationally invariant way.

Qubit of Information Encoded on the Surface of a Sphere

This way of encoding quantized bits of information on the surface of a sphere is called a matrix model. The next big question is where does the surface of the sphere come from? The answer the holographic principle gives is that the surface of the sphere arises as an observer’s event horizon due to the observer’s own accelerated motion.

The idea of qubits of information being the fundamental underlying basis for quantum theory has recently received a great deal of attention, including the award of a Nobel prize for experiments in quantum entanglement. The big question these experiments have not answered is exactly where is this information encoded? The holographic principle answers this question in terms of the surface of an event horizon that arises due to an observer’s own accelerated motion. In terms of an observer’s cosmic horizon that arises due to the expression of dark energy, that accelerated motion is understood in terms of the accelerated expansion of space. Even without the expression of dark energy, any accelerating observer will have its observations of events in space limited by an event horizon. In the generic case, this event horizon is called a Rindler horizon.

Accelerating Observer’s Event Horizon

The nature of an event horizon only requires the idea of an observer that undergoes accelerated motion and the invariance of the speed of light, which is the maximal rate of information transfer in three dimensional space. The speed of light is the maximal rate of information transfer in a computer network. A light ray that originates on the other side of the observer’s event horizon can never reach the accelerating observer as long as the observer continues to undergo its accelerated motion. The holographic principle is built on this idea of accelerated motion, whether that accelerated motion arises from the observer’s own accelerated motion or the accelerated expansion of space.

The basic idea of the holographic principle is that the observer’s event horizon, whether a de Sitter cosmic horizon or a Rindler horizon or some combination of the two, becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon. The most general way to formulate the holographic principle is in terms of a matrix model, which is the way Tom Banks has formulated the holographic principle. Unlike the AdS/CFT correspondence that only applies in anti-de Sitter space, the idea of a matrix model can also be formulated in de Sitter space.

The upshot is that an observer’s event horizon can become its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon, which is mathematically formulated in terms of a matrix model. The way the holographic works is that each qubit of information is encoded on a Planck size area element defined on the surface of the horizon, like bits of information encoded on the pixels of a computer screen. The number of qubits of information encoded on the horizon is given in terms of the surface area, A, of the horizon as n=A/4ℓ², where the Planck area, ℓ²=ħG/c³, is given in terms of Planck’s constant, the gravitational constant and the speed of light. Since a qubit of information is the smallest amount of measurable information that can be measured, this explains why a Planck-size event horizon, which encodes a single qubit of information, is the smallest possible event horizon. Larger event horizons encode more qubits of information.

Holographic Principle

The idea Tom Banks had about formulating the holographic principle in de Sitter space in terms of a matrix model, where the observer is at the central point of view of its own holographic world that is defined in terms of qubits of information encoded on its own holographic screen that arises as its cosmic horizon, is a natural extension of the idea that Ted Jacobson had about the thermodynamics of space-time. Jacobson considered an accelerating observer and its Rindler horizon. Jacobson assumed that the observer’s world was defined in terms of qubits of information encoded on the observer’s Rindler horizon. In terms of thermodynamics, this way of encoding qubits on the observer’s horizon is the nature of holographic entropy. The qubits are the fundamental dynamical degrees of freedom for the observer’s world. In terms of qubits as the fundamental basis for quantum theory, a qubit is the nature of entropic information. Holographic entropy is simply given in terms of the number of qubits encoded on the observer’s event horizon as S=kn. Jacobson needed one more piece of the puzzle, which is the amount of thermal energy carried by each dynamical degree of freedom at thermal equilibrium.

Thermodynamics tells us that at thermal equilibrium, each dynamical degree of freedom carries the same amount of thermal energy, which is given in terms of temperature as E=kT. In a holographic world, these dynamical degrees of freedom are qubits of information encoded on the observer’s event horizon. Jacobson was able to specify this thermal energy in terms of the Unruh temperature of the Rindler horizon, which is simply given in terms of the observer’s acceleration, a, as kT=ħa/2πc. Jacobson then used the laws of thermodynamics, which says that ΔE=TΔS=kTΔn. Since holographic entropy is given in terms of the number of qubits encoded on the surface area of the event horizon as n=A/4ℓ², this simply says that at thermal equilibrium, as the event horizon changes in surface area, the amount of thermal energy inherent in the observer’s holographic world also changes since there is a change in the number of qubits of information encoded on the event horizon. At thermal equilibrium, each qubit carries the same amount of thermal energy given in terms of the observer’s own acceleration as E=kT=ħa/2πc.

This simple relationship allowed Jacobson to derive Einstein’s field equations for the space-time metric from the laws of thermodynamics. As the surface area of the observer’s event horizon changes, there is a corresponding change in the amount of energy inherent in the observer’s holographic world, which corresponds to a change in the dynamical curvature of the space-time geometry of that holographic world as is specified by Einstein’s field equations for the space-time metric.

Einstein’s Field Equations for the Space-time Metric

Einstein’s field equations for the space-time metric are not really fundamental, but are more like a thermodynamic equation of state that describes gravitational events in the observer’s holographic world when things are near thermal equilibrium. Once we have Einstein’s field equations, we can then deduce all the field equations for the standard model of particle physics using the usual unification mechanisms of supersymmetry and extra compactified dimensions of space. At the level of field theory, the final result of unification looks like 11-dimensional supergravity, just as it does in the AdS/CFT correspondence. All the quantum fields that correspond to particle physics arise from Einstein’s field equations as extra components of the space-time metric due to supersymmetry and extra compactified dimensions of space. Just like Einstein’s field equations, none of these quantum fields are really fundamental, but instead only have the limited validity of thermodynamic equations of state that describe events in the observer’s holographic world when things are near thermal equilibrium.

The holographic principle is telling us that every observer observes events in its own holographic world from the central point of view of that world. Although those events appear to occur in three dimensional space and to be governed by the laws of physics as formulated in three dimensional space, in reality, the information for all those events is reducible to qubits of information encoded on the observer’s own event horizon, which is the two dimensional bounding surface of that space. The observer’s event horizon arises due to its own accelerated motion and becomes its holographic screen when its horizon encodes qubits of information. Everything the observer can observe in its own holographic world is a form of information that’s reducible to qubits of information encoded on its own holographic screen. Those forms of information are projected like images from the observer’s screen to its own point of view at the center of its own holographic world. Even the flow of energy that animates the images can be understood in terms of the energy of the observer’s own accelerated motion.

In the sense of the subject-object relation of perception, the observer is the subject and its object of perception is a form of information that is reducible to qubits of information encoded on its holographic screen. Perception only occurs as that form of information is projected like an image from the observer’s screen to its central point of view. The observer not only perceives the form of things, but also the flow energy that animates things. There is only an illusion that the form of a person that appears in the observer’s world is able to perceive things in that world. The form of a person is only the central form of information that appears in the observer’s world, like the form of an avatar that appears in a computer-generated virtual reality world. In reality, there is no person, only the projected images of a virtual reality that appears due to the observer’s own motion.

There is only an illusion that the central form of a person that appears in the observer’s holographic world is able to perceive things in that world. That illusion is created as the observer emotionally identifies itself with that emotionally animated central personal form. The central form of a person is always emotionally animated relative to all other forms that appear in the observer’s holographic world. The observer only emotionally identifies itself with that emotionally animated personal form due to its perception of feelings of emotional self-limitation to that emotionally animated personal form as that personal form is emotionally animated relative to all other forms that appear in its world.

In no significant way is this state of affairs different from an observer’s perception of the projected and animated images of a computer-generated virtual reality world that’s being displayed on a computer screen. In effect, the observer itself creates its own quantum computer that gives rise to the appearance of its own computer-generated holographic virtual reality world. The quantum computer is created due to the observer’s own accelerated motion that gives rise to its event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon. The laws of physics for the observer’s holographic world are the computational rules that govern the operation of the quantum computer. Even the energy that flows through the quantum computer can be understood as arising from the energy of the observer’s own accelerated motion.

If every observer observes events in its own holographic world from the central point of view of that world as events are displayed on its own holographic screen, then how do we explain the nature of a consensual reality shared by many observers? The answer is information sharing. In effect, a computer network is created when holographic screens overlap like a Venn diagram and share information. Every observer is at the central point of view of its own holographic world, but those holographic worlds can share information when their respective holographic screens overlap and share information, which allows many observers to share in a consensual reality.

Information Sharing Among Overlapping Holographic Screens

We have one last important question to answer, which is Gefter’s original question: Where does the observer come from? There must be a source of the observer. If we think of the observer as the consciousness present at the central point of view of its own holographic world, then there must be a source of this perceiving consciousness. The really big question is what is the source of the observer’s consciousness?

The reason this is a big question is because the perceiving consciousness of the observer cannot arise from something that appears in the holographic world that the observer perceives, like the central form of a person that appears in that world. The source of consciousness cannot be an object in consciousness. Perception always occurs in a subject-object relation, where the observer is the subject and its object of perception is a form of information that appears in its holographic world. That object of perception cannot be the source of the observer’s consciousness. To make that assumption would be to create a paradox of self-reference that would make the whole explanation logically inconsistent. Logical consistency of the explanation demands that the observer’s consciousness cannot arise from something that it can observe.

The basic problem is that consciousness cannot be computational in nature as Roger Penrose has pointed out. In a holographic world, everything the observer can observe is a form of information that’s reducible to qubits of information encoded on the observer’s holographic screen. All observable forms of information are computational since they can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on the observer’s screen, but the observer’s consciousness cannot be computational since it is what perceives the forms of information. The forms must be projected like images from the observer’s holographic screen to its point of view outside the screen. Since the observer’s consciousness exists outside the screen, it cannot be reduced to qubits of information encoded on the screen without creating a logically inconsistent paradox of self-reference. This is the basic idea underlying the Godel incompleteness theorems. An observer that observes forms of information that are being displayed on a computer screen from its point of view outside the screen cannot be reduced to bits of information encoded on the computer screen, and so the observer’s consciousness cannot be computational in nature. The forms of information are all computational in nature, but not the observer’s consciousness.

If the source of consciousness cannot arise from something that the observer can perceive in a subject-object relation of perception, then where does the observer’s consciousness come from? If the source of consciousness cannot arise from an object of perception, then where does the observer’s consciousness come from? This is the stumbling block that has prevented all real progress in terms of understanding the holographic principle. This is a stumbling block since we have to begin by assuming the a priori existence of a source for the observer’s consciousness before we can discuss how its holographic world appears to come into existence. That source of the observer’s consciousness must exist prior to the apparent existence of its holographic world.

This problem arises from how a holographic world is created. A holographic world only appears to come into existence due to an observer’s accelerated motion that gives rise to its event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon. The observer itself can only be understood as the perceiving consciousness present at the central point of view of its own holographic world that is able to undergo accelerated motion, which gives rise to its event horizon. To make sense of this scenario, we have to begin with the assumption of the existence of a source for the observer’s consciousness. There must be a source of the observer’s perceiving consciousness that has an a priori existence that exists prior to the apparent existence of its holographic world. Before the observer’s holographic world can appear to come into existence, the source of the observer’s consciousness must exist.

This is a stumbling block to any real understanding of the holographic principle because the assumption of the a priori existence of a source of the observer’s consciousness smacks of spiritualism, which is exactly what it is. Virtually everybody that works in the scientific field of the holographic principle is a physicalist, and the idea of a spiritual reality that is beyond physical reality is anathema to the physicalists. Lenny Susskind, Tom Banks and Amanda Gefter are all physicalists, and they all vehemently deny the existence of a spiritual reality that is beyond physical reality. The big problem that they face is that they also accept that physical reality is constructed as a holographic world.

Once you accept that physical reality is constructed as a holographic world, you’re in a real pickle when you try to understand the nature of consciousness. The source of consciousness cannot be an object in consciousness. In the sense of a subject-object relation of perception, the source of the observer’s perceiving consciousness cannot be an object of perception that appears in its own holographic world, which is understood as a form of information that’s reducible to qubits of information encoded on its own holographic screen that arises as an event horizon due to its own accelerated motion as a point of consciousness at the center of its own holographic world. Where does that consciousness come from? It’s fine to say that the subject-object relation of perception arises as a self-excited circuit, but we still have to explain the source of consciousness.

The physicalists will never really understand the holographic principle because they deny the existence of a spiritual reality beyond physical reality. That spiritual reality is the only possible source of consciousness. There is no other possible explanation for the source of consciousness. All other possible explanations suffer from the logical inconsistency of a paradox of self-reference. If we want to maintain logical consistency, we have to assume the existence of a source of consciousness that is beyond physical reality, which is best called spiritual reality. In the words of Sherlock Holmes, when you’ve eliminated everything that is impossible, whatever remains must be the truth.

What exactly is this spiritual reality beyond physical reality that is the source of the observer’s consciousness? The simple answer is that this spiritual reality is the primordial nature of existence. It is what exists when everything else disappears from existence. The observer’s holographic world can only disappear from existence when the observer stops accelerating. When the observer’s accelerated motion comes to an end, the observer enters into an ultimate state of free-fall. When the observer enters into an ultimate state of free-fall, the observer no longer has an event horizon that encodes qubits of information and becomes its holographic screen. In an ultimate state of free-fall, everything in the observer’s holographic world disappears from existence from its own point of view, and nothing remains.

Nothingness

The nothingness that remains when the observer’s holographic world disappears from existence is called the void. The void is the source of the observer’s consciousness, which is a differentiated state of consciousness that arises at the central point of view of its own holographic world. That holographic world only appears to come into existence from the observer’s own point of view due to the observer’s own accelerated motion relative to the motionless void. The existence of the void is timeless and unchanging, which is to say it is motionless. The void is unlimited. It has no boundary. The bounding surface of an event horizon can only arise from the point of view of an accelerating observer. The void is also undivided. As the source of the observer’s perceiving consciousness, the void can only be understood as undifferentiated consciousness.

In reality, the void cannot be conceptualized except in terms of negation as absolute nothingness, which is unlimited, undivided and unchanging. Only a holographic world that is characterized by limitation, division and change can ever be conceptualized. That conceptualization is the very nature of a holographic world, which is characterized by forms of information and the flow of energy. As absolute nothingness, the void is formless. As absolute nothingness, the void is timeless and motionless. The course of time, like the flow of energy, only appears to exist in an observer’s holographic world due to the observer’s own accelerated motion relative to the motionless void that gives rise to its event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon. In the absolute nothingness of the void, there are no events and nothing ever appears to happen. There is only absolute nothingness.

The void is the primordial, timeless nature of existence. The course of time, like the flow of energy, only appears to exist in an observer’s holographic world. Forms of information only appear to exist in an observer’s holographic world. The void, as the source of the observer’s perceiving consciousness, is the nature of timeless being, which can only be understood as undifferentiated consciousness. The individual consciousness of the observer, present at the central point of view of its own holographic world, is the nature of individual being, which is called I Am or the Self. As absolute nothingness, the void is the nature of undivided and unlimited timeless being, which is also called No-self.

In some mysterious way, the individual consciousness of the observer, present at its own point of view, must separate itself from the undifferentiated consciousness of the void before its holographic world can appear to come into existence. Individual consciousness only refers to the observer’s individual point of view. The observer’s holographic world only appears to come into existence from its own point of view when the observer begins to undergo accelerated motion relative to the motionless void, which is how its event horizon arises that becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon. When the observer’s accelerated motion comes to an end in an ultimate state of free-fall, its holographic world disappears from existence from its own point of view, and only the void remains. In the sense of a dissolution, the individual consciousness of the observer, present at its own point of view at the center of its own holographic world, dissolves back into the nothingness of the undifferentiated consciousness of the void like a drop of water that dissolves back into the ocean. Individual being dissolves back into its source of pure undivided being. This experience of dissolution is called spiritual enlightenment.

There are still a few loose ends that need to be tied together regarding the holographic principle. Just as the undifferentiated consciousness of the void is the source of the individual perceiving consciousness of the observer present at the central point of view of its own holographic world, the void is also the source of the energy that underlies the observer’s accelerated motion that gives rise to its event horizon, and the source of the information encoded on the observer’s event horizon that becomes its holographic screen. The void as the source of all these things helps clear up the mystery of the normal flow of thermal energy through the observer’s holographic world, which is closely related to the mystery of the cosmological constant and the big bang.

The best theory we have of the big bang is called inflationary cosmology, which assumes that early in the history of the universe the cosmological constant transitions from a higher to a lower value. The value of the cosmological constant sets the size of the observer’s holographic world in terms of the radius of its cosmic horizon due to the accelerated expansion of space. The cosmic horizon defines the limits of the observer’s own observable world since nothing is observable beyond the limits of its horizon. The larger the value of the cosmological constant, the smaller the radius of the observer’s cosmic horizon. In terms of thermal energy, the smaller the radius of the observer’s cosmic horizon, the higher its Unruh temperature. Early In the history of the big bang, the cosmological constant took on a very high value corresponding to a small radius of the observer’s cosmic horizon and a high Unruh temperature. Inflationary cosmology assumes that the cosmological constant transitions from a higher to a lower value, which increases the radius to the observer’s cosmic horizon and lowers its Unruh temperature. By this mechanism, the observer’s holographic world appears to increase in size. Simultaneously, this allows heat to flow from hotter to colder objects as the Unruh temperature decreases, which explains the normal flow of thermal energy through the observer’s holographic world. The normal flow of thermal energy is literally directed in the direction of the accelerated expansion of space as the cosmological constant transitions to a lower value and the observer’s holographic world increases in size. This also allows entropy to increase as the observer’s cosmic horizon increases in radius and surface area, which allows more qubits of information to be encoded on the horizon. This increase in entropy as heat flows in a thermal gradient is the nature of the second law of thermodynamics, which says that forms of information tend to become more disordered due to the randomizing effects of the flow of thermal energy as heat flows from hotter to colder objects. The disorganizing effects of thermal disorder are always counterbalanced by the organizing effects of coherent organization as forms hold together, but eventually thermal disorganization wins out and forms fall apart. The flow of heat in a thermal gradient also explains the nature of time’s arrow as things tend to become more thermally disordered. Time’s arrow is literally directed in the direction of the accelerated expansion of space and the expansion of the observer’s holographic world. When the cosmological constant transitions to its final value of zero, the radius of the observer’s cosmic horizon increases to infinity and its Unruh temperature cools to absolute zero. When the flow of heat ultimately comes to an end, the course of time also comes to an end, which is called the heat death of the universe.

Normal Flow of Thermal Energy through the Observer’s Holographic World

This is a big puzzle in this scenario that does not have a scientific explanation. How exactly is the value of the cosmological constant set and what allows for its transition to a lower value? In terms of the holographic principle, there is no scientific answer. In some sense, the value of the cosmological constant is a boundary condition that sets the conditions for the construction of a holographic world. Inflationary cosmology is based on quantum field theory, but quantum field theory cannot explain the nature of the cosmological constant since all field theories only arise in a holographic world as thermodynamic equations of state that only describe events in that world when things are near thermal equilibrium. We have to assume a value for the cosmological constant before we can even construct that holographic world and discuss the laws of physics in that world as formulated in terms of field theories. In the same way, there is no scientific explanation in terms of the holographic principle for why the cosmological constant transitions to a lower value. Each transition of the cosmological constant would in effect create a new big bang event, which occurs when the universe is far away from thermal equilibrium, and unlike the Unruh temperature, which assumes thermal equilibrium, cannot be calculated in quantum field theory, which is only valid for small fluctuations around thermal equilibrium. Theoretical physics can never explain the value of the cosmological constant or why it transitions to a lower value in terms of the holographic principle since we have to assume a value for the cosmological constant before we can construct a holographic world. In the sense of a boundary condition, the cosmological constant is what sets the radius of the observer’s cosmic horizon, which is the bounding surface of space that sets the limits of the observer’s own observable holographic world.

Just as the undifferentiated consciousness of the void in some mysterious way is the source of the individual consciousness of the observer at the central point of view of its own holographic world, the void is also the source of the dark energy that’s inherent in the cosmological constant, which must take on a non-zero value before the observer’s holographic world can even appear to come into existence. The dark energy of the cosmological constant is ultimately what energizes the observer’s own holographic world and puts the bang in the big bang event. The dark energy of the cosmological constant is also what gives rise to the observer’s cosmic horizon that becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on the horizon. The void is also the source of this information encoding. In some mysterious way, the whole thing begins as the undifferentiated consciousness of the void differentiates itself into the individual consciousness of the observer at the central point of view of its own holographic world, expresses the dark energy that underlies the accelerated expansion of space that places the observer in an accelerated frame of reference and gives rise to the observer’s cosmic horizon, and encodes qubits of information on the observer’s cosmic horizon that becomes its holographic screen. It all has to begin with the void. The void is the source of the whole thing. The void is the nature of the spiritual reality that is beyond the physical reality of an observer’s holographic world. There is no scientific explanation for the creation of the whole thing other than to call it God’s will.

Ultimately, the individual consciousness of the observer must return to its primordial state of undifferentiated consciousness. Individual being must reunite itself with pure undivided being. Individual consciousness, present at the central point of view of its own holographic world, must dissolve back into its source of undifferentiated consciousness like a drop of water that dissolves into the ocean. This dissolution always occurs in an ultimate state of free-fall as the accelerated motion of the observer’s own point of view relative to the motionless void comes to an end. In that dissolution, the course of time and the flow of energy come to an end. In that dissolution, the observer’s holographic world disappears from existence from its own point of view and nothing remains. That nothingness is the nature of timeless being, which is the primordial nature of existence.

Nothingness

Footnote on String Theory

Why isn’t string theory a fundamental description of reality? The answer is string theory is computational, and can only apply to the computational construction of a holographic world. String theory, like field theory, only applies at the level of a holographic world. String theory is closely related to field theory, which is seen in a 10-dimensional supersymmetric SU(N) gauge theory generating string theory in the large N limit, and in the low energy limit of string theory being 11-dimensional supergravity. This connection explains why string theory is holographic. String theory, like field theory, only gives the computational rules that govern events in a holographic world. That computation arises from qubits of information encoded on a holographic screen, which arises as an observer’s event horizon due to its own accelerated motion. When that acceleration comes to an end in an ultimate state of free-fall, all computation also comes to an end, and only the void remains. String theory, like field theory, cannot apply in the ultimate reality of the void that is beyond the computational virtual reality of a holographic world. The simple answer is that computation does not apply to the void. The void as the source of a computational holographic virtual reality world is beyond computation.

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Scientific References

Tom Banks and Willy Fischler (2018): Why the Cosmological Constant is a Boundary Condition. arXiv:1811.00130

Raphael Bousso (2002): The Holographic Principle. arXiv:hep-th/0203101

Amanda Gefter (2014): Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn (Random House)

Amanda Gefter (2012): Cosmic Solipsism. FQXi Essay

Brian Greene (2000): The Elegant Universe (Vintage Books)

Gerard ‘t Hooft (2000): The Holographic Principle. arXiv:hep-th/0003004

Ted Jacobson (1995): Thermodynamics of Space-time. arXiv:gr-qc/9504004

J Madore (1999): Non-commutative Geometry for Pedestrians. arXiv:gr-qc/9906059

Juan Maldacena (1997): The Large N Limit of Superconformal Field Theories and Supergravity. arXiv:hep-th/9711200

Roger Penrose (2005): The Road to Reality (Alfred A Knopf)

Lee Smolin (2001): Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (Basic Books)

Leonard Susskind (2008): The Black Hole War (Little, Brown and Company)

Leonard Susskind (1994): The World as a Hologram. arXiv:hep-th/9409089

A. Zee (2003): Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell (Princeton University Press)

Anton Zeilinger (1999): Experiment and the Foundations of Quantum Physics. Rev. Mod. Phys. 71, S288.

Additional References

The Bhagavad-Gita (1909): Edwin Arnold trans. (Harvard Classics)

Noam Chomsky on Curt Jaimungal’s podcast Theories of Everything (Apr 12, 2022)

Antonio Damasio (1999): The Feeling of What Happens (Harcourt Brace)

N. Gregory Hamilton (1988): Self and Others (Jason Aronson)

Jed McKenna (2002, 2004, 2007): Spiritual Enlightenment Trilogy (Wisefool Press)

Jed McKenna (2013): Jed McKenna’s Theory of Everything (Wisefool Press)

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1973): I Am That (Acorn Press)

Osho (1974): The Book of Secrets (St Martin’s Griffin)

Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki (1957): Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (Tuttle Publishing)

Bernadette Roberts (1993): The Experience of No-Self (State Univ of New York Press)

Eckhart Tolle (1997): The Power of Now (New World Library)

Lao Tsu (1989): Tao Te Ching. Gia-Fu Feng trans. (Vintage Books)

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Philosophy versus Physics

Here’s a recent posting from Online_Sadhu_Sanga@googlegroups.com on the Idols of the Mind vs. True Reality:

“Hegel’s development of the insights of Aristotle and Kant is crucial to learn about when considering the origin and nature of consciousness and life, especially the difference between life and nonlife. In this regard, the first chapter of Idols of the Mind vs. True Reality (2020) by Bhakti Madhava Puri, Ph.D., presents Aristotle’s development of dunamis, energia, and entelechy, and Hegel’s further insight about inner teleology and his explanation of mechanical, chemical, and biological (teleological) systems. It seems valuable to consider the role that the rigid understanding (German: Verstandt) plays in modern science’s commitment to the logical law of identity and the inappropriate wholesale application of mechanical logic to cells and organisms, and how progressing to dialectic reason (German: Vernunft) can serve to more honestly and comprehensively describe the holistic logic of identity-in-difference that characterizes living entities.

Topics throughout the rest of the book include (1) a historical account of scientists acknowledging the essential role of thought or intelligence governing macroscopic and microscopic material systems and the necessity for humility in recognizing this, (2) an explanation of how an a priori commitment to the logical law of identity led to the mathematization of nature and further mechanization of living entities and the issues thereof, and (3) a presentation of Hegel’s explanation of consciousness being the subject-object relation where an account of all three moments of the knower (subject), known (object), and knowing (consciousness/subject-object relation) — and their higher development — is necessary for comprehensive and complete knowledge of nature and its truth as Spirit. Depending on the expressed level of interest, we will also discuss the implications for modern science regarding the idea that Spirit is the identity-in-difference of Absolute Thought and Being, as well as the relationship and distinction between Infinite Spirit and finite spirit.”

This is all very nice at a philosophical level, but recently, a very rigorous scientific and mathematical implementation of these ideas has become possible thanks to the holographic principle of quantum gravity, which for reasons I do not understand, has been ignored and continues to be ignored while all efforts are directed in a nebulous, amorphous, and poorly defined philosophical direction. Isn’t it time to get more exact?

The only requirement for this kind of exact understanding is to give the holographic principle a valid interpretation. The fundamental assumption for this valid interpretation of the holographic principle is to assume the primordial existence of consciousness. In its primordial, timeless state, consciousness is undifferentiated, unchanging, unlimited and undivided, which is called the void.

Nothingness

In its differentiated state, consciousness is called the observer. The observer is a focal point of differentiated consciousness that is always present at the central point of view of its own holographic world. The observer is a focal point of illuminating and perceiving consciousness that not only perceives objects in its own holographic world but also illuminates objects.

All Seeing Eye

The observer is the subject in the subject-object relation of perception. An object of perception is a form of information that appears in the observer’s holographic world. That holographic world only appears to come into existence because the observer is undergoing accelerated motion relative to the motionless void. That accelerated motion gives rise to the observer’s event horizon that surrounds the observer’s central point of view and limits its observations of events in space. The observer’s event horizon becomes its holographic screen when its horizon encodes qubits of information. In effect, the observer creates its own quantum computer that gives rise to the appearance of its own computer-generated holographic virtual reality world.

Universal Observer

Accelerating Observer’s Event Horizon

In a computer-generated virtual reality, the form of everything perceivable is reducible to numbers, which are bits of information encoded on a computer screen. The situation in a holographic world is a bit more complicated than a classical computer since the bits of information are qubits or quantized bits of information encoded on a holographic screen that arises as an observer’s event horizon due to its own accelerated motion. The qubits are entangled due to quantum entanglement. A computer network is created due to information sharing among overlapping holographic screens, each of which arises from an observer’s accelerated motion and encodes information. Each observer is at the central point of view of its own holographic world, but shares in a consensual reality due to information sharing among overlapping screens. The observer’s computer-generated virtual reality, which is its holographic world, is governed by a quantum computer, which allows for the expression of potentiality, not just classical determinism. What we call the laws of physics in a holographic world are only the computational rules that govern the operation of the quantum computer. The whole thing only begins with the observer’s own accelerated motion that gives rise to its event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon.

The Observer, the Screen and the Images of Things in its Holographic World

Qubit of Information Encoded on a Planck-size Event Horizon

Holographic Principle

Information Sharing Among Overlapping Holographic Screens

The bottom line is that every object of perception is a form of information that can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on an observer’s holographic screen, which arises as its event horizon due to its own accelerated motion. Everything perceivable is like a computer-generated image that is projected from the observer’s screen to its central point of view and is animated in the flow of energy. The flow of energy can always be understood as arising from the observer’s own accelerated motion.

The form of a person, which is an object of perception, can be reduced to numbers in terms of qubits of information encoded on a holographic screen. What I Am cannot be reduced to numbers. What I Am is what perceives the form of a person that is reducible to numbers and is being displayed on a holographic screen. The form of a person is computational in nature because it’s like an image that’s being displayed on a computer screen in a computer-generated holographic virtual reality. The form of a person is only a computer-generated construction that’s reducible to numbers.

What I Am as the observer of that holographic world is not computational in nature and cannot be reduced to numbers because it is what perceives the projected and animated images of the form of a person that’s being displayed on the screen from its own point of view outside the screen. That’s why the expression I Am a person is a contradiction in terms. In reality, there is no person, only the projected and animated images of a holographic virtual reality world that’s being displayed on a holographic screen. In reality, only the true nature of what I Am really exists and moves.

Ultimately, I am not even a focal point of illuminating and perceiving consciousness that arises at the central point of view of its own holographic world. The observer only appears to have its own individual existence as it arises at its own individual point of view at the center of its own holographic world. The observer only creates that holographic world due to its own accelerated motion relative to the motionless void. The source of that point of consciousness is the undifferentiated consciousness of the void.

When the accelerated motion of that point of consciousness relative to the motionless void comes to an end, which can be called an ultimate state of free-fall, the observer’s holographic world disappears from existence from its own point of view since it no longer creates its own holographic screen in terms of information encoded on its own event horizon. In an ultimate state of free-fall, that focal point of consciousness dissolves back into the undifferentiated consciousness of the void like a drop of water that dissolves back into the ocean. The ocean of consciousness is the undifferentiated consciousness of the void, which is the source of the individual consciousness of the observer. The individual consciousness of the observer has to separate itself from the void and begin to move relative to the motionless void before its own holographic world can appear to come into existence from its own point of view.

All of these ideas can be formalized in terms of modern theoretical physics, which means they have the exactness of mathematical equations. See for example the work of Tom Banks in his article with Willy Fischler on Why the Cosmological Constant is a Boundary Condition: arXiv:1811.00130. Also see the pioneering article by Ted Jacobson on the Thermodynamics of Space-time: arXiv:gr-qc/9504004. Similar ideas are found in Amanda Gefter’s recent book: Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn. These ideas can be brought into perfect harmony with the concept of nonduality as most elegantly expressed by Nisargadatta Maharaj in his spiritual classic I Am That. There is absolutely nothing inconsistent between the concept of nonduality and the idea of the holographic principle. They fit together like a glove on a hand. Isn’t it time we stop talking about these things at a poorly defined philosophical level and start talking in terms of the hard mathematical science of theoretical physics?

It sounds harsh to say that all philosophical conceptual frameworks are poorly defined, but that’s only another way of saying that no philosophical system of thought has any real predictive power. Predictability is the litmus test that tells us that the conceptual framework is defining things in a way that mimics the way things are actually defined in nature. Predictability is a result of defining things in terms of quantifiable information, like the bits of information encoded on the pixels of a computer screen. Predictability is synonymous with computation. The laws of physics have predictive power because they allow for computation. The more complicated the phenomenon, the more difficult the computation, and there’s often a computational impasse. Computational science, which reaches its apex in theoretical physics, is often limited in its ability to make predictions for only very simple phenomena, like the behavior of an isolated elementary particle.

The holographic principle is the ultimate level of predictability in that it tells us that the behavior of all observable things, including the nature of a holographic world, can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on a holographic screen. That holographic screen arises as an event horizon due to an observer’s own accelerated motion, which becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon. The observer is the perceiving consciousness present at the central point of view of its own holographic world. This conceptual framework has predictive power since it mimics the way that all observable things are actually defined in nature. All observable things are forms of information that can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on an observer’s own holographic screen. Predictability is synonymous with computation.

In terms of predictability, the litmus test for any conceptual framework is whether the laws of physics can be deduced from the conceptual framework, which no philosophical system of thought is able to do. On the other hand, the laws of physics are deducible from the holographic principle in a straightforward way, as is demonstrated in the work of Ted Jacobson and Tom Banks. Einstein’s field equations for the space-time metric, which is the nature of the gravitational field, along with Maxwell’s equations for the electromagnetic field, Dirac’s equation for the electron field, and the Yang-Mills equations for the nuclear fields are all deducible from the holographic principle. The big qualifier is that the laws of physics are limited in validity and only apply at the level of an observer’s holographic world. The laws of physics do not apply at the ultimate level of reality, which is the level of the primordial, timeless existence of consciousness. At the ultimate level of reality, which is timeless and unchanging, there is no predictability. At the ultimate level of reality, nothing ever happens and there is nothing to predict.

Predictability based on computation is only a characteristic of a holographic world since the very nature of time only appears to exist in a holographic world. The course of time, like the expression of all energy, can only arise from the accelerated motion of an observer relative to the motionless void. The course of time is just another observable aspect of things that the observer perceives in its own holographic world. The course of time only arises as the observer perceives events in its own holographic world. Those events arise from the observer’s own accelerated motion relative to the motionless void. At the ultimate level of reality, there are no events. At the ultimate level of reality, only the timeless being of consciousness remains and timelessly exists.

The ultimate litmus test is whether the conceptual framework can predict the nature of spiritual enlightenment, which again, no philosophical system of thought is able to do. Only the holographic principle is able to predict the nature of spiritual enlightenment as an ultimate state of free-fall. In an ultimate state of free-fall, the observer no longer has an event horizon that limits its observation of events in space, and therefore no longer has a holographic screen that encodes information for everything observable in its own holographic world. In an ultimate state of free-fall, everything in the observer’s own holographic world disappears from existence from its own point of view, and nothing remains. In an ultimate state of free-fall, the observer’s accelerated motion relative to the motionless void comes to an end, the expression of all energy comes to an end, and the course of time comes to an end. Only the timeless being of consciousness remains. In an ultimate state of free-fall, the individual consciousness of the observer, present at its own point of view at the center of its own holographic world, dissolves back into the undifferentiated consciousness of the void as its world disappears from existence.

Nothingness

Download the PDF documents:

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oxymoron_-i-am-a-free-man-1Download

why-youre-confused-about-what-you-really-are-1Download

the-underlying-truth-of-you-and-the-story-of-realityDownload

recent-conversations-on-the-nature-of-nonduality-1Download

more-conversations-on-the-nature-of-nonduality-3Download

a-brief-history-of-the-holographic-principleDownload

Scientific References

Tom Banks and Willy Fischler (2018): Why the Cosmological Constant is a Boundary Condition. arXiv:1811.00130

Raphael Bousso (2002): The Holographic Principle. arXiv:hep-th/0203101

Amanda Gefter (2014): Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn (Random House)

Amanda Gefter (2012): Cosmic Solipsism. FQXi Essay

Brian Greene (2000): The Elegant Universe (Vintage Books)

Gerard ‘t Hooft (2000): The Holographic Principle. arXiv:hep-th/0003004

Ted Jacobson (1995): Thermodynamics of Space-time. arXiv:gr-qc/9504004

J Madore (1999): Non-commutative Geometry for Pedestrians. arXiv:gr-qc/9906059

Juan Maldacena (1997): The Large N Limit of Superconformal Field Theories and Supergravity. arXiv:hep-th/9711200

Roger Penrose (2005): The Road to Reality (Alfred A Knopf)

Lee Smolin (2001): Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (Basic Books)

Leonard Susskind (2008): The Black Hole War (Little, Brown and Company)

Leonard Susskind (1994): The World as a Hologram. arXiv:hep-th/9409089

A. Zee (2003): Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell (Princeton University Press)

Anton Zeilinger (1999): Experiment and the Foundations of Quantum Physics. Rev. Mod. Phys. 71, S288.

Additional References

The Bhagavad-Gita (1909): Edwin Arnold trans. (Harvard Classics)

Noam Chomsky on Curt Jaimungal’s podcast Theories of Everything (Apr 12, 2022)

Antonio Damasio (1999): The Feeling of What Happens (Harcourt Brace)

N. Gregory Hamilton (1988): Self and Others (Jason Aronson)

Jed McKenna (2002, 2004, 2007): Spiritual Enlightenment Trilogy (Wisefool Press)

Jed McKenna (2013): Jed McKenna’s Theory of Everything (Wisefool Press)

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1973): I Am That (Acorn Press)

Osho (1974): The Book of Secrets (St Martin’s Griffin)

Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki (1957): Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (Tuttle Publishing)

Bernadette Roberts (1993): The Experience of No-Self (State Univ of New York Press)

Eckhart Tolle (1997): The Power of Now (New World Library)

Lao Tsu (1989): Tao Te Ching. Gia-Fu Feng trans. (Vintage Books)

♦♦♦

Oxymoron: I Am a Free Man

Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing-Shakespeare

Nothingness

I Am a Free Man-Motto of Patrick McGoohan in the TV series The Prisoner

The expression I Am a Free Man is a contradiction in terms. In reality, whenever you say “I am a man”, you’re only emotionally identifying yourself with the emotionally animated form of a male person that appears in the world you perceive. The very nature of your bondage is your emotional self-identification with the form of a person.

Liberation is never freedom of the person; it is always freedom from the person-Nisargadatta Maharaj

If you’re not a person, then what exactly are you? The only way you can break-free from this personally self-identified state of emotional bondage is to realize the true nature of what you really are. To break-free from this state of bondage, you have to ask yourself what you really are. Ask your Self what you really are. “Self, what exactly are you?”

Ask yourself: Who am I?-Jed McKenna

All Seeing Eye

If you can’t make any progress by asking yourself what you really are, you can always ask Plato. Plato gave a very clear answer to this question in the Allegory of the Cave:

The entire Patrick McGoohan quote is I am not a number; I am a free man. The first part of this quote is correct. The second part of this quote is incorrect. The form of a person can be reduced to numbers in terms of qubits of information encoded on a holographic screen. What I Am cannot be reduced to numbers. What I Am is what perceives the form of a person that is reducible to numbers and is being displayed on a holographic screen. The form of a person is computational in nature because it’s like an image that’s being displayed on a computer screen in a computer-generated virtual reality. The form of a person is only a computer-generated construction that’s reducible to numbers.

The Observer, the Screen and the Images of Things in its Holographic World

Qubit of Information Encoded on a Planck-size Event Horizon

Holographic Principle

Information Sharing Among Overlapping Holographic Screens

In a computer-generated virtual reality, the form of everything perceivable is reducible to numbers, which are bits of information encoded on a computer screen. The situation in a holographic world is a bit more complicated than a classical computer since the bits of information are qubits or quantized bits of information encoded on a holographic screen that arises as an observer’s event horizon due to its own accelerated motion. The qubits are entangled due to quantum entanglement. A computer network is created due to information sharing among overlapping holographic screens, each of which arises from an observer’s accelerated motion and encodes information. Each observer is at the central point of view of its own holographic world, but shares in a consensual reality due to information sharing among overlapping screens. The observer’s computer-generated virtual reality, which is its holographic world, is governed by a quantum computer, which allows for the expression of potentiality, not just classical determinism. What we call the laws of physics in a holographic world are only the computational rules that govern the operation of the quantum computer. The whole thing only begins with the observer’s own accelerated motion that gives rise to its event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon.

Accelerating Observer’s Event Horizon

What I Am as the observer of that holographic world is not computational in nature and cannot be reduced to numbers because it is what perceives the projected and animated images of the form of a person that’s being displayed on the screen from its own point of view outside the screen. That’s why the expression I Am a Free Man is a contradiction in terms. In reality, there is no free man, only the projected and animated images of a holographic virtual reality world that’s being displayed on a holographic screen. In reality, only the true nature of what I Am really exists and moves.

Do not try to bend the spoon. That is impossible. Only try to realize the truth.
What truth?
There is no spoon. Then you’ll see it is not the spoon that bends, but only yourself.

Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

We are such stuff as dreams are made on
And our little life is rounded with a sleep-Shakespeare

To be born means to create a world around yourself as the center.
You are that point of consciousness.
By your movement the world is ever created.
Stop moving and there will be no world.

The I Am in movement creates the world; the I Am at peace becomes the Absolute-Nisargadatta Maharaj

Nothingness

Philosophy versus Physics

Here’s a recent posting from Online_Sadhu_Sanga@googlegroups.com on the Idols of the Mind vs. True Reality:

“Hegel’s development of the insights of Aristotle and Kant is crucial to learn about when considering the origin and nature of consciousness and life, especially the difference between life and nonlife. In this regard, the first chapter of Idols of the Mind vs. True Reality (2020) by Bhakti Madhava Puri, Ph.D., presents Aristotle’s development of dunamis, energia, and entelechy, and Hegel’s further insight about inner teleology and his explanation of mechanical, chemical, and biological (teleological) systems. It seems valuable to consider the role that the rigid understanding (German: Verstandt) plays in modern science’s commitment to the logical law of identity and the inappropriate wholesale application of mechanical logic to cells and organisms, and how progressing to dialectic reason (German: Vernunft) can serve to more honestly and comprehensively describe the holistic logic of identity-in-difference that characterizes living entities.

Topics throughout the rest of the book include (1) a historical account of scientists acknowledging the essential role of thought or intelligence governing macroscopic and microscopic material systems and the necessity for humility in recognizing this, (2) an explanation of how an a priori commitment to the logical law of identity led to the mathematization of nature and further mechanization of living entities and the issues thereof, and (3) a presentation of Hegel’s explanation of consciousness being the subject-object relation where an account of all three moments of the knower (subject), known (object), and knowing (consciousness/subject-object relation) — and their higher development — is necessary for comprehensive and complete knowledge of nature and its truth as Spirit. Depending on the expressed level of interest, we will also discuss the implications for modern science regarding the idea that Spirit is the identity-in-difference of Absolute Thought and Being, as well as the relationship and distinction between Infinite Spirit and finite spirit.”

This is all very nice at a philosophical level, but recently, a very rigorous scientific and mathematical implementation of these ideas has become possible thanks to the holographic principle of quantum gravity, which for reasons I do not understand, has been ignored and continues to be ignored while all efforts are directed in a nebulous, amorphous, and poorly defined philosophical direction. Isn’t it time to get more exact?

The only requirement for this kind of exact understanding is to give the holographic principle a valid interpretation. The fundamental assumption for this valid interpretation of the holographic principle is to assume the primordial existence of consciousness. In its primordial, timeless state, consciousness is undifferentiated, unchanging, unlimited and undivided, which is called the void. In its differentiated state, consciousness is called the observer. The observer is a focal point of differentiated consciousness that is always present at the central point of view of its own holographic world. The observer is a focal point of illuminating and perceiving consciousness that not only perceives objects in its own holographic world but also illuminates objects. The observer is the subject in the subject-object relation of perception. An object of perception is a form of information that appears in the observer’s holographic world. That holographic world only appears to come into existence because the observer is undergoing accelerated motion relative to the motionless void. That accelerated motion gives rise to the observer’s event horizon that surrounds the observer’s central point of view and limits its observations of events in space. The observer’s event horizon becomes its holographic screen when its horizon encodes qubits of information. In effect, the observer creates its own quantum computer that gives rise to the appearance of its own computer-generated holographic virtual reality world.

In a computer-generated virtual reality, the form of everything perceivable is reducible to numbers, which are bits of information encoded on a computer screen. The situation in a holographic world is a bit more complicated than a classical computer since the bits of information are qubits or quantized bits of information encoded on a holographic screen that arises as an observer’s event horizon due to its own accelerated motion. The qubits are entangled due to quantum entanglement. A computer network is created due to information sharing among overlapping holographic screens, each of which arises from an observer’s accelerated motion and encodes information. Each observer is at the central point of view of its own holographic world, but shares in a consensual reality due to information sharing among overlapping screens. The observer’s computer-generated virtual reality, which is its holographic world, is governed by a quantum computer, which allows for the expression of potentiality, not just classical determinism. What we call the laws of physics in a holographic world are only the computational rules that govern the operation of the quantum computer. The whole thing only begins with the observer’s own accelerated motion that gives rise to its event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon.

The bottom line is that every object of perception is a form of information that can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on an observer’s holographic screen, which arises as its event horizon due to its own accelerated motion. Everything perceivable is like a computer-generated image that is projected from the observer’s screen to its central point of view and is animated in the flow of energy. The flow of energy can always be understood as arising from the observer’s own accelerated motion.

The form of a person, which is an object of perception, can be reduced to numbers in terms of qubits of information encoded on a holographic screen. What I Am cannot be reduced to numbers. What I Am is what perceives the form of a person that is reducible to numbers and is being displayed on a holographic screen. The form of a person is computational in nature because it’s like an image that’s being displayed on a computer screen in a computer-generated holographic virtual reality. The form of a person is only a computer-generated construction that’s reducible to numbers.

What I Am as the observer of that holographic world is not computational in nature and cannot be reduced to numbers because it is what perceives the projected and animated images of the form of a person that’s being displayed on the screen from its own point of view outside the screen. That’s why the expression I Am a person is a contradiction in terms. In reality, there is no person, only the projected and animated images of a holographic virtual reality world that’s being displayed on a holographic screen. In reality, only the true nature of what I Am really exists and moves.

Ultimately, I am not even a focal point of illuminating and perceiving consciousness that arises at the central point of view of its own holographic world. The observer only appears to have its own individual existence as it arises at its own individual point of view at the center of its own holographic world. The observer only creates that holographic world due to its own accelerated motion relative to the motionless void. The source of that point of consciousness is the undifferentiated consciousness of the void.

When the accelerated motion of that point of consciousness relative to the motionless void comes to an end, which can be called an ultimate state of free-fall, the observer’s holographic world disappears from existence from its own point of view since it no longer creates its own holographic screen in terms of information encoded on its own event horizon. In an ultimate state of free-fall, that focal point of consciousness dissolves back into the undifferentiated consciousness of the void like a drop of water that dissolves back into the ocean. The ocean of consciousness is the undifferentiated consciousness of the void, which is the source of the individual consciousness of the observer. The individual consciousness of the observer has to separate itself from the void and begin to move relative to the motionless void before its own holographic world can appear to come into existence from its own point of view.

All of these ideas can be formalized in terms of modern theoretical physics, which means they have the exactness of mathematical equations. See for example the work of Tom Banks in his article with Willy Fischler on Why the Cosmological Constant is a Boundary Condition: arXiv:1811.00130. Also see the pioneering article by Ted Jacobson on the Thermodynamics of Space-time: arXiv:gr-qc/9504004. Similar ideas are found in Amanda Gefter’s recent book: Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn. These ideas can be brought into perfect harmony with the concept of nonduality as most elegantly expressed by Nisargadatta Maharaj in his spiritual classic I Am That. There is absolutely nothing inconsistent between the concept of nonduality and the idea of the holographic principle. They fit together like a glove on a hand. Isn’t it time we stop talking about these things at a poorly defined philosophical level and start talking in terms of the hard mathematical science of theoretical physics?

It sounds harsh to say that all philosophical conceptual frameworks are poorly defined, but that’s only another way of saying that no philosophical system of thought has any real predictive power. Predictability is the litmus test that tells us that the conceptual framework is defining things in a way that mimics the way things are actually defined in nature. Predictability is a result of defining things in terms of quantifiable information, like the bits of information encoded on the pixels of a computer screen. Predictability is synonymous with computation. The laws of physics have predictive power because they allow for computation. The more complicated the phenomenon, the more difficult the computation, and there’s often a computational impasse. Computational science, which reaches its apex in theoretical physics, is often limited in its ability to make predictions for only very simple phenomena, like the behavior of an isolated elementary particle.

The holographic principle is the ultimate level of predictability in that it tells us that the behavior of all observable things, including the nature of a holographic world, can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on a holographic screen. That holographic screen arises as an event horizon due to an observer’s own accelerated motion, which becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon. The observer is the perceiving consciousness present at the central point of view of its own holographic world. This conceptual framework has predictive power since it mimics the way that all observable things are actually defined in nature. All observable things are forms of information that can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on an observer’s own holographic screen. Predictability is synonymous with computation.

In terms of predictability, the litmus test for any conceptual framework is whether the laws of physics can be deduced from the conceptual framework, which no philosophical system of thought is able to do. On the other hand, the laws of physics are deducible from the holographic principle in a straightforward way, as is demonstrated in the work of Ted Jacobson and Tom Banks. Einstein’s field equations for the space-time metric, which is the nature of the gravitational field, along with Maxwell’s equations for the electromagnetic field, Dirac’s equation for the electron field, and the Yang-Mills equations for the nuclear fields are all deducible from the holographic principle. The big qualifier is that the laws of physics are limited in validity and only apply at the level of an observer’s holographic world. The laws of physics do not apply at the ultimate level of reality, which is the level of the primordial, timeless existence of consciousness. At the ultimate level of reality, which is timeless and unchanging, there is no predictability. At the ultimate level of reality, nothing ever happens and there is nothing to predict.

Predictability based on computation is only a characteristic of a holographic world since the very nature of time only appears to exist in a holographic world. The course of time, like the expression of all energy, can only arise from the accelerated motion of an observer relative to the motionless void. The course of time is just another observable aspect of things that the observer perceives in its own holographic world. The course of time only arises as the observer perceives events in its own holographic world. Those events arise from the observer’s own accelerated motion relative to the motionless void. At the ultimate level of reality, there are no events. At the ultimate level of reality, only the timeless being of consciousness remains and timelessly exists.

The ultimate litmus test is whether the conceptual framework can predict the nature of spiritual enlightenment, which again, no philosophical system of thought is able to do. Only the holographic principle is able to predict the nature of spiritual enlightenment as an ultimate state of free-fall. In an ultimate state of free-fall, the observer no longer has an event horizon that limits its observation of events in space, and therefore no longer has a holographic screen that encodes information for everything observable in its own holographic world. In an ultimate state of free-fall, everything in the observer’s own holographic world disappears from existence from its own point of view, and nothing remains. In an ultimate state of free-fall, the observer’s accelerated motion relative to the motionless void comes to an end, the expression of all energy comes to an end, and the course of time comes to an end. Only the timeless being of consciousness remains. In an ultimate state of free-fall, the individual consciousness of the observer, present at its own point of view at the center of its own holographic world, dissolves back into the undifferentiated consciousness of the void as its world disappears from existence.

Nothingness

Download the PDF documents:

oxymoron_-i-am-a-free-man-1Download

why-youre-confused-about-what-you-really-are-1Download

philosophy-versus-physics-1Download

recent-conversations-on-the-nature-of-nonduality-1Download

more-conversations-on-the-nature-of-nonduality-3Download

the-underlying-truth-of-you-and-the-story-of-realityDownload

a-brief-history-of-the-holographic-principleDownload

♦♦♦

Why You’re Confused About What You Really Are

In reality, you’re nothing more than a point of illuminating and perceiving consciousness that arises at the central point of view of the world you perceive. What you really are as the observer of that world is more fundamental in existence than the world you perceive, which is only constructed like the computer-generated projected and animated images of a holographic virtual reality world that’s being displayed on a holographic screen.

The Observer, the Screen and the Images of Things in its Holographic World

Your existence is more fundamental than anything that can ever appear to exist in that holographic world because you continue to exist even as that world disappears from existence. There is nothing mysterious about what is going on here. Every night when you fall into a deep sleep, the world you perceive disappears from existence from your own point of view. That world only appears to come back into existence as you awaken from your deep sleep. You’re only confused about what you really are because you don’t remain aware of yourself in the sense of remaining aware of your own sense of being present to observe that world, the sense of I-Am-ness, as you fall into that deep sleep.

There’s a perfectly good scientific explanation for how this all happens, which is called the holographic principle of quantum gravity. As you observe your own holographic world, you are nothing more than a point of illuminating and perceiving consciousness that arises at the central point of view of that world. You create that world due to your own accelerated motion relative to the motionless void. That’s how an event horizon arises that surrounds your point of view and limits your observations of events in space.

Accelerating Observer’s Event Horizon

Your event horizon becomes your holographic screen when your horizon encodes qubits of information. The form of everything you can observe in your own holographic world can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on your own holographic screen.

Qubit of Information Encoded on a Planck-size Event Horizon

Everything you can observe is a form of information that can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on the screen, just like the projected and animated images of a computer-generated virtual reality world that’s being displayed on a computer screen. Those forms of information are projected like images from the screen to your own point of view, and are animated in the flow of energy that arises from your own accelerated motion relative to the motionless void, which gives rise to your own event horizon that becomes your holographic screen when your horizon encodes qubits of information. You not only perceive the projected form of things, but also the flow of energy that animates things. That flow of energy arises from your own accelerated motion.

Holographic Principle

In effect, you’re creating your own quantum computer due to your own accelerated motion that gives rise to your event horizon that becomes your holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on your horizon. That quantum computer gives rise to the appearance of your own computer-generated holographic virtual reality world, which in reality is no more real than projected and animated holographic images you perceive.

You’re only confused about what you really are because you’re emotionally identifying yourself with the projected and animated image of your character in that holographic virtual reality world. Your character is only the central form of information that appears in that holographic virtual reality world, like the central character of a movie or an avatar in a virtual reality world. You emotionally identify yourself with your character due to your perception of feelings of emotional self-limitation to the form of your character as your character is emotionally animated relative to all other forms that appear in your own holographic world. You’re confused about what you really are due to your perception of those feelings of emotional self-limitation to the form of your character.

As an observer of your own holographic world, you only share a consensual reality with other observers to the degree information is shared among different observer’s worlds. Each observer is present at the central point of view of its own holographic world, which is defined on its own holographic screen that arises as its event horizon due to its own accelerated motion. When those holographic screens overlap like a Venn diagram, they can share information, which allows different observers to share a consensual reality.

Information Sharing Among Overlapping Holographic Screens

You’re only confused about what you really are as you emotionally identify yourself with the form of your character that appears in your own holographic virtual reality world due to your perception of feelings of emotional self-limitation to that form as your character is emotionally animated relative to all other forms. That expression of emotional energy arises from your own accelerated motion relative to the motionless void.

All Seeing Eye

Your accelerated motion as a point of consciousness comes to an end when you stop expressing that emotional energy. When your own accelerated motion relative to the motionless void comes to an end, you enter into an ultimate state of free-fall. When you enter into an ultimate state of free-fall, you no longer perceive a holographic world because you no longer have an event horizon that becomes your holographic screen. In an ultimate state of free-fall, everything that appears in your own holographic world, including the form of your character, disappears from existence from your own point of view, and nothing remains. That undivided, unlimited and motionless nothingness is the source of your own individual consciousness as the observer of your own world, which is always present at the central point of view of your own holographic world.

Nothingness

If you remain aware of yourself in the sense of remaining aware of your own sense of being present to observe that world, the sense of being-ness or I-Am-ness, as that world disappears from existence from your own point of view, then you become aware of the true nature of your own existence and being. Individual being dissolves back into its source of pure undivided being. Individual consciousness, present at the central point of view of its own holographic world, dissolves back into its source of pure undifferentiated consciousness like a drop of water that dissolves back into the ocean. That’s when your confusion comes to an end and you know the true nature of what you really are.

Nothingness

Adapted from the teachings of Nisargadatta Maharaj:

Be aware of being conscious and seek the source of consciousness.

In pure being consciousness arises.
In consciousness the world appears and disappears.
Consciousness is on contact, a reflection against a surface, a state of duality.
The center is a point of void and the witness a point of pure awareness; they know themselves to be as nothing.
But the void is full to the brim.
It is the eternal potential as consciousness is the eternal actual.

To be born means to create a world around yourself as the center.
You are that point of consciousness.
By your movement the world is ever created.
Stop moving and there will be no world.

The totality of all mental projections is the Great Illusion.
When I look beyond the mind I see the witness.
Beyond the witness is infinite emptiness and silence.

Once you realize that there is nothing in this world which you can call your own, you look at it from the outside as you look at a play on the stage or a picture on the screen. To know the picture as the play of light on the screen gives freedom from the idea that the picture is real. In reality I only look. Whatever is done is done on the stage.

Joy and sorrow, life and death, they are real to the man in bondage.

To me they are all in the show, as unreal as the show itself.

The world is but a mistaken view of reality, unreal to its core.

The world is but a show, glittering and empty. It is there as long as I want to see it and take part in it. When I cease caring, it dissolves. It has no cause and serves no purpose. It appears exactly as it looks, but there is no depth in it nor meaning.

To the Self the world is but a passing show. The world just sprouts into being out of nothing and returns to nothing. As long as the Self is merely aware, there is no problem.

You can stop it any moment by switching off attention.

You make it possible by giving it attention.

I see only consciousness, and know everything to be but consciousness, as you know the pictures on the cinema screen to be but light.

It is enough to shift attention from the screen onto oneself to break the spell.

Give attention to the witness to break the spell of the known, the illusion that only the perceivable world is real.

As long as you believe that only the perceivable world is real you remain its slave.

To become free your attention must be drawn to the witness.

Nothing perceivable is real. Only the onlooker is real, call him Self or Atman. That which makes you think that you are a human is not human. It is a dimensionless point of consciousness.

All you can say about yourself is I Am.

At the root of my being is pure awareness, a speck of intense light. This speck, by its nature, radiates and creates pictures in space and events in time.

Even the sense I Am is not continuous, though it is a useful pointer; it shows where to seek, but not what to seek.

The witness is both real and unreal, the last remnant of illusion, the first touch of the real. The moment you say I Am, the entire universe comes into being.

Your world is created with the emergence of the I Am idea. In your world everything has a beginning and an end. Timeless being is entirely in the now.

The Supreme reality is the void beyond being and non-being, beyond consciousness.

The Supreme state is the very center of consciousness and yet beyond consciousness.

In reality there is only the source, dark in itself, but making everything shine with the light of consciousness.

Unperceived, it causes perception. Being nothing it gives birth to all being.

It is the immovable background of motion.

The person is never the subject. You can see a person, but you are not the person. You are always the Supreme, which appears at a given point of time and space as the witness, a bridge between the pure awareness of the Supreme and the manifold consciousness of the person.

In reality nothing happens. Nothing happens to space itself. In pure consciousness nothing ever happens. Onto the screen of the mind destiny forever projects its pictures, and thus illusion constantly renews itself. The pictures come and go as light intercepted by ignorance. See the light and disregard the pictures.

To the mind the light of consciousness appears as darkness. It can be known only through its reflections. The highest state of awareness is to be the point of light tracing the world.

Beyond the highest state of awareness is to be the source of light.

To realize that is the end of all seeking. You come to it when you see all you think yourself to be as mere imagination and stand aloof in pure awareness. It is not difficult but detachment is needed. It is the clinging to the false that makes the truth so difficult to see. Discard what is not your own until nothing is left which you can disown. You will find that what is left is nothing.

We have enclosed ourselves in a cloud of personal desires and fears, images and thoughts, ideas and concepts.

The way to truth lies through the destruction of the false. To destroy the false you must question your most inveterate beliefs.

Of these the idea that you are the body is the worst.

Destroy the wall that separates; the I-am-the-body idea.

There is no such thing as an expression of reality. Neither action nor feeling nor thought express reality. I know that life itself is only a make-believe.

I just watch events happening, knowing them to be unreal

From my point of view everything happens by itself, quite spontaneously.

I do nothing. I just see them happen.

What begins and ends is mere appearance. The world can be said to appear but not to be. It is your memory that makes you think that the world continues. Memory creates the illusion of continuity. I see the world as it is, a momentary appearance in consciousness.

You see yourself in the world, while I see the world in myself. To you, you get born and die, while to me, the world appears and disappears. It is your imagination that misleads you. There is a deep contradiction in your attitude which you do not see.

The source of consciousness cannot be an object in consciousness. To know the source is to be the source.

All appearance and disappearance presupposes a change against a changeless background.

There must be a source from which all flows, a foundation on which all stands.

Consciousness itself is the source of everything.

You are the source of reality, a dimensionless center of perception that imparts reality to whatever it perceives, a pure witness that watches what is going on and remains unaffected. It is only imagination and self-identification with the imagined that encloses and converts the inner watcher into a person. The person is merely the result of a misunderstanding. In reality there is no such thing. Feelings, thoughts and actions race before the watcher in endless succession. In reality there is no person, only the watcher identifying itself.

Your questions are about a non-existing person. Realize that whatever you think yourself to be is just a stream of events; that whatever happens, comes and goes, is not real; that you alone are, the changeless among the changeful. Separate the observed from the observer and abandon false identifications. Be a fully awakened witness of the field of consciousness.

Whatever you perceive is not you. It is there in the field of consciousness, but you are not the field and its contents.

You can spend an eternity looking elsewhere for truth, all in vain. You must begin in yourself, with yourself. Realize that your world is only a reflection of yourself. All you need is to stop searching outside what can only be found within.

Wherever you go, at all times, you carry with you the sense of being present and aware, here and now. It means that you are independent of space and time. Space and time are in you, not you in them. It is only your self-identification with the body, limited in space and time, that gives you a sense of limitation. In reality, you are limitless.

Struggle to find out what you are in reality. To know what you are you must first investigate and know what you are not. Discover all that you are not: body, feelings, thoughts, time, space, this or that. Nothing, concrete or abstract, which you perceive can be you. The very act of perceiving shows that you are not what you perceive. The clearer you understand that on the level of mind you can be described in negative terms only the quicker will you come to the end of your search and realize that you are the limitless being.

All limited existence is imaginary.
Even space and time are imaginary.
Pure being, filling all and beyond all, is not limited.
All limitation is imaginary.
Only the unlimited is real.

What you call survival is but the survival of a dream.

Death is preferable to it. There is a chance of waking up.

As life before death is but imagination, so is life after death. The dream continues.

The realized man is beyond life and death. Life and death appears to him but a way of expressing movement in the immovable, change in the changeless.

He has died before his death and he saw that there was nothing to be afraid of.

The moment you know your real being you are afraid of nothing.

First we must know ourselves as witnesses only, dimensionless and timeless centers of observation, and then realize that immense ocean of pure awareness.

On the surface of the ocean of consciousness, names and forms are transitory waves. Only consciousness has real being, not its transformations.

As long as you are enmeshed in the tribulations of a particular personality, you can see nothing beyond it. Ultimately you will come to see that you are neither the particular nor the universal. You are beyond both.

The witness-consciousness is the reflection of the real in the mind. The real is beyond.

The witness is the door through which you pass beyond.

The I Am in movement creates the world; the I Am at peace becomes the Absolute.

Go back to that state of pure being, the I Am in its purity before it became contaminated with false self-identifications. Abandon them all. Focus the mind on pure being. In it all disappears: myself, the life I live, the world around me. Only peace and unfathomable silence remains.

The experience of the inner void is an explosion into reality.

Realization is in discovering the source and abiding there.

The timeless and spaceless reality is undifferentiated, the infinite potentiality, the source. It cannot be perceived, but can be experienced as ever witnessing the witness, perceiving the perceiver, the origin and end of all manifestation, the root of time and space.

Do nothing. There is nothing to do. Just be.
To be, you must be nobody.
You make yourself mortal by taking yourself to be a body.
That which is alive in you is immortal.

The Supreme state neither comes nor goes. It is. It is a timeless state, ever present.

In the timeless state there is no Self, no I Am, no witness.

There is no journey to Supreme reality. One is undeceived only.

Realization is sudden and irreversible. You rotate into a new dimension.

You see everything as it is. The world of illusions is left behind.

Reality is essentially alone.
To know that nothing is, is true knowledge.

For the path of return naughting oneself is necessary.
My stand I take where nothing is.
To the mind it is all darkness and silence.
It is deep and dark, mystery beyond mystery.
It is, while all else merely happens.
It is like a bottomless well, whatever falls into it disappears.

Adapted from the teachings of Osho:

We call Buddha the awakened one. This awakening is really the cessation of inner dreaming. When there is no dreaming you become pure space. This non-dreaming consciousness is what is known as enlightenment.

If you go on inquiring ‘Who am I?’ you are bound to come to the conclusion that you are not. This is an inquiry to dissolve. There is no answer. Only the question will dissolve. There will be no one to ask ‘Who am I?’ And then you know.

When the ‘I’ is not, the real ‘I’ opens. When the ego is not, you are for the first time encountering your being. That being is void.

You fall into an abyss, and the abyss is bottomless: you go on falling. That is why Buddha has called this nothingness emptiness. There is no end to it. Once you know it, you also have become endless. At this point Being is revealed: then you know who you are, what is your real being, what is your authentic existence.

The inner emptiness itself is the mystery.
When the inner space is there, you are not.
When you dissolve, the inner emptiness is there.
When you are not, the mystery will be revealed.
You will not be a witness to the mystery, you will be the mystery.

In the immortal words of the Bhagavad Gita:

The unreal has no being; the real never ceases to be.

Oxymoron: I Am a Free Man

I Am a Free Man-Motto of Patrick McGoohan in the TV series The Prisoner

The expression I Am a Free Man is a contradiction in terms. In reality, whenever you say “I am a man”, you’re only emotionally identifying yourself with the emotionally animated form of a male person that appears in the world you perceive. The very nature of your bondage is your emotional self-identification with the form of a person.

Liberation is never freedom of the person; it is always freedom from the person-Nisargadatta Maharaj

If you’re not a person, then what exactly are you? The only way you can break-free from this personally self-identified state of emotional bondage is to realize the true nature of what you really are. To break-free from this state of bondage, you have to ask yourself what you really are. Ask your Self what you really are. “Self, what exactly are you?”

Ask yourself: Who am I?-Jed McKenna

If you can’t make any progress by asking yourself what you really are, you can always ask Plato. Plato gave a very clear answer to this question in the Allegory of the Cave:

The entire Patrick McGoohan quote is I am not a number; I am a free man. The first part of this quote is correct. The second part of this quote is incorrect. The form of a person can be reduced to numbers in terms of qubits of information encoded on a holographic screen. What I Am cannot be reduced to numbers. What I Am is what perceives the form of a person that is reducible to numbers and is being displayed on a holographic screen. The form of a person is computational in nature because it’s like an image that’s being displayed on a computer screen in a computer-generated virtual reality. The form of a person is only a computer-generated construction that’s reducible to numbers.

In a computer-generated virtual reality, the form of everything perceivable is reducible to numbers, which are bits of information encoded on a computer screen. The situation in a holographic world is a bit more complicated than a classical computer since the bits of information are qubits or quantized bits of information encoded on a holographic screen that arises as an observer’s event horizon due to its own accelerated motion. The qubits are entangled due to quantum entanglement. A computer network is created due to information sharing among overlapping holographic screens, each of which arises from an observer’s accelerated motion and encodes information. Each observer is at the central point of view of its own holographic world, but shares in a consensual reality due to information sharing among overlapping screens. The observer’s computer-generated virtual reality, which is its holographic world, is governed by a quantum computer, which allows for the expression of potentiality, not just classical determinism. What we call the laws of physics in a holographic world are only the computational rules that govern the operation of the quantum computer. The whole thing only begins with the observer’s own accelerated motion that gives rise to its event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon.

What I Am as the observer of that holographic world is not computational in nature and cannot be reduced to numbers because it is what perceives the projected and animated images of the form of a person that’s being displayed on the screen from its own point of view outside the screen. That’s why the expression I Am a Free Man is a contradiction in terms. In reality, there is no free man, only the projected and animated images of a holographic virtual reality world that’s being displayed on a holographic screen. In reality, only the true nature of what I Am really exists and moves.

Do not try to bend the spoon. That is impossible. Only try to realize the truth.
What truth?
There is no spoon. Then you’ll see it is not the spoon that bends, but only yourself.

Download the PDF documents:

why-youre-confused-about-what-you-really-are-1Download

oxymoron_-i-am-a-free-man-1Download

the-underlying-truth-of-you-and-the-story-of-realityDownload

recent-conversations-on-the-nature-of-nonduality-1Download

more-conversations-on-the-nature-of-nonduality-3Download

a-brief-history-of-the-holographic-principleDownload

♦♦♦

Recent Conversations on the Nature of Nonduality

Conventional science has the whole thing ass-backwards. Conventional science mistakenly assumes that a world of matter, energy, space and time exists; that in that world the emotionally animated form of a person comes into existence; and that within that personal form personal consciousness emerges. This idea is just flat-out wrong. In reality, a void of undifferentiated consciousness timelessly exists: motionless, unlimited and undivided. In that void, a point of perceiving and illuminating consciousness arises at its own individual point of view. When that individual point of consciousness moves relative to the motionless void, an event horizon arises that surrounds the observer’s central point of view and limits its observations of things in space. The observer’s event horizon becomes its holographic screen when its horizon encodes qubits of information. The observer’s holographic world only appears to come into existence from its point of view at the center of that world due to its own motion that gives rise to its event horizon that becomes its holographic screen as its horizon encodes information. The observer’s holographic world only appears to come into existence like the projected and animated images of a computer-generated virtual reality that’s displayed on a computer screen. Everything the observer can perceive in its own holographic world is a projected form of information that’s animated in the flow of energy that arises from its own motion. The emotionally animated form of a person that appears within that holographic world is like the central character of a movie or an avatar that appears in a virtual reality movie. There is only an illusion that the form of the person has personal consciousness when the observer emotionally identifies itself with that emotionally animated personal form.

Hi J

I just found your article Advaita, Consciousness and Quantum Physics. I’m very interested in this topic. For more than forty years I have been researching about a spiral, fractal, holographic, toroidal and entropic-syntropic pattern in the evolutionary dynamics, that leads to a point of Singularity —Omega— in two centuries and reveals the essential non-duality of energy and consciousness in the universe.

I’m sending you a link to my work Beyond Darwin: The hidden rhythm of evolution, a resume of this transdisciplinary research: 

http://byebyedarwin.blogspot.com/p/english-version_01.html.

(Here you can find versions in Spanish and English and optional PDF in both languages). I specially suggest you take a look at Addendum 7: Entropic-syntropic evolution (where I highlight the resonance between my research and the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanic by John G. Cramer and Ruth E. Kastner) and Addendum 8: The evolutionary dance of Emptiness (where it is proposed how fundamental non-duality generates, instant after instant, the entirety of the universe).

All the best,

Jo

Hi Jo

It seems my approach is somewhat different than yours, although at some level they may be equivalent. I accept the recent research findings of quantum gravity that are explored at Stanford (Lenny Susskind), the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study (Juan Maldacena), Berkeley (Raphael Bousso), and the Kavli Institute in Santa Barbara. I’m particularly interested in matrix models (non-commutative geometry) as proposed by Tom Banks. What unifies all these approaches is the idea of the holographic principle as the most fundamental principle of physics, more fundamental than the principle of equivalence underlying the idea of gravity or the idea of unitary time evolution underlying all quantum field theories and particle physics. My approach is purely one of interpretation of the holographic principle, and in this regard it is similar to the approach Amanda Gefter took in her recent book Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn, where she tried to make logical sense of the holographic principle. I’ve taken the logical argument farther than Gefter took it to make it consistent with the idea of non-duality and the testimony of enlightened beings, particularly Nisargadatta Maharaj. Much to my amazement, I’ve discovered that this logical argument is completely consistent with what enlightened beings say about the nature of reality in the sense of the concept of non-duality, which I would summarize as non-dual awareness (best understood as a void of undifferentiated consciousness) as the source of everything, which not only includes the perceivable world, but also the central point of view of the individual consciousness of the observer of the perceivable world.

The Observer, the Observer’s Holographic Screen, and its Object of Perception

In the language of Advaita, the void is Brahman and the observer is Atman. The perceivable world is being displayed on a holographic screen, like the projected and animated images of a holographic virtual reality movie, and is being perceived from the central point of view of the observer. That holographic screen arises as the observer’s event horizon due to its own accelerated motion.

Accelerating Observer’s Event Horizon

The observer’s event horizon becomes its holographic screen when the horizon encodes qubits of information (hence the idea of a matrix model). I accept the idea of qubits of information encoded on a holographic screen as the fundamental dynamical degrees of freedom for a holographic world along the lines of the recent Nobel prize being awarded for research in quantum entanglement.

Qubit of Information Encoded on the Surface of a Planck-size Event Horizon

Holographic Principle

The laws of physics (for gravity, electromagnetism and the nuclear forces) naturally arise in that holographic world as thermodynamic equations of state when things are near thermal equilibrium, as nicely demonstrated by Ted Jacobson. In effect, the observer is creating its own quantum computer (due to its own accelerated motion that gives rise to its event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon), and that quantum computer is what gives rise to the appearance of the observer’s own computer-generated holographic virtual reality world. The laws of physics are like the computational rules that govern the operation of the quantum computer when things are near thermal equilibrium.

The idea of multiple observers (each present at the central point of view of its own holographic screen) sharing a consensual reality naturally arises when those holographic screens overlap like a Venn diagram and share information. This nicely resolves all the observational paradoxes of quantum theory, like the Schrodinger cat/Wigner friend paradox and the paradox of spooky action at a distance.

Information Sharing Among Overlapping Holographic Screens

More importantly, it gives a natural scientific explanation for the nature of spiritual enlightenment as described by enlightened beings like Nisargadatta. The observer’s accelerated motion is always relative to the motionless void. When that accelerated motion comes to an end in an ultimate state of free fall, the observer’s holographic world disappears from existence from its own point of view and the observer’s individual consciousness, present at the central point of view of its own holographic world, dissolves back into the undifferentiated consciousness of the void like a drop of water that dissolves back into the ocean. This state of dissolution into non-dual awareness is how the experience of enlightenment is described by all enlightened beings.

Atman-Brahman

With regard to the idea of evolution, I’m perfectly happy with the idea of Darwinian evolution as currently understood in terms of natural selection and the survival of the fittest body, which at least to some degree has a thermodynamic explanation. From my point of view, all evolution takes place in the observer’s own holographic virtual reality world. Consciousness does not evolve. The individual consciousness of the observer, present at the central point of view of its own holographic world, can only be present to observe the events of its own holographic world, or that individual consciousness can return to its source of pure undifferentiated consciousness through a process of dissolution into unlimited and undivided nothingness.

Nothingness

One last idea. For some time now I’ve had the idea it might be fruitful to undergo a series of debates about the nature of reality, where I would discuss the holographic principle and my debating partner would explore some other idea, and where we would try to shoot down each other’s ideas due to their inherent logical contradictions and inconsistencies. A good forum for such a debate might be the Science and Nonduality Conference held each year in California, but an alternative could be a Zoom conference held online. Does this idea interest you at all?

Hi J

Thank you very much for your tasty mail and for the three articles that you attached to me! Rest assured that I will read them with great interest.

I will tell you the story. More than four years ago, I read some texts on a page titled Science and Nonduality that I found fascinating. One of them, entitled It’s All in the Mind, I liked it so much that I transferred it to Spanish with the Google translator. I downloaded it on paper and I still keep it in the folder of articles of great importance. I wanted to contact the author, but since I couldn’t find his name anywhere, I wrote the following email to the Science & Nonduality website of Maurizio and Zaya Benazzio:

Dear friends,

I just read the article The Internal-External Connection: Source to Cosmos, published on October 26 at https://scienceandnonduality.wordpress.com/ . I’m fascinated! I have a huge interest in contacting the author of this work. His name does not appear anywhere. Could you, please, give me his name from him and his e-mail address from him to be able to comment with him on the enormous coincidences between my research on the universal evolutionary dynamic and the content of the aforementioned article?

I await your news with great interest. My biggest congratulations to everyone for your wonderful web!

All best,

Jo

Maurizio answered me like this:

Dear Jo

This site has nothing to do with us…:-)

Not sure who it is writing that stuff (and I wish to put no judgment of it is good or bad) but surely has nothing to do with our org. Someone is using our name without our permission…

Love, M.

I think I’ve finally found the author, right? I’m in luck!

You say in your email that “Consciousness does not evolve”. I fully agree with you that consciousness itself does not evolve at all, but that statement must be completed by saying that the actualization of that consciousness in the manifested world does evolve depending on the complexity of the entities or organisms with which it is successively identifying.

As I see it, any materialist approach—including Darwinism and neo-Darwinism—is completely unable to explain the progressive emergence of consciousness through the evolutionary process, and likewise unable to explain the evolutionary pattern that my research shows. The key to all this is that the emergence of phenomena in the universe is not only a function of the initial conditions —energy pole—, but also depends on a final attractor —consciousness pole—. This subject-object polarity (consciousness-energy) is nothing more than the dual expression of fundamental non-duality, as affirmed by the great wisdom traditions. And, precisely, taking this idea into account, I believe that our respective approaches are essentially compatible, since, as you affirm, “The consciousness of the observer arises from the same ultimate reality from which the physical universe arises.” [The bolds are mine]. That is the central key of my proposal!

I strongly invite you to take a look at Addendum 7 and, above all, at Addendum 8 —I am attaching you both addenda—, because there you will be able to know my approach to how fundamental Emptiness is creating, instant after instant, the entire evolutionary holographic universe.

Regarding your suggestion about possible debates on the nature of reality, I have to tell you that I can’t participate in them because I don’t know English —everything I read and write in this language (this email included) I do it through from Google translate—and, on the other hand, since I’m not a physicist, I could hardly debate with you on this ground. In any case, I will be happy to answer you by email any question you want to ask me.

Another thing! I’d like to contact Amanda Gefter as well, but I can’t find her email address anywhere. Could you provide it to me?

The next few days I will read with great interest the articles that you have attached to me. I’m sure I’ll have a lot of fun with them! If I have any suggestions to make when I finish them, I’ll get back to you.

Hi Jo

My initial reaction to your response is I agree with everything you say!

First point: Consciousness does not evolve because undifferentiated consciousness is timeless and unchanging in nature. That’s the nature of the void. It’s the primordial nature of existence. It is what exists when everything else disappears from existence. It is what exists when time comes to an end. Time in the sense of a dynamically curved space-time geometry, as formulated in Einstein’s theory for gravity, only exists at the level of a holographic world, which is best understood in terms of a computer-generated virtual reality world, like depicted in the Matrix. The undifferentiated consciousness of the void is what timelessly exists when that holographic world disappears from existence. There’s nothing mysterious here. It’s what happens each night when we fall into a deep sleep and we become aware of nothing. The only tricky part in the sense of becoming spiritually enlightened is remaining aware of our own being as we fall into the void and as everything else disappears from existence from our own point of view. A holographic world always disappears from existence from the central point of view of its observer as the observer enters into an ultimate state of free fall. The only tricky part is for the observer to remain aware of its own individual being, present at its own individual point of view, as that individual being dissolves back into the undivided being of the void. While the undivided being of the void is timeless, the individual being of the observer is always present now, in the present moment. That’s why present moment awareness is an essential condition for becoming spiritually enlightened.

Second point: There is only an illusion that the individual consciousness of the observer evolves prior to becoming spiritually enlightened. The more accurate characterization of this process is a devolution. The problem is personal self-identification. As you correctly point out, all perception occurs in a subject-object relation, where the observer is the nature of the subject, which can also be called the Self, and its object of perception is the emotionally animated form of a person that appears as the central form of information in its own holographic world. That personal central form of information is always emotionally animated relative to all other forms that appear in that world. Personal self-identification only occurs because the observer feels emotionally self-limited to that personal form as the observer perceives the emotional energy that animates that personal form relative to all other forms, which creates the dualistic illusion of self and other. In reality, the observer is nothing more than the individual consciousness present at the central point of view of its own holographic world, but when the observer emotionally identifies itself with its emotionally animated personal central form, it is as though this personal form is the subject in the subject-object relation of perception, which creates the dualistic illusion of self and other. This dualistic illusion is only created because of feelings of emotional self-limitation to a personal form as emotions are expressed that animate the form of the person. The problem is the expression of emotions, which at the level of Darwinian evolution are all survival emotions that defend the survival of the body in the sense of the survival of the fittest body. That’s how emotions evolve. They defend the survival of the body. In a very real sense, we are all prisoners of our Darwinian conditioning, which doesn’t just occur over a single lifetime, but over millions of life-times. Emotions evolve to defend the survival of the body. That’s what the survival of the fittest body is all about. Once we emotionally identify ourselves with our own body, we’re screwed. We feel compelled to defend the survival of our own body as though our existence depends on it. That’s how we’re conditioned by Darwinian evolution. The way this works is through the pleasure-pain principle and the expression of fear and desire. We are constantly pursuing pleasure as we express desire and avoiding pain as we express fear in order to defend the survival of our body, which we do as though our existence depends on it. That’s what keeps us emotionally self-identified with the emotionally animated personal form of our body.

The only way we can break-free from our Darwinian conditioning is if we stop expressing self-defensive and self-limiting emotions, which is not an evolution, but a devolution. That’s why we have to surrender to divine will and give up the expression of our own personally biased self-defensive individual will, which in reality only defends a personal illusion of what we really are in the sense of a personal self-concept. In addition to surrendering to divine will, we also have to sever emotional attachments. When we sever an emotional attachment to something, it feels like something dies inside because part of our emotionally energized, mentally constructed, body-based personal self-concept dies away when we stop caring about that thing and that thing becomes dead to us. Our self-concept is always constructed in an emotional relationship between our body and some other thing. Ultimately, we have to sever our emotional attachment to the personal form of our own body, which is like the central character in the holographic virtual reality movie that we’re watching from our own point of view at the center of that holographic world. When we stop caring about the life our character appears to live in that world and sever the emotional attachment to our own character, our character becomes dead to us. That’s how we cut the knot of personal self-identification and stop emotionally identifying ourselves with the emotionally animated form of a person. When we sever the emotional attachment, we’re able to step out of the world we perceive and see that world from the outside as our consciousness rises to a higher level. We see that world like a movie that we’re watching as all the animated images of the movie are projected from the movie screen to our own point of view in the movie audience outside the screen. We see that the person we mistakenly took ourselves to be is only the central character of the movie. We see that the whole thing is an illusion and is imaginary in nature. When we see the illusion as an illusion, we naturally lose interest in paying attention to an illusion. That’s when we can really withdraw our attention away from the illusion and look within. When we withdraw our attention away from the illusion, we also withdraw our investment of emotional energy in the illusion that emotionally animates our character in the illusion. When we totally withdraw our attention away from the illusion, we withdraw all energy away from the illusion. That’s when our own motion as a moving point of consciousness relative to the motionless void comes to an end and we enter into an ultimate state of free fall. If we remain aware of our own beingness while we fall into the void and as our own holographic world disappears from existence from our own point of view, our individual being, present at the central point of view of our own holographic world, dissolves back into the unlimited and undivided being of the motionless void, like a drop of water that dissolves back into the ocean. Individual consciousness dissolves back in the nothingness of pure undifferentiated consciousness.

If you carefully read I Am That by Nisargadatta, you’ll see these are exactly the instructions Nisargadatta gives for how to become spiritually enlightened. Spiritual enlightenment is the nature of awakening from the dream. After spiritual enlightenment, one also awakens within the dream. One becomes aware of one’s Self as a moving point of consciousness at the center of one’s own world. One sees how the motion of one’s Self is animating all the images of one’s own world, like the images of a movie. One sees how the light of consciousness, emanating from the central point of view of one’s own Self, is projecting and illuminating those images. One sees how one’s Self perceives those images as the images are reflected from a screen back to one’s Self. One sees all of this from the darkness, emptiness and silence of the void.

Third point: I’ve spoken with Maurizio at the Science and Nonduality Conference several times and have tried to explain the holographic principle to him, but this is like talking to a brick wall. This is very odd since the whole original motivation for the Science and Nonduality Conference was to fulfill Nisargadatta’s final wish that his teachings be given a scientific basis, and the holographic principle is the natural scientific basis for Nisargadatta’s teachings. The holographic principle, properly understood in terms of the consciousness of the observer, gives a perfectly good scientific explanation for these teachings, and there is absolutely no inconsistency or logical contradiction. The problem as I see it is that people speak out of both sides of their mouth, or as the Native Americans put it, people speak with a forked tongue. People say that they want to know the answer, but if that means they have to accept that their own ego is an illusion of what they really are, they really don’t want to know the answer. Ego will believe any logical contradiction it has to believe in order to defend the survival of its own illusory existence. If the holographic principle threatens the survival of that illusory existence of ego, then the attitude of ego is, let’s not look at the holographic principle.

Fourth point: I communicated with Amanda Gefter several years ago, but she was very resistant to the idea of understanding the nature of consciousness in terms of the undifferentiated consciousness of the void (Brahman) as the source of the individual consciousness of the observer (Atman) at the central point of view of its own holographic world. This is odd since her whole thesis was based on the idea of the observer, which she correctly identified as an accelerated frame of reference that gives rise to an event horizon that acts as the observer’s holographic screen when information is encoded on the horizon. This is also odd since her final conclusion was that nothing is ultimately real. This is also odd since she worked closely with her father, who is a Buddhist, and Buddhism accepts the ultimate reality of nothingness. My impression is that like most scientifically minded people, she is completely hung up on the idea of physicalism, and is not willing to attribute any spiritual aspect to the nature of reality. For the physicalists, there is no reality except for physical reality. The idea of a spiritual reality is anathema to them. This of course is just another one of the logical contradictions ego will use to defend its own illusory existence. The physicalists are unwilling to concede that spiritual reality is the reality of consciousness, which is beyond the physical reality that it perceives. Again, this is very odd since Gerter’s understanding of the holographic principle is perfect, which tells us in no uncertain terms that the consciousness of the observer can never be reduced to something that it can observe in its own holographic physical world. That physical world is always defined by the way information is encoded on the observer’s event horizon that arises from its own accelerated motion. The observer can only be understood as the perceiving consciousness present at the central point of view of its own holographic world, which is defined on a holographic screen that delineates the bounding surface of that holographic world. You can’t collapse the boundary of that world into the central point of view and still have a world. All attempts to reduce the consciousness of the observer to something that the observer can observe in its own holographic world only result in the logical contradiction of a paradox of self-reference. At some level, Gefter understood this when she wrote her book, but for some reason, most likely the irrational reluctance that all physicalists have to the idea of a spiritual reality beyond the physical world that bubbles up from the resistance of ego, she was unwilling to take the next step and draw the obvious conclusion that the source of consciousness is beyond the perceivable physical world that consciousness perceives.

Last point: I hope this is OK with you. I posted our initial conversation on the Sadhu-Sanga Google group website as Advaita, Consciousness and Quantum Physics Revisited.

If it’s OK with you, I’d like to make these conversations public, which in some sense, serves the purpose of a debate and allows other interested people to chime in and make their own comments. There’s real value in making this kind of knowledge public. I know of no other way to whittle away at the resistance of ego.

Let me know. I’ll send you more feedback after I read your articles.

Hi Jo

My thoughts on Addendum 7:

As best I can tell, all of your analysis is based on the conventional formulation of quantum theory and quantum field theory in terms of unitary time evolution. You are only including the advanced waves of Feynman-Wheeler with the retarded waves in order to connect the past to the future in an inextricable way. The problem as I see it is that this approach can never include the effect of gravity, since as formulated by Einstein’s field equations, gravity is the dynamical curvature of a space-time geometry, which can never be understood in the sense of unitary time evolution, which is only a valid concept in gravity-free Minkowski space, where there is a notion of time translation invariance. In other words, gravity is not consistent with quantum theory as conventionally formulated. This is why you have to go beyond the idea of unitary time evolution to the holographic principle, which does not suffer from this logical contradiction. How would you re-express your ideas in terms of the holographic principle?

My thoughts on Addendum 8:

I really have no problem with anything you’re saying here, except to again point out the contradiction between the unitary time evolution of quantum theory and the dynamically curved space-time geometry of gravity. How would you re-express these ideas, not in terms of point particles that exist and move through the space-time geometry of a universe, but in terms of qubits of information encoded on a holographic screen? You really can’t talk about a holographic world unless you can explain the nature of the hologram, which Bohm never did. Bohm seems to have been completely oblivious to the work of Wheeler and Bekenstein. The poles that you describe, between an observer and its object, between consciousness and energy, need one more ingredient, which is information, hence the role of qubits encoded on a holographic screen. This is where you need to include some sort of discussion of the holographic principle. The big mystery of course is how we get from the non-dual reality of the void to the dualistic reality of an observer and its holographic world. I don’t think this mystery is solvable in a scientific sense except to say that in some mysterious way the undifferentiated consciousness of the void differentiates itself into the point of view of the observer whenever that point of consciousness begins its accelerated motion relative to the motionless void, which gives rise to the observer’s event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on the horizon. The reverse process of that accelerated motion coming to an end in an ultimate state of free fall is a bit easier to understand in the sense of the dissolution of that individual point of consciousness into the undifferentiated consciousness of the void, like a drop of water that dissolves back into the ocean.

Other than my suggestion that you incorporate the holographic principle into your discussion, I basically agree with everything you say. This is really a tremendous piece of work that pulls together a large number of threads. You only need to add one more critical ingredient, which is the nature of information. Instead of talking about quantum fields, as in the Wheeler-Feynman theory of the advanced and retarded potentials of electromagnetism, you need to talk about information at the level of qubits. Maybe an Addendum 9?

Hi J

Thank you very much for your very interesting emails and your articles! I intended to answer you when I had read all those texts completely, but, although I have only reached page 50 of the titled The Underlying Truth of You and the Story of Reality, I am so fascinated with your work that, before finishing reading everything, I would like to tell you right away my enthusiasm for the load of highly suggestive ideas that you propose and for how pedagogically you expose them despite their complexity. There are some technical nuances that I am not able to fully grasp, but your insistence on highlighting the key points of your proposal makes the article much easier to read. My best congratulations on this marvelous overview of integral reality, Jim!

From my point of view, everything I’m reading seems to me to be very much in tune with the conclusions of my evolutionary research. The problem that you pose with the “effect of gravity“… for me, who is not a physicist, is beyond my ability to understand. You speak of “unitary time evolution“… according to my proposal, time is illusory and everything happens instant after instant, in an eternal Now… is this not acceptable?…

As I understand things, based on both experiential and theoretical research on non-dual reality, the foundation of everything transcends and includes the partial perspectives of objectivist monism (materialism) and subjectivist monism (idealism), that is, it is subject-and-object simultaneously and in an undifferentiated way, or, more exactly, is “prior” to that polarization. The origin of the manifested universe is simply the apparent dualization of the non-dual in the form of the poles of energy and consciousness. The information, according to this approach, would only be the interaction between these two poles, from the very originary moment, which would gradually increase, instant after instant.

You say: “Maybe an Addendum 9?”. Ha!, ha!, ha!, just yesterday I had the crazy idea of adding an Addendum 9… with the only content being a link to your Science & Nonduality page!…

As I see that, apart from your powerful theoretical approach to non-duality, you are also interested in its experiential aspect, I invite you to take a look at the PDF of the Non-Dual Evolution text that you can find at the head of my blog: http://byebyedarwin.blogspot.com/p/english-version_01.html. It has three chapters. The first is basically the article Beyond Darwin and the 8 Addenda, the second deals with the philosophical implications of my evolutionary research from a non-dual perspective, and the third is an invitation to the reader to experientially discover that non-dual foundation that originates and welcomes, from moment to moment, the totality of manifested reality. These last two chapters are literal translations of some sections of my book Siendo nada, soy todo (Being nothing, I am everything) —published in Spanish by Ed. Dilema in 2007—, of which you can find the PDF at the head of the Spanish version of my blog.

Ah!, of course!, you can publish my texts and my emails in the way that you consider most appropriate. Try not to be too cruel to me!

Thanks for everything! Congratulations on everything! I will continue to read your articles with great interest…

Hi Jo

Thank you for the kind words of your reply.

I have a few more comments about your Addendums.

I agree that everything happens now, in the present moment, since the observer only exists in the present moment. Spiritual awakening always begins with the observer becoming aware of its own existence, which is its sense of being present, in the present moment. The whole point of focusing attention on the now, with present moment awareness, is to become aware of our own being as a presence of consciousness.

I agree the perception of time is an illusion, but as is clear from your work, you want to understand how that illusion is created. We have the impression of an unchangeable past and an undetermined future, but even at the level of classical Newtonian physics, the future is determined by the past, since once you know the initial conditions, it’s possible to calculate the final conditions in a deterministic way. At the level of quantum theory, we have to assume an initial condition and a final condition and then sum over all possible paths that connect the initial condition to the final condition. Each path is weighted with a probability factor given in terms of the action as P=exp(iA/ħ), where the action is given in terms of kinetic and potential energy as an integral, A=∫dA, over dA=dt(KE-PE). The wave-function of quantum theory arises from this probability factor. The time variable in the integrand is the time variable assumed for unitary time evolution of the wave-function.

Unitary Time Evolution of the Wave-function

The classical path is understood as the path of least action, which is the most likely path in terms of quantum probability. This formulation not only applies to the ordinary quantum theory of particle physics, but also to quantum field theory. In QFT the sum over all possible paths that connect an initial condition to a final condition includes virtual particle-antiparticle pairs, where the antiparticle has a negative energy and frequency, E=hf, and so can be understood as a particle that moves backwards in time. This is where the idea of advanced and retarded waves comes from. At the level of QFT, the future is as much determining the past as the past is determining the future.

Quantum State as the Sum over all Possible Paths

I like the idea that the future determines the past as much as the past determines the future, and that in some sense, the future and the past are both illusions of perception since everything is observed now, in the present moment, which is where the observer exists. In the sense of an illusion, I would say that both the future and the past are imaginary in the same sense that the projected and animated images of a movie are imaginary. This of course brings us to the problem of how to understand a holographic world, which is also imaginary in the same sense as the projected and animated images of a movie.

The bottom line is that the space-time geometry of a holographic world is also imaginary, since it only arises from the perception of images projected from an observer’s holographic screen to its central point of view. The images of that world are forms of information reducible to qubits of information encoded on the screen which are animated in the flow of energy. The problem with understanding the nature of that space-time geometry is the problem of understanding gravity as the dynamical curvature of that space-time geometry.

This is where the idea of gravity conflicts with the idea of unitary time evolution that underlies quantum theory. Quantum theory can only be formulated in the gravity-free Minkowski space of special relativity, where there is a notion of time translation invariance. This notion breaks down in a dynamically curved space-time geometry with gravity. This breakdown of time translation invariance in a curved space-time geometry with gravity is best exemplified by event horizons, like the event horizon of a black hole.

Schwarzschild Radius of the Event Horizon of a Black Hole

There are several ways to see this. The first is Hawking radiation. At the event horizon of a black hole, virtual particle-antiparticle pairs appear to separate as observed by an external observer. The separated particle is radiated away from the event horizon toward the external observer and appears to become a particle of thermal radiation that carries positive heat energy, while the separated antiparticle falls into the black hole and carries negative energy that reduces the mass of the black hole. This is a separation of positive and negative frequencies as in the separation of advanced and retarded waves. This separation of virtual particle-antiparticle pairs at the event horizon gives the event horizon an apparent temperature as observed by the external observer. On the other hand, for a freely falling observer that falls through the event horizon, there is no Hawking radiation, which only appears to exist for the external observer that must accelerate away from the event horizon with an acceleration equal and opposite to that of gravity to maintain its stationary position outside the event horizon. The paradox we have to resolve is how Hawking radiation can appear to exist for the accelerated external observer but not for the freely falling observer.

Hawking Radiation

The other way to demonstrate the breakdown of the observer’s space-time geometry at an event horizon is with the Planck length as the smallest possible measurable distance scale. The way we measure the size of things is by scattering light off of them, as with a microscope. The smaller the thing, the smaller wavelength of light we need to use. Since energy is related to wave frequency as E=hf, and wave frequency is inversely proportional to wavelength, the smaller the thing, the larger the energy of the light we need to use. At some point, we focus so much energy into such a small region of space, we create a black hole. If we focus even more energy into even a smaller region of space, we only make the black hole bigger with a larger event horizon. The length scale at which the black hole must form is the Planck length, which is the smallest distance scale we can ever measure since nothing is observable beyond the limits of the event horizon.

Planck Length

This is how Jacob Bekenstein discovered holographic entropy. Bekenstein imagined throwing a single photon, which is a quantum of electromagnetic radiation, and for which we know nothing about except for its polarization state, into a black hole. This photon carries a single qubit of information in terms of its right handed or left handed polarization state, which is like a spin variable that can only be observed to spin up or spin down. When this photon is added to the black hole, the event horizon of the black hole increases in surface area by about one Planck area. It is as though the surface area of the event horizon is covered with Planck area size pixels, each of which encodes a single qubit of information.

Black Hole Holographic Entropy

This explains why the Planck length is the smallest distance scale that can ever be measured. A Planck size black hole is the smallest event horizon that can be created, which encodes a single qubits of information, which is the smallest amount of information that can ever be measured.

The Hawking calculation for the apparent temperature of the event horizon of a black hole as observed by an external observer and the Bekenstein calculation for the holographic entropy of a black hole tie together in terms of the laws of thermodynamics. At thermal equilibrium, the equipartition of energy tells us that every fundamental dynamical degree of freedom carries the same amount of the thermal energy given in terms of temperature as E=kT, and that entropy is given in terms of the number of dynamical degrees of freedom as S=kn. Bekenstein showed the dynamical degrees of freedom for the black hole are qubits of information encoded on the event horizon, with one qubit encoded per Planck area size pixel, and so the black hole’s holographic entropy is proportional to the surface area, A, of the event horizon, S=kn=kA/4ℓ². Hawking showed the observed temperature of the event horizon is proportional to the acceleration of gravity, a, with which an external observer must accelerate away from the event horizon to maintain its stationary position outside the event horizon, kT=ħa/2πc. The laws of thermodynamics simply say that a decrease or increase in the surface area of the event horizon, which corresponds to a decrease or increase in the number of qubits of information encoded on the event horizon, either corresponds to the radiation of Hawking radiation away from the event horizon or to the addition of photons of electromagnetic radiation to the black hole, which either decreases or increases the mass of the black hole in terms of the thermal energy carried by that radiation, which is proportional to the observer’s acceleration. This thermodynamic addition and subtraction process always occurs in terms of an integral number of qubits encoded on an observer’s holographic screen because the emitted and absorbed radiation also carries information in terms of qubits.

If we generalize these ideas of Bekenstein and Hawking from black holes to the entire observable universe, we can then deduce the holographic principle, which describes the nature of an accelerating observer and its holographic world. The basic idea is that just as a black hole has an event horizon from the perspective of an accelerating observer that hovers outside the black hole in a stationary position, the observer’s holographic world also has an event horizon. This event horizon, which bounds the observer’s own observable holographic world, is called a cosmic horizon that arises from dark energy and the accelerated expansion of space. In relativity theory, dark energy is called a cosmological constant that gives rise to the accelerated expansion of space that always appears to expand away from the observer’s central point of view. With the accelerated expansion of space, the farther the observer looks out into space, the faster the expansion of space appears to accelerate away from the observer. At its cosmic horizon, space appears to expand away from the observer at the speed of light, and so nothing is observable to the observer beyond the limits of its own cosmic horizon.

Accelerated Expansion of Space

What exactly is the observer? The observer is nothing more than a point of view that arises at the center of its own holographic world. The observer is observing events in its own holographic world. Those observable events are being displayed on the observer’s own holographic screen that encodes information for all those events. The perception of an event is like an image projected from the observer’s screen to its own point of view at the center of its own holographic world. In the sense of an object of perception, all perceivable objects are forms of information encoded on the screen. If that screen is like a computer screen that encodes bits of information, all perceivable objects are reducible to bits of information, which John Wheeler called “It from bit”.

What exactly does relativity theory tell us about the observer? Relativity theory doesn’t attempt to explain what the observer is, only that the observer is at the central point of view of its own coordinate system, which is a frame of reference. If that frame of reference is characterized by accelerated motion, which is called an accelerated frame of reference, the observer observes effects of gravity occurring in a dynamically curved space-time geometry. One of those effects of gravity is the observer’s event horizon, which limits the observer’s observations of events in space. The observer’s event horizon is a two dimensional bounding surface of space that limits its observations of events in three dimensional space. We really don’t need the whole formalism of relativity theory to understand the nature of an event horizon. We only need the concepts of an observer that undergoes accelerated motion and the invariance of the speed of light, which is the maximal rate of information transfer in three dimensional space. A light ray that originates on the other side of the observer’s event horizon can never reach the observer’s point of view as long as the observer continues to undergo accelerated motion along its world-line, and so nothing is observable beyond its event horizon.

Once we have an accelerating observer and its event horizon, which naturally arises as a bounding surface of space that limits the observer’s observations in space due to its own accelerated motion, we can then construct the observer’s holographic world. The basic idea is that the observer’s event horizon acts as its holographic screen that displays images of everything the observer can perceive in its own holographic world. How are those images constructed? The images are all forms of information that can be reduced to bits of information encoded on the observer’s event horizon. These bits of information are not classical bits in the sense of a classical computer, but are quantized bits of information in the sense of a quantum computer, which are called qubits.

The way the holographic principle solves the problem of the fundamental dynamical degrees of freedom for a holographic world at the quantum level is to assume that these fundamental dynamical degrees of freedom are qubits of information encoded on a holographic screen that arises as an event horizon in an observer’s accelerated frame of reference. The qubits encoded on a holographic screen are more fundamental as dynamical degrees of freedom than the point particles assumed by QFT that appear to occupy position coordinates in space and to move through space over the course of time in the space-time geometry of the observer’s holographic world. The holographic principle is the only known mechanism that can unify gravity, understood in the sense of a dynamically curved space-time geometry, with the particle physics of QFT, which must assume that space-time geometry is flat, gravity-free Minkowski space.

The holographic principle specifies that the number of qubits of information encoded for a holographic world, which are the fundamental dynamical degrees of freedom for that holographic world, are given in terms of the surface area of the observer’s event horizon as n=A/4ℓ², where the Planck area is defined as ℓ²=ħG/c³. It is as though each Planck area on the observer’s event horizon encodes a single qubit of information, like pixels on a computer screen that encode bits of information in a binary code of 1’s and 0’s.

This encoding of qubits of information on an event horizon is more complicated than the way a classical computer encodes information because the qubits are all entangled with each other. Quantum entanglement is a result of the way information is encoded on the two dimensional surface of the observer’s event horizon in a rotationally invariant way, which results from the way qubits are mathematically represented on that surface by matrices, which are two dimensional arrays of numbers.

A qubit is mathematically represented by a two dimensional array of numbers called a matrix, like a Pauli spin matrix, which is an SU(2) matrix. The eigenvalues of the matrix give a mathematical representation of information encoded in a binary code, like a spin variable that can only be observed to be in either a spin up or spin down state, but this information is encoded on the surface of a 2-sphere in a rotationally invariant way since the SU(2) matrix also gives a mathematical representation of rotational symmetry on the surface of the 2-sphere. At the level of qubits, what we call quantum entanglement is a mathematical representation of this rotational invariance.

Since qubits of information are encoded in terms of matrices, which are two dimensional arrays of numbers, this information must be encoded on a two dimensional surface of space. Where does that two dimensional surface of space come from? The answer is the two dimensional surface of space is the observer’s event horizon that arises due to its own accelerated motion, limits its observations of events in space, and acts as its holographic screen when that horizon encodes qubits of information. Everything the observer can observe in its own holographic world is a form of information encoded on its own event horizon that acts as its holographic screen. The holographic principle is simply a statement that everything the observer can observe in its own holographic world can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on its own event horizon that arises due to its own accelerated motion and acts as its holographic screen.

The equipartition of energy tells us that at thermal equilibrium, each fundamental dynamical degree of freedom carries the same amount of thermal energy. Where does this thermal energy come from? The answer is that this thermal energy comes from the observer’s own accelerated motion. If the observer accelerates with an acceleration, a, that thermal energy is given in terms of the Unruh temperature of the observer’s event horizon as E=kT=ħa/2πc. The accelerating observer is itself creating its own thermal energy, and at thermal equilibrium, each qubit of information, which is a fundamental dynamical degree of freedom for the observer’s own holographic world, carries the same amount of thermal energy given in terms of the observer’s own acceleration.

We now have all the pieces of the puzzle to explain how the laws of physics arise in an observer’s holographic world. The laws of thermodynamics tell us that ΔE=TΔS, where holographic entropy is given in terms of the surface area of the observer’s event horizon as S=kn=kA/4ℓ², and the Unruh temperature of the observer’s event horizon at thermal equilibrium is given in terms of the observer’s acceleration as kT=ħa/2πc. The laws of thermodynamics simply say that ΔE=kTΔn, where the fundamental dynamical degrees of freedom for the observer’s holographic world are defined in terms of the number of qubits of information encoded on the observer’s event horizon, which is proportional to the surface area of the event horizon. At thermal equilibrium, each qubit of information encoded on the event horizon carries the same amount of thermal energy given in terms of the observer’s own acceleration. A change in the surface area of the observer’s event horizon implies a change in the number of qubits of information encoded on the event horizon, which implies a change in energy for the observer’s holographic world.

Thermodynamics tells us that a change in energy implies a change in entropy, which the holographic principle tells us implies a change in the surface area of the observer’s event horizon, which implies a change in the space-time geometry of the observer’s holographic world. This chain of events is how Ted Jacobson derived Einstein’s field equations for gravity from the laws of thermodynamics. Einstein’s field equations are not really fundamental, but are more like an effective field theory that describes gravitational events in the observer’s holographic world when things are near thermal equilibrium.

The holographic principle demonstrates that the laws of physics in a 3+1 dimensional space-time geometry can be reduced to the way qubits of information are encoded on an observer’s holographic screen that arises as an event horizon in its accelerated frame of reference and to the thermal energy inherent in that accelerated motion. This is exactly what Ted Jacobson demonstrated when he derived Einstein’s field equations for the space-time metric from the laws of thermodynamics. Jacobson only had to assume the laws of thermodynamics, that entropy is given in terms of a holographic entropy that only depends on the surface area of the observer’s event horizon, S=kn=kA/4ℓ², and the thermal energy inherent in the temperature of the observer’s event horizon at thermal equilibrium is given in terms of the observer’s acceleration, kT=ħa/2πc. The holographic nature of entropy is best understood in terms of the number of qubits of information encoded on the surface of the observer’s event horizon, which is called a matrix model.

Einstein’s Field Equations for the Space-time Metric

This way of deriving Einstein’s field equations from the laws of thermodynamics tells us that Einstein’s field equations for gravity only have the validity of thermodynamic equations of state. Once we have Einstein’s field equations, then all the usual quantum field theories of the standard model of particle physics, which include the field theories for the electromagnetic and nuclear forces, can be derived using the usual unification mechanisms of super-symmetry and extra compactified dimensions of space. At the level of field theory, the final result of unification looks just like 11-dimensional super-gravity. With unification, all particle spin arises from super-symmetry, and all particle charges arise from quantized momentum in extra compactified dimensions. The electromagnetic and nuclear fields arise as extra components of the space-time metric, and all point particles are understood as quantum excitations of the fields. This also tells us that all the usual quantum field theories of the standard model of particle physics are only valid as thermodynamic equations of state or as effective field theories.

Field theories are not incorrect, but they only have the approximate validity of thermodynamic equations of state. Einstein’s field equations for gravity, Maxwell’s field equations for electromagnetism and Dirac’s field equations for the electron can all be understood as quantum theory at the level of first quantization. The idea of the second quantization of field theories inherent in quantum field theory is only valid for small quantum fluctuations around thermal equilibrium, but it makes no sense to quantize gravity in flat, gravity-free Minkowski space when Einstein’s field equations for gravity must represent the dynamical curvature of space-time geometry.

The nature of Hawking radiation is telling us that only an accelerated observer can observe something in its own holographic world. Only the accelerated observer observes Hawking radiation. The freely falling observer observes no Hawking radiation. Hawking radiation only appears to exist for the accelerated observer due to separation of virtual particle-antiparticle pairs at the accelerated observer’s event horizon. The virtual particle-antiparticle pairs are created out of nothing and normally annihilate back into nothing in a short period of time due to quantum uncertainty in energy, but at the event horizon they can appear to separate from the perspective of the accelerated observer. Since their total energy is zero, the virtual antiparticle must carry an equal but opposite amount of negative energy as the positive energy carried by the virtual particle. When these virtual particles appear to separate at the event horizon, the positive energy that’s radiated away from the event horizon turns into thermal energy, while the negative energy that falls into the black hole decreases the mass of the black hole.

In terms of the holographic principle, these radiated and absorbed particles can always be reduced to qubits of information encoded on the event horizon of the black hole. If we think of the event horizon of the black hole as a holographic screen that encodes qubits of information, the apparent radiation and absorption of energy from the event horizon of the black hole is like the projection of images from the observer’s holographic screen to its accelerated point of view outside the screen. The radiated and absorbed particles are forms of information that can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on the observer’s holographic screen. If we generalize this idea from a black hole to an observer’s own holographic world, then the form of everything the observer can observe in its own holographic world is a form of information that can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on the observer’s holographic screen, which arises as an event horizon due to the observer’s own accelerated motion. These forms of information are projected like images from the observer’s holographic screen to its own accelerated point of view outside the screen as the observer perceives the images. There really is nothing inside that holographic world since that world only consists of projected images. Even the energy that animates the projected images can be understood as arising from the energy of the observer’s own accelerated motion.

That’s the nature of a holographic world, where the fundamental dynamical degrees of freedom for that world are qubits of information encoded on an observer’s holographic screen that arises as its event horizon due to the observer’s own accelerated motion. Point particles that appear to occupy position coordinates in space and to move through space over the course of time in that world can always be reduced to qubits of information encoded on the observer’s own holographic screen. Even the space-time geometry of that holographic world can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on the observer’s holographic screen.

The holographic principle explains the nature of the observed effects of gravity as the apparent dynamical curvature of the space-time geometry of an observer’s holographic world, which can always be reduced to qubits of information encoded on the observer’s own holographic screen that arises as its event horizon due to the observer’s own accelerated motion. The problem is this explanation is not consistent with the idea of unitary time evolution that underlies the conventional quantum theory and QFT of particle physics, since in a curved space-time geometry with gravity, there is no notion of time translation invariance. We really can’t connect the present moment to a distant past or far-away future with the advanced and retarded waves of QFT because the positive and negative frequencies of those waves are separated at an event horizon.

That’s why I’d like you to reformulate your ideas about entropic-syntropic evolution, not in terms of a QFT based on the incorrect assumption of unitary time evolution, but in terms of the holographic principle. My guess is that you can’t do this, at least not in terms of a distant past and a far-away future. My own ideas about syntropy (the order of coherent organization) as a counter-balancing effect to entropy (the disorder of thermal disorganization) is that coherent organization naturally arises in a holographic world, moment by moment, as a natural result of quantum entanglement due to the entanglement of qubits of information encoded on an observer’s holographic screen, which are the fundamental dynamical degrees of freedom of that holographic world. Coherent organization of form is a moment by moment process that arises from quantum entanglement because all the qubits of information for that holographic world are entangled.

The flip side of this way of understanding coherent organization is that observation is never really a local phenomena. That’s why the idea of local realism, which is inherent in our mistaken ideas about particle physics, and which seems to be violated in the phenomena of spooky action at a distance, is not a valid concept. Observation is never really a local phenomena, but rather a holistic phenomena that encompasses an observer’s entire world as the observer makes observations of its own holographic world.

The observer itself can only be understood as the perceiving consciousness present at the central point of view of its own holographic world, which is always defined on the observer’s own holographic screen that arises as an event horizon due to its own accelerated motion. The observer’s event horizon becomes its holographic screen when the horizon encodes qubits of information. That information is always entangled in the sense of quantum entanglement, and so everything perceivable in that holographic world is inherently connected to everything else. Coherent organization of form naturally arises from the tendency of entangled qubits of information to align together over a sequence of events, which occurs moment by moment.

The key to understanding the nature of observation in a holographic world is that observation is never a local phenomena. There is only an illusion that the form of a person that appears in the observer’s own holographic world can make a local observation of that world. In reality, all observations are non-local and are made by the observer at the central point of view of its own holographic world. Observation always occurs in a subject-object relation, where the observer is the subject and its objects of perception not only include forms of information in its own holographic world, but that world in its entirety. This not only resolves the paradoxes of spooky action at a distance, but also those of Schrodinger’s cat and Wigner’s friend.

As I’ve previously mentioned, there is only a consensual reality shared by multiple observers, each present at the central point of view of its own holographic world, when the respective holographic screens of all the different observers overlap like a Venn diagram and share information.

In terms of non-dual reality, all of this is happening in the nothingness of the void. Each observer, present at its own individual point of view, is arising in that nothingness as the observer’s individual consciousness is differentiated from the undifferentiated consciousness of the void. The accelerated motion of each observer is always relative to the motionless void, which is how each observer’s event horizon arises that becomes its holographic screen when the horizon encodes qubits of information. Just as the void is the source of the observer, the void is also the source of the energy that underlies the observer’s accelerated motion that gives rise to its event horizon and the source of the information encoding on the observer’s event horizon.

If I can quote you back to yourself:

“According to my proposal, time is illusory and everything happens instant after instant, in an eternal Now…As I understand things, based on both experiential and theoretical research on non-dual reality, the foundation of everything transcends and includes the partial perspectives of objectivist monism (materialism) and subjectivist monism (idealism), that is, it is subject-and-object simultaneously and in an undifferentiated way, or, more exactly, is “prior” to that polarization. The origin of the manifested universe is simply the apparent dualization of the non-dual in the form of the poles of energy and consciousness. The information, according to this approach, would only be the interaction between these two poles, from the very originary moment, which would gradually increase, instant after instant.”

I agree.

Hi J

Thank you very much, once again, for your kind mail and for your fantastic explanations about the holographic universe! Your pedagogical presentation of the subject has allowed even a complete layman in these matters like me to glimpse a few ideas of enormous interest.

I loved it when you say: “My own ideas about syntropy (the order of coherent organization) as a counter-balancing effect to entropy (the disorder of thermal disorganization) is that coherent organization naturally arises in a holographic world, moment by moment, as a natural result of quantum entanglement due to the entanglement of qubits of information encoded on an observer’s holographic screen, which are the fundamental dynamical degrees of freedom of that holographic world. Coherent organization of form is a moment by moment process that arises from quantum entanglement because all the qubits of information for that holographic world are entangled.” Or also when you state: “The flip side of this way of understanding coherent organization is that observation is never really a local phenomenon. That’s why the idea of local realism, which is inherent in our mistaken ideas about particle physics, and which seems to be violated in the phenomenon of spooky action at a distance, is not a valid concept. Observation is never really a local phenomenon, but rather a holistic phenomenon that encompasses an observer’s entire world as the observer makes observations of its own holographic world.” Or when you insist: “That information is always entangled in the sense of quantum entanglement, and so everything perceivable in that holographic world is inherently connected to everything else. Coherent organization of form naturally arises from the tendency of entangled qubits of information to align together over a sequence of events, which occurs moment by moment.” Or, of course, when you state: “The key to understanding the nature of observation in a holographic world is that observation is never a local phenomenon. There is only an illusion that the form of a person that appears in the observer’s own holographic world can make a local observation of that world. In reality, all observations are non-local and are made by the observer at the central point of view of its own holographic world. Observation always occurs in a subject-object relation, where the observer is the subject and its objects of perception not only include forms of information in its own holographic world, but that world in its entirety.” And when, finally, you hold that: “In terms of non-dual reality, all of this is happening in the nothingness of the void. Each observer, present at its own individual point of view, is arising in that nothingness as the observer’s individual consciousness is differentiated from the undifferentiated consciousness of the void. The accelerated motion of each observer is always relative to the motionless void, which is how each observer’s event horizon arises that becomes its holographic screen when the horizon encodes qubits of information. Just as the void is the source of the observer, the void is also the source of the energy that underlies the observer’s accelerated motion that gives rise to its event horizon and the source of the information encoding on the observer’s event horizon.” My research fully aligns with all these ideas! I think I’m going to have no choice but to seriously think about writing an Addendum 9: Holographic Evolution in the future!

For now, I have finished reading your wonderful article The Underlying Truth of You and the Story of Reality, which I found very inspiring. The final pages, with texts by various non-dualist masters, are truly luminous. Above all, the abundant and tasty bouquet of phrases from the book I Am That by Nisargadatta (and Maurice Frydman) that are real pearls! I will continue reading your articles in the coming days, to soak myself in holography from every pore and… let’s see what happens!

I would like to talk to you about some ideas that I have been thinking about while reading your article.

There are some non-dualist teachers —or, rather, idealistic monists— who have a very negative view of the manifested universe, claim that the world of finitude is a pure error resulting from ignorance, and their claim is to escape from this world of the finite forms to return to the joyful original plenitude. As I understand it, on the contrary, the universal manifestation, far from being a lamentable error, is nothing less than the fascinating progressive unfolding of the infinite potentiality of the non-dual foundation. It is the creative, dazzling and inexhaustible artifice of the unmanifested Emptiness to contemplate itself in infinite ways!

The trick of this self-creative game is very simple. It is enough that the fundamental Emptiness, which is simultaneously subject and object in an undifferentiated way, unfolds these two aspects according to a basic polarity of energy and consciousness, thus generating an illusory distance between both poles with endless balances between both facets. The spectrum thus created runs the full range of archetypal levels from the potential energy (Shakti) of the original pole to the pure consciousness (Shiva) of the final pole. The thousand-year-old Hindu psychophysiology, and in a very special way the tantric tradition, has synthesized this archetypal spectrum through the chain of chakras, each one of which is defined by a certain sound vibration and by a characteristic activity: Muladhara (matter / survival), Svadhistana (life / sex), Manipura (power / desire), Anahata (love / compassion), Vishuddha (expression / creation), Ajna (intelligence / understanding), and Sahasrara (spirit / enlightenment). The Hindu tradition also affirms that the totality of this spectrum of seven levels in which the flow of energy-consciousness is stabilized, manifests itself, at least, in three different envelopes: biological, psychological and intellective.

My research on the pattern of evolution and development, both in human phylogeny and ontogeny, has revealed the presence of a harmonic fractal pattern in the unfolding of the successive levels of stratified stability that mark the evolutionary ladder. It has been surprising for me to see how this long spectrum of evolutionary levels fits with total precision to the scheme of chakras and envelopes proposed in the Hindu tradition. If you are interested in this subject, I invite you to take a look at my Beyond Darwin article and, especially, the section entitled Regarding the chakras.

I am telling you all this because in your article, echoing the classic Darwinian approach, you make repeated references to “the survival of the fittest body” as the dynamic element of the evolutionary process. It is obvious that the survival instinct of the physical body is the most basic element of all this process, because, obviously, if the organism does not survive, it will not be able to evolve in any way. In this same sense, in the scheme of the chakras the characteristic of “survival” corresponds to the cycle of muladhara, the initial stage to be developed in the progressive emergence of life. But —look carefully— from there, there are many other facets that yearn to unfold, as indicated by the series of chakras, and that, one after another, will play the central dynamizing role in each of the successive evolutionary stages, in the biological, mental, intellective and spiritual fields. Ultimately, the evolutionary process, by successively unfolding and integrating the entire spectrum of potential levels of stratified stability of energy-consciousness —from the originary pole of objective energy to the final pole of subjective consciousness— is attempting to manifest in the world of the forms the non-duality of subject and object that characterizes the fundamental Emptiness. In summary, evolution is not a mere error resulting from ignorance or an exclusively material and meaningless process, but rather, on the contrary, it is the fascinating artifice of the Void to contemplate its invisible original face in a grand symphony of pixels, in a wonderful holographic mosaic.

Enjoy the spectacle!

Hi Jo

Of course I agree with you. If I can quote Jed McKenna:

Why is nothingness better than somethingness? Why is unity better than duality? Why is truth better than the lie? Why is the infinite better than the finite? Why is awake better than dreaming? Our fragile little bubbles are what let us float around in the infinite, able to enjoy the experience of somethingness-good and bad-where only nothingness exists. The bubble is a magnificent amusement park and leaving it is a damn silly thing to do unless you absolutely must.

The dreamstate is a big amusement park and I would never encourage anyone to try to escape. That would be as absurd as suggesting that you commit suicide for your own good.

Enlightenment is literally the biggest nothing of all time. Enlightenment is life-negative. Spiritual enlightenment is pointless and meaningless, and should only be sought by those who have absolutely no choice in the matter.

The thing one leaves isn’t just the prison of self but self itself, so the freedom thus won is something of a booby prize.

McKenna never recommends awakening from the dream. McKenna recommends awakening within the dream, which he calls the Integrated State. It can also be called the born-again experience. One dies in self-identification with the body and is reborn to a spiritual identity. This naturally happens when one surrenders to divine will. One comes into alignment with the normal flow of things and feels connected rather than disconnected and personally self-limited. One also expresses right actions and experiences expressions of creativity, like the stuff that we’re writing about. This is the highest level of spiritual evolution that a person can ever have while that person continues to live a life and the dream (life is but a dream) continues to be dreamt. Surrender leads directly to awakening within the dream.

This is how McKenna describes awakening within the dream:

To surrender is to relinquish the illusion of control, which initiates the death part of the death/rebirth process, which is the transition from the bondage of the womb-like Segregated State to the freedom of the ever-expanding Integrated State. No faith or belief is required to accomplish this act of surrender, only clear-seeing. When one begins to understand ego and fear for what they really are, this process becomes as easy and natural as dropping a heavy weight.

Surrender follows naturally from seeing what is.

The person who arrives at this point is not the person who goes beyond. In this process, resistance is conquered and non-resistance takes its place; acceptance, recognition, surrender. The segregated self is slain and the integrated self is born. To the onlooker it looks like one thing becomes the other, but to the participant it is quite unmistakably the end of one thing and the beginning of another. The necessary letting go is itself a kind of death. It is the primary death/birth process, and nothing proceeds until it happens.

We are both protagonist and antagonist in this conflict, both attacker and defended. We can’t win by fighting. The very thing that fights, that resists, is the thing we seek to overthrow. Only by vanquishing ego can we prevail. Only in surrender can we find victory. This is the part so few get, and fewer get beyond. If you want to say all religions and spiritual teachings share a core truth, it can only be this: Surrender is victory.

Ego is obstruction, surrender is flow. Surrender is the basis and precursor of growth. There is no growth possible within egoic constraints, only the illusion of growth. Once we free ourselves, we come into alignment.

There is only one possible objective, you must die to be reborn, and to do that begin the process of thinking clearly and freeing your thoughts from emotion-dense clouds of self-limiting belief

Nothing else means anything. No amount of knowledge or understanding or spiritual experience could be of any value if you’re still stuck in the segregated state. You have one goal, die to the flesh and be born of the spirit.

On the other hand, to awaken from the dream, you have to kill your own ego, which leads to the destruction of your own Self in the sense that the Self is the individual consciousness present at the center of its own world. Awakening from the dream destroys the Self in the sense that the individual consciousness of the observer dissolves back into the nothingness of undifferentiated consciousness. Bernadette Robert’s book: The Experience of No-Self gives a very good description of this experience. As McKenna says, there’s nothing to be desired about it:

How can you want nothing? Words ascribed to the Buddha are often fraudulent, but there’s one very clear exception: “Truly, I have attained nothing from total enlightenment”. It’s not so much that he didn’t gain anything as that he did gain nothing.

Battling past the ego to get to the truth has been at the heart of countless spiritual teachings. Ego-death as a means to no-self is what this journey is all about. Anyone headed for truth is going to get there over ego’s dead body or not at all.

Spiritual enlightenment is self-defeating. It is a battle we wage upon ourselves. Truth is a uniquely challenging pursuit because the very thing that wants it is the only thing in the way of it. It’s a battle we must die to win. The great enemy is the very self that wages the war. When self is destroyed, who wins?

The idea of the individual self, valid and separate, unravels very quickly under any serious scrutiny. All beliefs do. What takes time and effort is to put the idea of self under such scrutiny and make sense of what’s left after the belief is gone.

All beliefs, all concepts, all thoughts, they’re all false. If you’re going for the truth, you’re not taking any of them with you. Nothing that says two, not one, survives.

Self is an untruth.

From the unawakened side, the gate blocking one from enlightenment is enormous and impassable. Delusion fills one’s entire field of view because it resides prior to perception. Once delusion has been destroyed, we can see it never really existed.

With every step we leave behind that which we move beyond.

Every step in the process of awakening has three components: Seeing what needs to be killed, killing it, and cleaning up the mess. You must process the loss.

A step begins with seeing and understanding. That seeing and understanding becomes the very thing that destroys the thing seen and understood. But it doesn’t end there. Just because you killed something doesn’t mean you killed your attachment to it. Seeing the thing is the beginning of killing the thing, and killing the thing is the beginning of detaching from it.

Every step is a loss and as long as there’s more to lose, there are more steps to take.

Everything is lost. Nothing is gained.

The way you kill your ego and destroy your own Self is by severing emotional attachments. That’s why Arjuna fell down and refused to give the order to launch the war in the Bhagavad Gita when he saw that war would kill everyone and everything he loved. That war would destroy his world. That war is a war you fight against your own Self. Winning that war is the same as dying, first at a personal level and then at an individual level. Severing emotional attachments is the nature of this dying process. Everything has to become dead to you, including your own personal character in the world you perceive, and even that world. You have to stop caring about it all, which is what it means to sever all the emotional attachments. When Arjuna saw this, he refused to give the order to launch the war. He only got up and gave the order because he saw that everything he was emotionally attached to and loved was an illusion. You can only awaken from the dream when you see the illusion as an illusion, lose interest in paying attention to the illusion, and totally withdraw your attention away from the illusion. Severing emotional attachments is the process of your consciousness rising to a higher level and directly seeing for yourself the illusion as an illusion. It’s also the process of dying and destroying your own Self and your own world.

Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

McKenna references the Bhagavad Gita in terms of the battle one must fight in order to destroy delusion (Self) in the process of realizing the truth (No-self):

The Gita is the dialogue between the false self and the true state; the bridging of the paradigm gap. The prize to be won in this battle is not wealth or fame or power, but the transition from untrue to true, from dream to awake, from delusion to reality.

I added a few more paragraphs to our prior discussion on the holographic principle and put them into a pdf document:

The nature of Hawking radiation is telling us that only an accelerated observer can observe something in its own holographic world. Only the accelerated observer observes Hawking radiation. The freely falling observer observes no Hawking radiation. Hawking radiation only appears to exist for the accelerated observer due to separation of virtual particle-antiparticle pairs at the accelerated observer’s event horizon. The virtual particle-antiparticle pairs are created out of nothing and normally annihilate back into nothing in a short period of time due to quantum uncertainty in energy, but at the event horizon they can appear to separate from the perspective of the accelerated observer. Since their total energy is zero, the virtual antiparticle must carry an equal but opposite amount of negative energy as the positive energy carried by the virtual particle. When these virtual particles appear to separate at the event horizon, the positive energy that’s radiated away from the event horizon turns into thermal energy, while the negative energy that falls into the black hole decreases the mass of the black hole.

In terms of the holographic principle, these radiated and absorbed particles can always be reduced to qubits of information encoded on the event horizon of the black hole. If we think of the event horizon of the black hole as a holographic screen that encodes qubits of information, the apparent radiation and absorption of energy from the event horizon of the black hole is like the projection of images from the observer’s holographic screen to its accelerated point of view outside the screen. The radiated and absorbed particles are forms of information that can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on the observer’s holographic screen. If we generalize this idea from a black hole to an observer’s own holographic world, then the form of everything the observer can observe in its own holographic world is a form of information that can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on the observer’s holographic screen, which arises as an event horizon due to the observer’s own accelerated motion. These forms of information are projected like images from the observer’s holographic screen to its own accelerated point of view outside the screen as the observer perceives the images. There really is nothing inside that holographic world since that world only consists of projected images. Even the energy that animates the projected images can be understood as arising from the energy of the observer’s own accelerated motion.

That’s how I understand the nature of the (imaginary) illusion.

Hi J

Thank you very much for your very interesting email, for the lucid texts of Jed McKenna and for your clarifying explanation on the nature of Hawking radiation!

I believe that the great contribution of the Mahāyāna tradition has been, precisely, the understanding that the ultimate reality is not a pure Emptiness that denies the world of forms, but, on the contrary, the radical non-duality of Emptiness and the forms, as stated in the Heart Sutra: “Form is Void; the Void is form“… which, I believe, would be in great harmony with the trinitarian approach in the Christian tradition: the Father would be the unmanifested Emptiness, the Son would be his formal image and the Holy Spirit would be the dynamic reciprocal love between the Father and the Son…

Changing the subject, I wanted to tell you about an intriguing issue that I’ve been trying to unravel for a few years. Deep down, it has to do with the sense —or nonsense— of evolutionary dynamics. As you explain in your article, from a materialistic perspective the future of the expansion of the universe is none other than heat death… and full stop. From the non-dualistic approach in which I develop my research, the issue has other more suggestive implications. If you have taken a look at the core of the Beyond Darwin article, you will have been able to see how, both in human phylogeny and ontogeny, a very precise harmonic-spiral-fractal pattern is revealed in the unfolding rhythm of the successive evolutionary levels of the spectrum of energy-consciousness that punctuate the entire process. All trajectories have a vertiginous rhythm at their origin (A), they gradually slow down as they move towards a certain level of the spectrum and, from there, they accelerate the process again until reaching, again, vertiginous speeds when they approach the final moment (Ω).

Last year, two Big History scholars —Leonid Grinin and Andrey Korotayev—edited a book called Evolution: Trajectories of Social Evolution, published both in print and online by Uchitel. I was invited to write one of the chapters and here you can find the result: https://www.sociostudies.org/upload/sociostudies.org/book/evol_8_en/08_Faixat.pdf . The title is Non-Dual Singularity. I copy the Abstract:

“Abstract:

The Universe emerged in a violent Singularity —basically of energy— generating vertiginous transformations. Later, due to cooling, the emergence of novelties slowed down gradually. After the formation of the solar system and the subsequent emergence of life on our planet, the rhythm of creative transformations began to increase progressively, first through biological evolution and, later, through human development and expansion of civilizations. Currently, the emergence of novelties is again dizzying and everything seems to indicate that we are fast approaching another imminent Singularity —basically of consciousness— of infinite creativity.

In this paper we propose that both Singularities —A and Ω— are nothing but the polar expression of the fundamental Void always present, ‘prior’ to its apparent dualization as energy and consciousness. The initial and final Singularities would not be, in this way, but the points of exit from and entry to this eternally self-evident non-dual Emptiness that, instant after instant, manifests itself in and as the world of forms.”

A few years ago, I learned that American researchers Saul Perlmutter, Brian P. Schmidt, and Adam G. Riess had won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on the accelerating expansion of the universe through observations of distant supernovae. When I saw the shape and chronology of the global trajectory resulting of the expansion of the universe… I immediately realized the complete parallelism with the shape and chronology of the global trajectory of the evolutionary process of the “macrocosm” revealed in my research!… The tipping point between the deceleration and acceleration phases of the universe —approximately 9 billion years after the Big Bang, or, put another way, about 4.5 billion years before today— was completely in line with what was revealed in my research on the rate of evolution!… Was this a mere coincidence or did the matter have a deeper meaning?…

Four years ago, reading the book Cosmometry by researcher Marshall Lefferts —from Nassim Haramein’s team— I found the following paragraph on page 120:

“Additionally, both Haramein and cosmologist Jude Currivan propose that there is an informational aspect of universal expansion, wherein the total information content of the universe is constantly increasing, thus requiring a growing volume of pixelated space-time within which to accommodate this informational evolution.”

And, at the bottom of that same page, I could also read: “In a personal conversation with me, Currivan elaborated that in every Planck-scale moment the universe adds another set of information that is encoded into the expanding field of spacetime, and that the expansion of space and flow of time is evolution, without which there would be no evolutionary experience of consciousness.”

At that moment I had the sensation of having finally found the long-awaited explanation for the “mysterious” parallelism found between the accelerated expansion of the universe —demonstrated by Perlmutter, Schmidt and Riess— and the accelerated unfolding of the evolution of consciousness that is becoming revealed in my research. Needless to say, I immediately raised the issue with both Marshall and Jude… but they didn’t get back to me about it…

You can imagine the enormous illusion that reading things like this in your article has made me these days: “The universe can only expand and cool due to the accelerated expansion of space that arises from the expression of dark energy, which allows the universe to expand in size and cool as the cosmological constant transitions to a lower value and the observer’s cosmic horizon increases in radius. That’s also how more qubits of information are encoded for the universe as the observer’s cosmic horizon increases in surface area.” (The bolds are mine.) Fantastic! Fantastic! It seems that the manifested reality is not objective or subjective but subject-objective. It seems that the evolution of consciousness and the expansion of the universe, far from being two independent phenomena, are two sides of a single process… the dual appearance of the non-dual timeless ever-present Self-evidence!

I put the question to you, Jim! From your point of view, do you think what I’m suggesting makes any sense or is it complete nonsense? So that you visualize the matter a bit, I am attaching you some illustrative images of this synchrony, taken from my research, from the cover of a book by the Big History scholar Akop Nazaretyan and from the internet.

Will they give us the Nobel Prize for this finding?… ha!, ha!, ha!

Hi Jo

This is a lot to respond to!

In terms of the holy trinity, I agree that the Father is the void (the unmanifested Emptiness), the Son is the projected and animated image (of a person that appears in the world), but that the holy spirit (the spirit of God) is the observer (the consciousness present at the center of its own holographic world). The key point that clarifies this interpretation is that the observer’s own holographic world is defined on its event horizon (that arises due to the observer’s own accelerated motion relative to the motionless void) when the horizon encodes qubits of information. This is the only way that quantum theory can be reconciled with relativity theory. In terms of Advaita, the Father is Brahman, the holy spirit is Atman and the Son is the Avatar.

This is how Nisargadatta describes the creation of the observer’s world:

To be born means to create a world around yourself as the center.
You are that point of consciousness.
By your movement the world is ever created.
Stop moving and there will be no world.

The problem of the cosmological constant transitioning to a lower value really does not have a scientific explanation in terms of the holographic principle. This is why cosmologists are stuck on the mistaken idea of inflationary cosmology (based on QFT), which cannot be a fundamental explanation since QFT cannot be fundamental, but can only have the limited validity of a thermodynamic equation of state. If you really take the holographic principle seriously (as I do) then there is no scientific explanation for why the cosmological constant transitions to a lower value. Each such transition would in effect be a new big bang event. The only real explanation is that it’s God’s will. In some mysterious way, the void resets the cosmological constant to a lower value whenever God’s will decides to make that change. There is also nothing that stops God’s will from restarting the whole thing all over again. That’s why at the end of the day, the normal flow of energy in a holographic world can only be attributed to God’s will. Of course, the scientific community (firmly entrenched in the mistaken idea of physicalism) will never accept a spiritual explanation, but as far as I can see, there is no other possible explanation. In the words of Sherlock Holmes, when you’ve eliminated everything that is impossible, whatever remains, no matter how implausible it seems, must be the truth.

Normal Flow of Thermal Energy Through the Observer’s Holographic World

It’s worth a brief discussion for why there is no scientific explanation for the value of the cosmological constant or why or how it transitions to a lower value. In some sense, the cosmological constant is a boundary condition that sets the conditions for the nature of a holographic world. The cosmological constant is a measure of dark energy, which characterizes the rate at which the accelerated expansion of space appears to expand away from the central point of view of the observer of its own holographic world. This expansion of space gives rise to the observer’s cosmic horizon where space appears to expand away from the observer at the speed of light, and so nothing is observable beyond the limits of the observer’s cosmic horizon. The holographic principle tells us that everything the observer can observe in its own holographic world can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on its cosmic horizon that becomes its holographic screen when its horizon encodes qubits of information. Everything observable is a form of information. The laws of physics, as conventionally formulated in terms of field theories, like Einstein’s field equations for the space-time metric of gravity and the quantum field theories for the electromagnetic and nuclear forces, only apply at the level of that holographic world, and only have the limited validity of thermodynamic equations of state that describe events in that world when things are near thermal equilibrium. The laws of physics are not really fundamental, but only emerge in that world due to the way that world is holographically constructed. This holographic construction process has to begin with a cosmological constant, which sets the boundary conditions for that world.

The normal flow of energy in that holographic world can only be understood in terms of the cosmological constant transitioning to a lower value, but again, there is no scientific explanation for that transition in terms of the holographic principle, which has to assume a value for the cosmological constant before we can even discuss the laws of physics. When the cosmological constant transitions to a lower value, the observer’s cosmic horizon increases in radius, and so the observer’s observable world increases in size and cools in temperature. When the observer’s cosmic horizon increases in radius, its Unruh temperature decreases. This explains the normal flow of thermal energy through the observer’s holographic world as heat flows from hotter to colder objects. This also explains why entropy tends to increase as heat flow in a thermal gradient, since the observer’s cosmic horizon encodes more qubits of information as it increases in surface area. This normal flow of heat in a thermal gradient and increase in entropy also explains the normal course of time in the sense of time’s arrow. Time’s arrow is literally directed in the direction of the expansion of the size of the observer’s holographic world as that world expands in size due to the cosmological constant transitioning to a lower value. None of this has a scientific explanation, since in terms of the holographic principle, science can never explain the origin of the cosmological constant or why it transitions to a lower value. Science only applies at the level of a holographic world, and we have to assume a value for the cosmological constant to construct that holographic world. The only possible explanation is that it’s all a mysterious expression of God’s will.

There are just some things that can never be explained.

If I can quote you again:

“It seems that the manifested reality is not objective or subjective but subject-objective. It seems that the evolution of consciousness and the expansion of the universe, far from being two independent phenomena, are two sides of a single process… the dual appearance of the non-dual timeless ever-present Self-evidence!“

The only difference in the way I see things is that consciousness itself does not evolve. To the extent there is an evolution, this evolution only applies at the level of personal self-identification, as in whether the individual consciousness of the observer, present at the center of its own holographic world, emotionally identifies itself with the emotionally animated form of a person that appears in its world. Those emotional expressions arise from the motion of the observer’s own point of view relative to the motionless void. The evolution of consciousness is not about consciousness itself, but only about the motion of consciousness. When the observer’s consciousness is under the sway of Darwinian evolution, it expresses self-limiting emotions that create feelings of self-limitation to the emotionally animated form of a body and it emotionally identifies itself with that personal form as though its existence depends on it. If the motion of consciousness comes into alignment with the normal flow of things, as happens in a state of surrender, the observer awakens within the dream. If the motion of consciousness comes to an end, as happens in an ultimate state of free fall, the observer awakens from the dream. Evolution is not really about consciousness, but the way emotional energy is expressed.

You’re correct to make the link between the expansion of the universe and evolution, not in the sense of the evolution of consciousness, but only in terms of the evolution of the expression of emotional energy. At the level of Darwinian evolution, emotional energy is expressed to defend the survival of the body in terms of the coherent organization and self-replication of the form of the body in a recognizable way over a sequence of events, which is how the coherently organized form of the body is emotionally animated as the body appears to survive. At the level of the survival of the fittest body, that’s what the expression of fear and desire are all about. The expression of emotions is inherently linked to the expansion of the universe because the dark energy that’s inherent in the expansion of space is the primordial positive energy that underlies the expression of all other kinds of energy, like emotional energy. As the universe expands, dark energy is transformed into all other kinds of energy. This naturally happens through a process of spontaneous symmetry breaking, like the Higgs effect that turns dark energy into mass.

The expression of positive dark energy is always counterbalanced by the negative potential energy of gravitational attraction so that the total energy of the universe can add up to zero, as is confirmed by observation. With unification of the fundamental forces, we understand that the attractive energy of the electromagnetic and nuclear forces that hold atoms, molecules and all macroscopic objects together, like a biological body, all arise as various aspects of gravity. In this way, the evolution of a biological body at the level of the expression of emotions can be traced back to the evolution of an expanding universe, which naturally happens as the cosmological constant transitions to a lower value and the observable universe expands in size. It is therefore correct to say that all of evolution is inherently linked to the expansion of the universe. In terms of the holographic principle, the universe is a holographic world. Everything observable in that world is a form of information that can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on an observer’s holographic screen that arises as its event horizon due to its accelerated motion. Those forms are projected like images from the observer’s screen to its central point of view and are animated in the flow of energy that arises from the observer’s own accelerated motion. In a very real sense, that holographic world is an illusion, just like the projected and animated images of a computer-generated virtual reality. The whole thing begins with the observer’s own accelerated motion, which can ultimately be traced back to the dark energy of the accelerated expansion of space.

Accelerated Expansion of Space

Accelerated Expansion of the Universe

Evolution is never about consciousness itself, but only about the way the animated and projected images of the illusion undergo change. Only the illusion changes and evolves. Consciousness is. Consciousness is the nature of being, which is our own being that we only become aware of with our own sense of being present, the sense of I-Am-ness. That sense of being a presence of consciousness that exists in the present moment at the center of our own world is the only true thing we can ever know about ourselves.

We only become aware of our own individual being at the level of the Self, which is the individual consciousness present at the center of its own world, when we awaken within the dream. This naturally happens in a state of surrender as the motion of the Self comes into alignment with the normal flow of things. We become aware of our own individual being even as we continue to perceive the illusion of our own world from the central point of view of that world. Individual only refers to our own individual point of view. When we awaken from the dream, which naturally happens in an ultimate state of free-fall as the motion of the Self comes to an end, the illusion of our own world disappears from existence from our own point of view and our individual being dissolves back into the nothingness of pure undivided being, which is referred to as No-self.

The experience of self and other is only possible in the illusion. At the ultimate level of truth, there is no self and there is no other because there is only undivided nothingness.

There is only an illusion that consciousness evolves due to the nature of emotionally driven personal self-identification. The coherently organized form of a person can appear to evolve even as that form self-replicates its form in a recognizable way. The expression of emotional energy that allows for that self-replication of form and that emotionally animates the form can also appear to evolve. Consciousness does not really evolve because consciousness cannot be reduced to any form that it perceives or to any expression of emotional energy it perceives, but consciousness can emotionally identify itself with an emotionally animated form it perceives. The coherently organized self-replicating form can evolve and the expression of emotions that allows for that self-replication of form and that animates the form can evolve. Consciousness only perceives that evolution, both at the level of perceiving the form and at the level of perceiving the emotional energy that animates the form. When the expression of emotions is self-limiting in nature, as occurs with the expression of fear and desire that underlies Darwinian evolution and the survival of the fittest body, consciousness feels emotionally self-limited to the form as it perceives the expression of emotions that animates the form, which leads consciousness to emotionally identify itself with the form. Once consciousness emotionally identifies itself with the form, it feels compelled to continue to defend the survival of that form through the expression of self-defensive emotions as though its existence depends on it. The expression of the self-defensive emotions of fear and desire is how the vicious cycle of the emotional self-identification of consciousness with form is perpetuated. This vicious cycle of emotional self-defense and emotional self-identification is how consciousness has become conditioned by Darwinian evolution and natural selection to emotionally defend the survival of the form of its body, which it feels compelled to do as though its existence depends upon it.

The emotional self-identification of consciousness with the form of its body is delusional in the sense of a false belief that consciousness believes about itself. Consciousness believes that it is its body, which is patently false, since the form of its body is something that it perceives in its own world. Consciousness believes a false belief about what it is, and is deceiving itself about what it is by believing that false belief about itself. This false belief that consciousness believes about itself is the nature of the personal body-based self-concept that is mentally constructed and emotionally energized in its own mind. When its personal self-concept is constructed in its mind, consciousness believes this false belief about itself and deceives itself into believing this false belief about what it is. It deceives itself into believing that it is the personal form of its body. The only thing that makes this false belief believable is the expression of self-defensive emotional energy that makes consciousness feel emotionally self-limited to the emotionally animated form of its body. The expression of that self-defensive emotional energy is how it has become conditioned by Darwinian evolution to believe this false belief about what it really is.

The only reason this is possible is because perception always occurs in a subject-object relation. The true nature of the subject is the individual consciousness of the observer present at its own individual point of view at the center of its own holographic world. The nature of its object of perception is the central form of its emotionally animated body that appears in its holographic world. That personal central form is always emotionally animated relative to all other forms that appear in its holographic world. When that emotional animation is self-defensive in nature, as occurs with the expression of fear and desire, the observer feels self-limited to the emotionally animated form of its body as it perceives those self-limiting emotional expressions and emotionally identifies itself with its body. The experience of self and other is only possible when the observer emotionally identifies itself with the personal form of its body that is emotionally related to other forms. That’s the nature of personal self-identification, which has nothing more to do with the true nature of consciousness than an emotional feeling that it perceives.

Only the emotional feelings consciousness perceives can undergo an evolution, not the true nature of what consciousness is. The beingness of consciousness does not evolve, since the ultimate nature of the existence of consciousness is timeless being, which is the ultimate nature of existence. All you can say about it is that it is. It does not change or evolve. The observer that perceives its own holographic world from its central point of view is always present in an eternal now, which is a reflection of that timeless being.

When the observer awakens within its dream, which naturally occurs in a state of surrender, the observer can only know itself to be a spiritual presence of consciousness at the center of its own world. When the observer awakens from its dream, which naturally occurs in an ultimate state of free fall, the observer can only know itself to be the undifferentiated consciousness of the void. The observer only knows this about itself after it returns to its state of awakening within the dream. During the ultimate state of awakening from the dream, there is no observer because the individual consciousness of the observer dissolves back into the undifferentiated consciousness of the void. In that ultimate state of dissolution, there is no experience of self and other. All is One.

One last important point. Concepts can only appear in the illusion of a holographic world. Like everything else that appears to exist in a holographic world, all concepts can be reduced to the information that’s encoded on a holographic screen that bounds that holographic world and the energy that flows through that holographic world. Just like the projected and animated images of a computer-generated virtual reality, all concepts are being displayed on a holographic screen as the observer at the central point of view of its own holographic world perceives them. This means that only the virtual reality of a holographic world can be conceptualized. Ultimate reality cannot be conceptualized except in terms of negation as absolute nothingness, which is why we call it the void. At the ultimate level of the timeless being of ultimate reality, there are no concepts. The idea of being a Self with individual being is a concept. Nisargadatta calls the idea of being a Self, with the sense I-Am, the first concept. That’s why it’s possible to say that when delusion is destroyed, which destroys all concepts including the self-concept, we can see that it never really existed. Ultimately only undivided nothingness exists.

This is how Nisargadatta describes the journey of awakening:

There is no journey to Supreme reality. One is undeceived only.

You mentioned in a previous email that enlightened beings see creation as a mistake, but that’s not exactly how they see things. Enlightened beings do not see creation as a mistake. Enlightened beings see ego as a mistake. Ego is the epitome of selfishness and self-defensiveness with its insane desire to express personally biased individual will and control everything with its delusional and futile efforts to deny death that arises from its fear of death and non-existence. Ego is the abomination, the violation of God’s will. If you can live in a state of surrender to God’s will and free from ego, then creation is not a mistake because it’s not personal. The person is just the central character in the virtual reality movie you’re watching from your own point of view. Stop emotionally identifying yourself with your character in the movie, which naturally stops happening in a state of surrender to God’s will, and none of it is personal. The virtual reality movie appears to come into existence as a spontaneous expression of creativity by God’s will. The true nature of what you are, your being, is nothing but consciousness, which at the ultimate level of existence is undivided, unlimited, timeless, and never ceases to be. That pure nothingness of being, which is the ground of being and the ultimate nature of reality, is what you really are. The virtual reality movie is unreal and has no being.

In the immortal words of the Bhagavad Gita:

The unreal has no being; the real never ceases to be.

I have a few last thoughts about your description of the evolution of consciousness in the sense of one’s ascension up the levels of chakras. Until the highest possible level is reached, I would describe this ascension as an awakening within the dream that can only result from one’s surrender to divine will. Surrender allows one’s own motion to come into alignment with the normal flow of things. When one comes into alignment with the expression of divine will, one naturally vibrates at a higher and purer frequency. This is easiest to understand in terms of the motion of the Self (Atman) relative to the motionless void (Brahman). The Self is the point of observing consciousness at the center of its own holographic world that undergoes accelerated motion, which gives rise to its event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon. The energy of that accelerated motion is given in terms of the observer’s acceleration, a, relative to the motionless void and the Unruh temperature as E=kT=ħa/2πc. In quantum theory, E=hf, and so it’s possible to express this energy in terms of the observer’s own frequency of vibration given in terms of its acceleration.

When one surrenders to divine will, one’s expression of energy comes into alignment with the normal flow of things. As I’ve previously mentioned, the normal flow of energy through one’s own holographic world can be understood in terms of the cosmological constant transitioning to a lower value, which results in the observer’s cosmic horizon increasing in radius due to a decrease in the rate at which the expansion of space appears to accelerate away from the observer’s central point of view. In terms of the holographic principle, this transition can only be understood as an expression of God’s will. There is no other possible explanation consistent with the holographic principle. When one surrenders to God’s will, one is vibrating at the highest possible level.

When one expresses one’s own personally biased individual will, one fails to surrender, which I would describe as the essence of the selfishness and self-defensiveness of the ego that only creates an obstacle or emotional disturbance in the normal flow of things. These expressions of ego interfere with the normal flow of things and create vibrations at a lower level. When one surrenders to divine will, one puts one’s trust in divine will to sort out what is for the best and accepts that expression of divine will as for the best every moment, no matter what appears to happen in that moment. In the sense of health and happiness, surrender is the only path that leads to the manifestation of the best of all possible worlds. That doesn’t mean that pain, illness and disease won’t occur even in a state of one’s surrender to divine will, but the path of the ego can only make things worse for oneself as one interferes with the normal flow of things.

In this sense, I would describe the process of one’s ascension up the levels of chakras to be the result of one’s surrender to divine will. One awakens within the dream as one does nothing at a personal level. In a state of surrender to divine will, one can only know oneself to be a presence of consciousness at the center of one’s own world. One no longer feels emotionally disconnected and self-limited to the central form of a person that appears in that world, but feels connected to everything that appears in that world. One becomes aware of one’s own being as that presence of consciousness, which one becomes aware of through one’s sense of being present as one observes that world.

One’s ultimate ascension is to awaken from the dream, which is a result of one’s willingness to do nothing at an absolute level. When one’s own motion relative to the motionless void comes to an end in an ultimate state of free fall, one’s own world disappears from existence from one’s own point of view. If one remains aware of one’s own being as one falls into the void and everything else disappears from existence, one’s individual being, present at the central point of view of its own world, dissolves back into the nothingness of pure undivided being like a drop of water that dissolves into the ocean. One’s perspective ascends to the highest possible level of awareness, which is the perspective of the darkness, deepness, emptiness and silence of the void. When one perceives one’s own world again, one not only perceives that world from a higher level of consciousness, like the projected and animated images of a movie that one perceives from one’s own point of view as those images are displayed on a movie screen, but one also perceives the animating and projecting motion of one’s own Self.

This perspective is perfectly described in the Tao Te Ching:

In the silence and the void
Standing alone and unchanging
Ever present and in motion
I do not know its name
Call it Tao

Tao in the world is like a river flowing home to the sea

Returning is the motion of the Tao

It returns to nothingness
It leads all things back to the great oneness

Ever desireless, one can see the mystery
Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations
These two spring from the same source
This appears as darkness
Darkness within darkness
The gate to all mystery

Nisargadatta describes essentially the same thing:

To be born means to create a world around yourself as the center.
You are that point of consciousness.
By your movement the world is ever created.
Stop moving and there will be no world.

The totality of all mental projections is the Great Illusion.
When I look beyond the mind I see the witness.
Beyond the witness is infinite emptiness and silence.

For the path of return naughting oneself is necessary.
My stand I take where nothing is.
To the mind it is all darkness and silence.
It is deep and dark, mystery beyond mystery.
It is, while all else merely happens.
It is like a bottomless well, whatever falls into it disappears.

Falling into the void in an ultimate state of free fall is the nature of passing through the gateless gate as described by Mu-mon:

The great path has no gates
Thousands of roads enter it
When one passes through this gateless gate
One walks the universe alone

Awakening is never really about doing something. You awaken within the dream when you do nothing at a personal level. You awaken from the dream when you do nothing at an absolute level. It’s your own desire to do things that’s your obstacle to awakening. That’s why awakening can only occur in a state of surrender to divine will.

Surrender is not something that you can do. Surrender is what happens when you’ve done everything that you can do and you’ve failed to awaken. In that failure you feel helpless, hopeless and in despair. In that despair you give up trying to do things. Only when you feel that despair and give up all your efforts to do things can you surrender.

You surrender when you give up your desire to control things. You have to give up your self-defensive, personally biased desire to be in control. You have to stop expressing fear and desire in your efforts to pursue pleasure and avoid pain, which only defends the survival of your body. You have to stop defending yourself and stop expressing your own personally biased individual will. Ultimately, you’ll come to see that you’re only defending the survival of a personal illusion of what you really are, which is the illusion of being a personal form that appears in the world you perceive. The timeless existence of the true nature of what you really are, which is nothing but consciousness, needs no defense, and so it’s possible to say that surrender follows naturally from seeing what is.

When you surrender, you just watch as you allow events to play out in the normal way. You just watch from your own point of view as events play out in the normal way, like the projected and animated images of a movie you’re watching that’s being displayed on a movie screen. In a state of surrender, you’re no longer directing the events of the movie. When you surrender, your attention is focused only on the now of the present moment. You enter into a state of present moment awareness. In terms of awakening, the whole point of surrendering and bringing yourself to this state of present moment awareness is so you can do nothing at a personal level. You have to do nothing so you can turn your attention away from the events of the world you perceive, look within, and bring yourself into focus as you focus your attention on your own sense of being present. You have to become aware of your own beingness and presence. You have to know yourself to be a presence of consciousness at the center of the world you perceive that exists now, in the present moment. That’s where you have to stabilize the focus of your attention before you can awaken. You have to center yourself, bring yourself into focus and be with yourself in the present moment, which is the eternal now of your timeless being.

As soon as you do something, you develop an identity and self-image as a person who does things. Whatever you do, that’s your identity. That’s how you emotionally identify yourself with the emotionally animated form of a person who does things. The very act of doing things and being emotionally invested in the outcome of those actions is how you identify yourself with a personal form and develop a personal self-concept. Those personal actions are self-defensive in nature as they defend the survival of that personal self-concept. It really doesn’t matter what you do. Conceptualizing things and writing about your concepts and explanations is as self-defensive and self-image constructing as anything else you can do. You develop a personal self-image as a conceptualizer of things. That’s the inevitable result of doing things. As soon as you do something, you become a person who does things. That’s the nature of self-identification. When you do something, you become somebody who does things. If you want to be nobody, you have to become willing to do nothing, which means you have to want nothing.

This is how Nisargadatta describes being nobody:

Do nothing. There is nothing to do. Just be.
To be, you must be nobody.
You make yourself mortal by taking yourself to be a body.
That which is alive in you is immortal.

Chuang Tzu says essentially the same thing:

The man of Tao remains unknown.
Perfect virtue produces nothing.
No-self is true self
And the greatest man is nobody

Hi J

Thank you so much for your tasty email yesterday! These days I’m reading many of your articles —all of them very interesting— to immerse myself deeply in your inspiring holographic and non-dualistic proposal, with a view to soon writing the famous Addendum 9: Holographic evolution in my never-ending article Beyond Darwin.

A couple of clarifications:

—Regarding the expression “evolution of consciousness”, in the email I sent you on February 5, I told you: “You say in your email that “Consciousness does not evolve”. I fully agree with you that consciousness itself does not evolve at all, but that statement must be completed by saying that the actualization of that consciousness in the manifested world does evolve depending on the complexity of the entities or organisms with which it is successively identifying.”

—In your email yesterday, you say: “You mentioned in a previous email that enlightened beings see creation as a mistake, but that’s not exactly how they see things.” Exactly what I said in the email of February 11 was: “There are some non-dualist teachers —or, rather, idealistic monists— who have a very negative view of the manifested universe, claim that the world of finitude is a pure error resulting from ignorance, and their claim is to escape from this world of the finite forms to return to the joyful original plenitude. As I understand it, on the contrary, the universal manifestation, far from being a lamentable error, is nothing less than the fascinating progressive unfolding of the infinite potentiality of the non-dual foundation. It is the creative, dazzling and inexhaustible artifice of the unmanifested Emptiness to contemplate itself in infinite ways!”.

I feel in great syntony with the Nisargadatta texts that you quote in your emails and in your articles. I invite you to take a look at the third part —pages 113-139— of my Non-Dual Evolution work that I am attaching to you and that you can also find at the head of my blog: http://byebyedarwin.blogspot.com/p/english-version_01.html.

Hi Jo

You’re absolutely right to shoot down my criticisms. In fact, we’re in total agreement about what is really going on here. Consciousness does not evolve. The personal self-identification of consciousness with the form of a person evolves. I prefer to call the end result of that evolution the destruction of delusion, but that’s just a matter of semantics. The only reason I’m making this point so strongly is because there’s a great deal of misinformation out there about what consciousness really is, and what the path to awakening actually entails. Once you tell people that the only path to awakening is to destroy your own delusional belief that you are a person, they either reject that idea out of hand, or they’re just not interested in the idea of awakening anymore. You’re only fooling yourself into thinking that you can awaken without a very painful self-destructive process of destroying delusion. As all enlightened beings point out: Truth is what remains when delusion is destroyed. That’s the only point I’m trying to make.

Awakening is only about destroying delusion. You suffer from the delusional belief you have about yourself that you are a person. In reality, you are nothing but consciousness, but you’ve emotionally identified yourself with the emotionally animated form of a person that appears in the world you perceive. The person is no more real than the image of a central character that’s being displayed on a movie screen in a virtual reality movie that you’re watching from your own point of view. The only way you awaken is by destroying this false belief that you believe about yourself that you are a person that appears in the virtual reality movie that you’re watching. The only thing that makes that false belief believable is the expression of emotional energy inherent in the mental construction of the belief that makes you feel emotionally self-limited to the emotionally animated form of the person. You destroy delusion when you stop expressing that personally biased and self-limiting emotional energy. You only stop expressing that personally self-limited emotional energy when you surrender to divine will and do nothing at a personal level, which is to awaken within the dream, or when you do nothing at an absolute level, and awaken from the dream. You have to become willing to do nothing to destroy delusion.

If I can quote Jed McKenna again:

Battling past the ego to get to the truth has been at the heart of countless spiritual teachings. Ego-death as a means to no-self is what this journey is all about. Anyone headed for truth is going to get there over ego’s dead body or not at all.

Spiritual enlightenment is self-defeating. It is a battle we wage upon ourselves. Truth is a uniquely challenging pursuit because the very thing that wants it is the only thing in the way of it. It’s a battle we must die to win. The great enemy is the very self that wages the war. When self is destroyed, who wins?

The idea of the individual self, valid and separate, unravels very quickly under any serious scrutiny. All beliefs do. What takes time and effort is to put the idea of self under such scrutiny and make sense of what’s left after the belief is gone.

All beliefs, all concepts, all thoughts, they’re all false. If you’re going for the truth, you’re not taking any of them with you. Nothing that says two, not one, survives.

Self is an untruth.

From the unawakened side, the gate blocking one from enlightenment is enormous and impassable. Delusion fills one’s entire field of view because it resides prior to perception. Once delusion has been destroyed, we can see it never really existed.

Spiritual awakening is about discovering what’s true. Anything that’s not about getting to the truth must be discarded. Truth isn’t about knowing things. It’s about unknowing. It’s not about becoming true, it’s about unbecoming false so that all that’s left is truth.

The process of awakening looks like it’s about destroying ego, but that’s not really accurate. You never completely rid yourself of ego-the false self-as long as you’re alive, and it’s not important that you do. What matters is the emotional tethers that anchor us to the dreamstate; that hold us in place and make us feel that we’re a part of something real. We send out energetic tendrils from the nexus of ego like roots to attach ourselves to the dreamstate, and to detach from it we must sever them. The energy of an emotion is our life force, and the amount of life force determines the power of the emotion. Withdraw energy from an emotion and what’s left? A sterile thought. An empty husk. In this sense, freeing ourselves from attachment is indeed the process of awakening, but such attachments aren’t what we have, they’re what we are.

All attachments to the dreamstate are made of energy. That energy is called emotion. All emotions, positive and negative, are attachments. Humans are emotion-based creatures and all emotions derive their energy from one core emotion; fear. Fear cannot be confronted or slain because it is fear of nothing, of no-self. The desire to slay fear is itself a fear-based emotion. Fear can only be surrendered to; the thing feared, entered.

It is the emotional energy of fear that erects and maintains the egoic shell. We are madly, desperately, insanely afraid of the truth, and it is that fear that walls us off from our unbounded nature.

Fear of what? Fear of no-self. The nameless, faceless dread of non-being. Not just fear of death, which anyone can deny or explain away, but fear of nothingness, which no fairytale can fix.

All belief systems are just the stories we create in order to deal with the void. Ego abhors a vacuum, so everybody’s scrambling to create the illusion of something where there’s nothing. Belief systems are simply the devices we use to explain away the unthinkable horror of no-self.

We erect ego to compensate for the lack of direct self-knowledge. There is no true self to perceive, there is only false self and no-self. One looks for true self and finds nothing. It’s the dread of that nothingness that keeps one’s attention outwardly fixed.

The enlightened view life as a dream, so how could they possibly differentiate between right and wrong or good and evil? How can one turn of events be better or worse than another? Of what real importance is anything in a dream? You wake up and the dream is gone as if it never was. All the characters and events that seemed so real have simply vanished. The enlightened may walk and talk in the dream world, but they don’t mistake the dream for reality. Members of movie audiences don’t leap out of their seats to save characters in the film. If they did, they would be hauled off to the nearest mental health facility and treated for a delusional disorder.

The wall separating the awakened and unawakened states is a force field empowered by the emotional energy of fear. Only ego death defeats the barrier because the barrier is ego itself.

The deepest truth of any person is no-person. You don’t wake up by perfecting your dream character; you wake up by breaking free of it. There’s no truth to the ego so no degree of mastery over it results in anything true. Putting attention on the ego merely reinforces it.

If you want to be more true, then the way to do that is by becoming less false. Go inside yourself with the spotlight of discrimination and illuminate it. Illumination destroys it. Lies disappear when you really look at them because they never had real substance, they were only imagined.

You, the reader, are at the exact center of the universe, your universe. It’s all yours, it’s all about you, and you are all alone in it. Anything that tells you otherwise is a belief, and no belief is true.

Truth is beyond opposites. Duality is a dream. The truth contains no element of the false and the false contains no truth. There is only truth and illusion, and within illusion there is only fear and denial. Fear of truth is the foundation upon which Maya’s Palace of Delusion is erected. She has no power but that we give her. Denial of fear is the motivation underlying all activities in which humans engage. This is Vanity in the biblical sense: I have seen all the works that are done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a chasing after wind.

The only sin is ignorance. Ignorance of what? It’s not the kind where you don’t know something. It’s the kind where you do know something that’s not true. The false self is ignorance. Ego. The personality. Everything you think of as you.

Ignorance isn’t an aspect of self; it’s the essence of self. It’s not nothing where there should be something, it’s the delicate weaving of something from nothing. That nothingness woven into somethingness is what you call reality. The part you call you is ego.

Success in realizing one’s true nature is absolutely assured because it’s one’s true nature. The greatest wonder isn’t that you’ll make it back, it’s that you made it away. Struggling to achieve truth is as preposterous as struggling to achieve death. Neither death nor gravity, nor tomorrow’s sunrise is as certain as the fact that everyone will end up fully “enlightened”, regardless of the “path” they take.

Everything is in a constant process of returning to its true state. To really be ‘off the path’ would mean to be outside of consciousness. There is no such place.

Truth is, non-truth isn’t. The false is purely an apparition; it exists only in the eye of the beholder. There is no true self and the false self is irrelevant, a character in a dream.

There’s nothing wrong with being a dream character, unless it’s your goal to wake up, in which case the dream character must be ruthlessly annihilated. If your desire is to become the best dang person you can be, then rejoice, you’re in the right place, the dream state, the dualistic universe. If your interest is to cut the crap and figure out what is true then you’re in the wrong place and you’ve got a very messy fight ahead and there’s no point in pretending otherwise.

The end of illusion is the end of you.

The you that you think of as you is not you. The you that thinks of you as you is not you. It’s just the character the underlying truth of you is dreaming into brief existence. Enlightenment isn’t in the character; it’s in the underlying truth.

Truth doesn’t need to be sought because it isn’t lost. It’s not at the end of some path waiting to be discovered. It’s not the result of practice or growth or learning. Truth is everywhere at all times, never absent, never distant. Truth isn’t the tricky thing, it’s the simplest thing there is. Truth is that which cannot be simplified further.

The fact is that no amount or combination of knowledge can bring about truth realization. It’s not an emotion or a state of consciousness.

It is not possible to knowledgeably choose or want spiritual enlightenment. To desire it is to misunderstand it. Ego cannot desire egolessness. One does not undergo the process of awakening out of love for the true but out of hatred for the false; a hatred so intense that it burns everything and spares nothing.

To know the lie is to hate it; to see it is to slay it.

We need the boundaries ego provides. They’re a necessary part of life in the amusement park. Self is the complex, shifting set of dimensions that give us shape and form and which distinguish us from other shapes and forms. The amusement park isn’t ‘come as you are’, it’s a costume party. Who you come as doesn’t matter, only that you come as someone.

Enlightenment is about truth. It’s not about becoming a better or happier person. It’s not about personal growth or spiritual evolution. There is no higher stakes game in this world or any other, in this dimension or any other. The price of truth is everything, but no one knows what everything means until they’re paying it. In the simplest terms, enlightenment is impersonal, whereas what is commonly peddled as enlightenment is personal in the extreme.

People completely in character. No inkling that things may be other than they seem. Still shackled in Plato’s cave. The degree to which one is unaware of one’s fraudulent nature might be considered the degree to which one is the grip of Maya, delusion, the dreamstate. Increased awakeness would naturally translate into greater dissatisfaction with fraudulence, falseness and delusion, and a corresponding desire to know what is real. Extend the line forward and it results in a complete break with ego and an awakening into one’s true nature.

Before enlightenment I believed my ego was me, then enlightenment comes along and no more ego, only the underlying reality. Now it’s after enlightenment and this ego might be slightly uncomfortable or ill-fitting at times, but it’s all I’ve got. The idea that your ego is destroyed in the process of becoming enlightened is roughly correct, but it’s not complete. Before enlightenment, you’re a human being in the world, just like everyone you see. During enlightenment you realize the human being you thought you were is just a character in a play, and that the world you thought you were in is just a stage, so you go through a process of radical deconstruction of your character to see what’s left when it’s gone. The result isn’t enlightened-self or true-self, it’s no-self. When it’s all over it’s time to be a human being in the world again, and that means slipping back into costume and getting back on stage. Now you’re actually in the audience, watching the drama. I could never mistake the play for reality again, or my character for my true state. Happily, I never know what my character is going to do or say until he does it or says it, so the whole thing stays interesting.

Even now it takes a conscious effort to maintain my false self, my dream character, to animate it, to keep it running. And this trajectory I’m on will take me as close to nonexistence as anyone can get and still have a body. In other words, I will continue to channel progressively less and less energy into my dreamstate being, my teaching will reduce down to its most refined and least tolerant form, my interest will withdraw from the world, and I will become as minimal as a person can be.

No one can say ‘I am enlightened’ because there is no ‘I’ to it. There is no such thing as an enlightened person. My personality, my ego, what appears to be me, is just an afterimage-a physical apparition based on residual energy patterns.

Ego doesn’t need to be killed because it was never really alive. You don’t have to destroy your false self because it’s not real, which is really the whole point. It’s just a character we play. What needs to be killed is that part of us that identifies with the character. Once that’s done-really done, and it can take years-then you can wear the costume and play the character as it suits you, in the character but not of the character.

There is no such thing as objective reality. Nothing can be shown to exist.

Nothing but the subjective I am is true.

Understanding consensual reality as a dreamstate is unbreakable. Life is but a dream. Reality has no basis in reality.

The difference between us isn’t that I’m enlightened and you’re not. The difference between us is that I know it and you don’t. I possess selfless awareness and you don’t.

This isn’t about personal awareness or self-exploration. It’s not about feelings or insights. It’s not about personal or spiritual evolution. This is about what you know for sure, about what you are sure you know is true, about what ‘you are’ that is true. With this process you tear away layer after layer of untruth masquerading as truth. It burns bridges that can never be rebuilt, and the only real reason to do it is because you can no longer stand not to.

In the world but not of the world means that you’re playing a role on the stage, but you don’t confuse your role with yourself or the stage with reality. It means you know that you’re playing a character. It’s like lucid dreaming. You achieve normal waking consciousness within the dream so that you’re in the dream but not of the dream. There’s no benefit to understanding it. It’s something you’re familiar with because it’s your reality or you’re not because it isn’t.

Enlightenment is comprehensive. It’s an entirely different paradigm.

My reality is not your reality. I view dualistic reality as a dream.

To me you’re a minor character in my dramatic dreamscape. A semi-coherent energetic pattern making a brief appearance on the stage of my awareness.

You’re not struggling to climb from hell into heaven, you’re just having an in-the-body experience. It’s not evil, it’s just life, and when it’s over, you die, easy as falling off a log.

The worms won’t care how your epitaph reads and the truth of you will outlive time itself.

Spiritual enlightenment is the state in which the self is free of all delusion, including self itself. The process of becoming enlightened is a deliberate act of self-annihilation. It is the false self that does the killing and the false self that dies; a suicide in all but the physical sense. Because there is no true self to fill the vacancy created by the passing of the false self, no self remains.

Now she’s in freefall. At the precise moment of impact, the planet will disappear, and nothing will take its place. Her freefall won’t end, but it will no longer feel like falling because there will no longer be anything to reference it against. This is where dual awareness ends. From then on she will live in boundless awareness, never again able to differentiate between self and non-self. Abiding non-dual awareness.

Truth is one, is non-dual, is infinite, is one-without-other. Truth is dissolution, no-self, unity. There’s nothing to say about it, nothing to feel about it, nothing to know about it. You are true or you’re a lie, as in ego-bound, as in dual, as in asleep.

The truth of the situation is that eventually, there’s nothing. Infinity. Eternity. The void.

Like a child flicking a switch that turns the world off like a light. What can you say when the thing that ends isn’t within a context, but context itself?

There is the place where all the paradoxes disappear and where no questions remain, but there’s no point trying to describe this place.

That’s where I am now. Empty space is my reality. The void. No-self. I abide in non-dual, non-relative awareness.

Come see for yourself.

Nisargadatta says essentially the same thing:

Be aware of being conscious and seek the source of consciousness.

In pure being consciousness arises.
In consciousness the world appears and disappears.
Consciousness is on contact, a reflection against a surface, a state of duality.
The center is a point of void and the witness a point of pure awareness; they know themselves to be as nothing.
But the void is full to the brim.
It is the eternal potential as consciousness is the eternal actual.

The Supreme reality is the void beyond being and non-being, beyond consciousness.

The Supreme state is the very center of consciousness and yet beyond consciousness.

Nothing perceivable is real. Only the onlooker is real, call him Self or Atman. That which makes you think that you are a human is not human. It is a dimensionless point of consciousness.

All you can say about yourself is I Am.

Even the sense I Am is not continuous, though it is a useful pointer; it shows where to seek, but not what to seek.

At the root of my being is pure awareness, a speck of intense light. This speck, by its nature, radiates and creates pictures in space and events in time.

To the mind the light of consciousness appears as darkness. It can be known only through its reflections.

The highest state of awareness is to be the point of light tracing the world.

Beyond the highest state of awareness is to be the source of light.

All appearance and disappearance presupposes a change against a changeless background.

There must be a source from which all flows, a foundation on which all stands.

Consciousness itself is the source of everything.

The person is never the subject. You can see a person, but you are not the person. You are always the Supreme, which appears at a given point of time and space as the witness, a bridge between the pure awareness of the Supreme and the manifold consciousness of the person.

The objects in the world are many, but the eye that sees them is one. The higher always appears as one to the lower and the lower as many to the higher.

You see yourself in the world, while I see the world in myself. To you, you get born and die, while to me, the world appears and disappears. It is your imagination that misleads you. There is a deep contradiction in your attitude which you do not see.

The source of consciousness cannot be an object in consciousness. To know the source is to be the source. When you realize that you are not the person, but the pure and calm witness, and that fearless awareness is your very being, you are the being.

Give attention to the witness to break the spell of the known, the illusion that only the perceivable world is real.

To become free your attention must be drawn to the witness.

I see only consciousness, and know everything to be but consciousness, as you know the pictures on the cinema screen to be but light.

It is enough to shift attention from the screen onto oneself to break the spell.

Once you realize that there is nothing in this world which you can call your own, you look at it from the outside as you look at a play on the stage or a picture on the screen.

To know the picture as the play of light on the screen gives freedom from the idea that the picture is real. In reality I only look. Whatever is done is done on the stage.

Joy and sorrow, life and death, they are real to the man in bondage.

To me they are all in the show, as unreal as the show itself.

What you call survival is but the survival of a dream.

Death is preferable to it. There is a chance of waking up.

As life before death is but imagination, so is life after death. The dream continues.

To the Self the world is but a passing show. The world just sprouts into being out of nothing and returns to nothing. As long as the Self is merely aware, there is no problem.

You can stop it any moment by switching off attention.

You make it possible by giving it attention.

My life is a succession of events just like yours. Only I Am detached and see the passing show as a passing show, while you stick to things and move along with them.

There is no such thing as an expression of reality. Neither action nor feeling nor thought express reality. I know that life itself is only a make-believe.

I just watch events happening, knowing them to be unreal.

The witness is both real and unreal, the last remnant of illusion, the first touch of the real. The moment you say I Am, the entire universe comes into being.

Your world is created with the emergence of the I Am idea. In your world everything has a beginning and an end. Timeless being is entirely in the now.

Everything is a play of ideas. In the state free from ideation nothing is perceived. The root idea is I Am. It shatters the state of pure consciousness and is followed by the innumerable sensations and perceptions, feelings and ideas which in their totality constitute God’s world. The I Am remains as the witness, but it is by the will of God that everything happens.

All that is, lives and moves and has its being in consciousness.
I Am in and beyond that consciousness.
I Am in it as the witness.
I Am beyond it as Being.

We have enclosed ourselves in a cloud of personal desires and fears, images and thoughts, ideas and concepts.

The totality of all mental projections is the Great Illusion.
When I look beyond the mind I see the witness.
Beyond the witness is infinite emptiness and silence.

You can only start from where you are. You are here and now. You cannot get out of here and now. You are aware of thinking, feeling, doing. You are not aware of your being. You can only be aware of your being here and now.

Wherever you go, at all times, you carry with you the sense of being present and aware, here and now. It means that you are independent of space and time. Space and time are in you, not you in them. It is only your self-identification with the body, limited in space and time, that gives you a sense of limitation. In reality, you are limitless.

Struggle to find out what you are in reality. To know what you are you must first investigate and know what you are not. Discover all that you are not: body, feelings, thoughts, time, space, this or that. Nothing, concrete or abstract, which you perceive can be you. The very act of perceiving shows that you are not what you perceive. The clearer you understand that on the level of mind you can be described in negative terms only the quicker will you come to the end of your search and realize that you are the limitless being.

All limited existence is imaginary.
Even space and time are imaginary.
Pure being, filling all and beyond all, is not limited.
All limitation is imaginary.
Only the unlimited is real.

As long as you are engrossed in the world, you cannot know yourself. To know yourself, turn your attention away from the world and turn within.

Turn within. I Am you know. Be with it all the time, until you revert to it spontaneously. There is no simpler and easier way.

Know yourself as you are. Stay with the sense I Am.

Everyone sees the world through the idea one has of oneself. As you think your Self to be, so you think your world to be. If you imagine your Self as separate from the world, the world will appear as separate from you and you will experience desire and fear. Your own creative power projects on it a picture and all your questions refer to the picture.

Your questions are about a non-existing person. Realize that whatever you think yourself to be is just a stream of events; that whatever happens, comes and goes, is not real; that you alone are, the changeless among the changeful. Separate the observed from the observer and abandon false identifications. Be a fully awakened witness of the field of consciousness.

Whatever you perceive is not you. It is there in the field of consciousness, but you are not the field and its contents.

You can spend an eternity looking elsewhere for truth, all in vain. You must begin in yourself, with yourself. Realize that your world is only a reflection of yourself. All you need is to stop searching outside what can only be found within.

To realize that is the end of all seeking. You come to it when you see all you think yourself to be as mere imagination and stand aloof in pure awareness. It is not difficult but detachment is needed. It is the clinging to the false that makes the truth so difficult to see. Discard what is not your own until nothing is left which you can disown. You will find that what is left is nothing.

In reality nothing happens. Nothing happens to space itself. In pure consciousness nothing ever happens. Onto the screen of the mind destiny forever projects its pictures, and thus illusion constantly renews itself. The pictures come and go as light intercepted by ignorance. See the light and disregard the pictures.

Dive deep into yourself and find the source from where all meaning flows. It is not the superficial mind that can give meaning. You are not what you think yourself to be. You cannot think yourself to be what you have not experienced. You are the perceiving point, the nondimensional source of all dimensions, which is as nothing and yet the source of everything. You can know what you are not, but you cannot know your real being. You can only be what you are.

In reality there is only the source, dark in itself, but making everything shine with the light of consciousness.

Unperceived, it causes perception. Being nothing it gives birth to all being.

It is the immovable background of motion.

The Supreme state neither comes nor goes. It is. It is a timeless state, ever present.

In the timeless state there is no Self, no I Am, no witness.

Awareness is beyond all.
Awareness is primordial; it is the original state.
Awareness is undivided, aware of itself.

What begins and ends is mere appearance. The world can be said to appear but not to be. It is your memory that makes you think that the world continues. Memory creates the illusion of continuity. I see the world as it is, a momentary appearance in consciousness.

From my point of view everything happens by itself, quite spontaneously.

I do nothing. I just see them happen.

If you seek reality you must set yourself free of all patterns of thinking and feeling. Even the idea of being human should be discarded. Abandon all self-identifications, abandon all self-concern, abandon every desire. Stop thinking of achievement of any kind. You are complete here and now. You need absolutely nothing.

Nothing stands in the way of your liberation here and now except for your being more interested in other things. You must see through them as mere mental errors.

As long as you are interested in your present way of living, you will shirk from the final leap into the unknown.

Moments when one feels empty and estranged are desirable moments, for it means the soul has cast its moorings and is sailing for distant places.

The search for reality is the most dangerous of all undertakings for it will destroy the world in which you live.

To be born means to create a world around yourself as the center.
You are that point of consciousness.
By your movement the world is ever created.
Stop moving and there will be no world.

At the root of all creation lies desire.
The projecting power is imagination prompted by desire.
Desire and imagination foster and reinforce each other.

Desire for embodied existence is the root-cause of trouble.

As long as there is the sense of identity with the body, frustration is inevitable. It is because of your illusion that you are the doer.

As long as you have the idea of influencing events, liberation is not for you. The very notion of doership, of being a cause, is bondage.

There is no such thing as free will. Will is bondage. You identify yourself with your desires and become their slave.

You are the source of reality, a dimensionless center of perception that imparts reality to whatever it perceives, a pure witness that watches what is going on and remains unaffected. It is only imagination and self-identification with the imagined that encloses and converts the inner watcher into a person. The person is merely the result of a misunderstanding. In reality there is no such thing. Feelings, thoughts and actions race before the watcher in endless succession. In reality there is no person, only the watcher identifying itself.

To imagine that you are in control is the aberration of the body-mind. There is a universal power that is in control. The illusion of personal control is in the mind only. Stand without desire and fear, relinquishing all control. This is the shortest way to reality.

Some unknown power acts and you imagine that you are acting. You are merely watching what happens.

You must begin by being the dispassionate observer.

Then only will you realize your full being.

Only in complete self-negation is there a chance to discover our real being.

The urge must come from within as a wave of detachment.

The way to truth lies through the destruction of the false. To destroy the false you must question your most inveterate beliefs.

Of these the idea that you are the body is the worst.

Destroy the wall that separates; the I-am-the-body idea.

Investigate your world, apply your mind to it, examine it critically.
Scrutinize every idea about it.
Everything must be scrutinized and the unnecessary ruthlessly destroyed.
There cannot be too much destruction.
For in reality nothing is of value.

Externalization is the first step in liberation. Step away and look. Separate yourself and watch. The physical events will go on happening, but in themselves they have no importance.

Seeing that you are not the person you take yourself to be, step out and look from the outside.

It is disinterestedness that liberates. If you lose interest, you break the emotional link that perpetuates the bondage.

The unreal appears to be real only because you believe in it. You impart reality to it by taking it to be real. Doubt it and it ceases.

You must realize yourself as the silent witness of all that happens. Your consciousness raised to a higher dimension, from which you see everything much clearer.

Awareness comes as if from a higher dimension.

The witness that stands aloof is the watchtower of the real, the point at which awareness, inherent in the unmanifested, contacts the manifested.

Find the immutable center where all movement takes birth. Be the axis at the center, not whirling at the periphery. Nothing stops you except fear. You are afraid of impersonal being.

If you desire nothing, then you are as good as dead, or you are the Supreme.

Self-identifications are patently false and the cause of bondage.

Your attachment is your bondage.

You create bondage when you desire and fear and identify yourself with your feelings.
You identify yourself with your desires and become their slave.
Your bonds are self-created as chains of attachment.

Cut the knot of self-identification.

There is trouble only when you cling to something. It is your desire to hold onto it that creates the problem. Let go. When you hold onto nothing, no trouble arises.

Freedom means letting go. Spiritual maturity lies in the readiness to let go of everything.

Liberation is never of the person, it is always from the person.

Death gives freedom. To be free in the world you must die to the world.

I Am dead already. Physical death will make no difference. I Am timeless being.

One becomes self-conscious only when caught in the conflict between pleasure and pain, which demands choice and decision. The personal self by its very nature is constantly pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. The ending of this pattern is the ending of the self. The ending of the self with its desires and fears enables you to return to your real nature.

As long as you are locked up with your mind and ego, you cannot go further. Were you really at war with your ego, you would question its reality. You don’t question because you are not really interested. You are moved by the pleasure-pain principle, fear and desire, which is your ego. You are going along with your ego, not fighting against it. You are not even aware how totally swayed you are by personal considerations. Be in revolt against your ego, for the ego narrows and distorts. It is the worst of all tyrants. It dominates you completely.

As long as you take yourself to be a person, a body and a mind, separate from the stream of life, having a will of its own, pursuing its own aims, you are living merely on the surface and whatever you do will be short-lived and of little value, mere straw to feed the flames of vanity.

Ego is in resistance until the very end.

In the end you get fed up with the waste of time and energy.

When you refuse to play the game, you are out of it.

As long as you believe that only the perceivable world is real you remain its slave.

The world is but a mistaken view of reality, unreal to its core. The world is but a show, glittering and empty. It is there as long as I want to see it and take part in it. When I cease caring, it dissolves. It has no cause and serves no purpose. It appears exactly as it looks, but there is no depth in it nor meaning.

The realized man is beyond life and death. Life and death appears to him but a way of expressing movement in the immovable, change in the changeless. He has died before his death and he saw that there was nothing to be afraid of. The moment you know your real being you are afraid of nothing.

Do nothing. There is nothing to do. Just be.
To be, you must be nobody.
You make yourself mortal by taking yourself to be a body.
That which is alive in you is immortal.

For the path of return naughting oneself is necessary.
My stand I take where nothing is.
To the mind it is all darkness and silence.
It is deep and dark, mystery beyond mystery.
It is, while all else merely happens.
It is like a bottomless well, whatever falls into it disappears.

Reality is essentially alone.
To know that nothing is, is true knowledge.

First we must know ourselves as witnesses only, dimensionless and timeless centers of observation, and then realize that immense ocean of pure awareness.

On the surface of the ocean of consciousness, names and forms are transitory waves.

Only consciousness has real being, not its transformations.

As long as you are enmeshed in the tribulations of a particular personality, you can see nothing beyond it. Ultimately you will come to see that you are neither the particular nor the universal. You are beyond both.

The witness-consciousness is the reflection of the real in the mind. The real is beyond.

The witness is the door through which you pass beyond.

The door that locks you in is also the door that lets you out. I Am is the door. Stay with it until it opens. It is always open, but you are not at it.

Between desires and freedom from all desires is an abyss which must be crossed.

Cross the door and go beyond.

Go back to that state of pure being, the I Am in its purity before it became contaminated with false self-identifications. Abandon them all. Focus the mind on pure being. In it all disappears: myself, the life I live, the world around me. Only peace and unfathomable silence remains.

The experience of the inner void is an explosion into reality.

Realization is sudden and irreversible. You rotate into a new dimension.

Realization is in discovering the source and abiding there.

By itself nothing has existence.

Your true home is in nothingness.

The timeless and spaceless reality is undifferentiated, the infinite potentiality, the source. It cannot be perceived, but can be experienced as ever witnessing the witness, perceiving the perceiver, the origin and end of all manifestation, the root of time and space.

There is no journey to Supreme reality. One is undeceived only.

You see everything as it is. The world of illusions is left behind.

Osho also describes the ultimate state of awakening from the dream:

We call Buddha the awakened one. This awakening is really the cessation of inner dreaming. When there is no dreaming you become pure space. This non-dreaming consciousness is what is known as enlightenment.

If you go on inquiring ‘Who am I?’ you are bound to come to the conclusion that you are not. This is an inquiry to dissolve. There is no answer. Only the question will dissolve. There will be no one to ask ‘Who am I?’ And then you know.

When the ‘I’ is not, the real ‘I’ opens. When the ego is not, you are for the first time encountering your being. That being is void.

You fall into an abyss, and the abyss is bottomless: you go on falling. That is why Buddha has called this nothingness emptiness. There is no end to it. Once you know it, you also have become endless. At this point Being is revealed: then you know who you are, what is your real being, what is your authentic existence.

The inner emptiness itself is the mystery.
When the inner space is there, you are not.
When you dissolve, the inner emptiness is there.
When you are not, the mystery will be revealed.
You will not be a witness to the mystery, you will be the mystery.

Download the PDF documents:

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the-underlying-truth-of-you-and-the-story-of-realityDownload

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Scientific References

Tom Banks and Willy Fischler (2018): Why the Cosmological Constant is a Boundary Condition. arXiv:1811.00130

Raphael Bousso (2002): The Holographic Principle. arXiv:hep-th/0203101

Amanda Gefter (2014): Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn (Random House)

Amanda Gefter (2012): Cosmic Solipsism. FQXi Essay

Brian Greene (2000): The Elegant Universe (Vintage Books)

Gerard ‘t Hooft (2000): The Holographic Principle. arXiv:hep-th/0003004

Ted Jacobson (1995): Thermodynamics of Space-time. arXiv:gr-qc/9504004

J Madore (1999): Non-commutative Geometry for Pedestrians. arXiv:gr-qc/9906059

Juan Maldacena (1997): The Large N Limit of Superconformal Field Theories and Supergravity. arXiv:hep-th/9711200

Roger Penrose (2005): The Road to Reality (Alfred A Knopf)

Lee Smolin (2001): Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (Basic Books)

Leonard Susskind (2008): The Black Hole War (Little, Brown and Company)

Leonard Susskind (1994): The World as a Hologram. arXiv:hep-th/9409089

A. Zee (2003): Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell (Princeton University Press)

Anton Zeilinger (1999): Experiment and the Foundations of Quantum Physics. Rev. Mod. Phys. 71, S288.

Additional References

The Bhagavad-Gita (1909): Edwin Arnold trans. (Harvard Classics)

Noam Chomsky on Curt Jaimungal’s podcast Theories of Everything (Apr 12, 2022)

Antonio Damasio (1999): The Feeling of What Happens (Harcourt Brace)

N. Gregory Hamilton (1988): Self and Others (Jason Aronson)

Jed McKenna (2002, 2004, 2007): Spiritual Enlightenment Trilogy (Wisefool Press)

Jed McKenna (2013): Jed McKenna’s Theory of Everything (Wisefool Press)

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1973): I Am That (Acorn Press)

Osho (1974): The Book of Secrets (St Martin’s Griffin)

Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki (1957): Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (Tuttle Publishing)

Bernadette Roberts (1993): The Experience of No-Self (State Univ of New York Press)

Eckhart Tolle (1997): The Power of Now (New World Library)

Lao Tsu (1989): Tao Te Ching. Gia-Fu Feng trans. (Vintage Books)

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The Underlying Truth of You and the Story of Reality

The you that you think of as you is not you. The you that thinks of you as you is not you. It’s just the character the underlying truth of you is dreaming into brief existence. Enlightenment isn’t in the character; it’s in the underlying truth-Jed McKenna

The only way to understand the nature of the underlying truth of you is to understand that the world you perceive is just like a computer-generated virtual reality, like depicted in the movie the Matrix. The underlying truth of you is what is creating and perceiving the images of that virtual reality, and your character is your avatar in that virtual reality. A story can be told about the nature of that virtual reality, but no story can be told about the nature of the underlying truth. Your character in the virtual reality is like an actor on a stage and all human drama is being enacted on the stage by your and other characters. In the sense of a computer-generated virtual reality, the stage is just like a computer screen that displays all the projected and animated images of the virtual reality, which the underlying truth of you is both creating and perceiving from its own point of view.

The Observer, the Observer’s Holographic Screen, and its Object of Perception

The underlying truth of you can only be understood as consciousness itself, but to fully understand what consciousness is, it’s necessary to understand what consciousness isn’t. At the most ultimate level of existence, you are nothing but consciousness. The bottom line is that consciousness isn’t something that it can perceive. Consciousness is what perceives things. The best way to understand this strange state of affairs is with the idea that everything consciousness can perceive is like something that’s being displayed in a computer-generated holographic virtual reality. Everything consciousness can perceive is like a form of information that is being displayed on a computer screen.

The underlying truth of you is dreaming that virtual reality world into brief existence, which includes your character as the central form of information that appears in that virtual reality. This dreaming process is just like the projected and animated images of a virtual reality world that is being displayed on a computer screen. The dreaming process has both creation and perception aspects. The only reason this dreaming process appears to be confusing to you is because of the tricky way in which both the creation and perception aspects of the dreaming process arise from the underlying truth of you.

The explanation for the dreaming process that’s being presented here is a scientific explanation that’s based on the most advanced scientific knowledge that’s currently available. If you really understand what science is telling us, then it’s possible to unravel the mystery, and this tricky dreaming process becomes scientifically understandable.

The first question is, what exactly is the underlying truth of you? This question does not really have a good answer except in terms of negation. At a conceptual level, we can only say what it isn’t, not what it is. The best way to describe the underlying truth of you is as the void. The void cannot really be conceptualized, but can best be thought of as an empty space of potentiality. The potentiality of the void can best be understood as pure undivided awareness or undifferentiated consciousness. Since this awareness is undivided, it is also called One or nondual. Since this awareness is unlimited, it is also called infinity. Since this awareness is timeless and unchanging, it is also called eternity.

The void of pure nondual awareness is the underlying truth of what you really are, which can also be called pure undivided and unlimited being. Since this being is timeless in nature and does not change, it can also be called the primordial nature of existence. It is what exists when all change comes to an end. It is what exists when time comes to an end. It is what exists when all separation, division and limitation comes to an end. It is what exists when the virtual reality world it dreams into brief existence comes to an end. Separation, division, limitation and change only apply at the level of the virtual reality.

How exactly is the virtual reality world created and perceived? This is where modern science can supply some answers. The void, as an empty space of potentiality, has the potential to express energy. The best way to understand how the void expresses energy is with the concept of dark energy that gives rise to the accelerated expansion of space. Observations of the universe tell us that we live in an expanding universe, where space appears to expand away from our own point of view in an accelerated way. The farther out we look into space, the faster space appears to expand away from our own point of view. This accelerated expansion of space requires energy, which is called dark energy. In relativity theory, as formulated by Einstein’s field equations for gravity, dark energy is called a cosmological constant that gives rise to the accelerated expansion of space.

Accelerated Expansion of the Universe

Imagine that space is expanding like a balloon being blown up. From the point of view of an observer at the center of the balloon, the surface of the balloon is expanding away from the observer. If the balloon’s expansion is accelerated, the surface of the balloon expands away from the observer faster the larger the balloon becomes in size. In relativity theory, the surface of the balloon is an event horizon called a cosmic horizon. At the event horizon, space expands away from the central point of view of the observer at the speed of light, and since nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, nothing is observable to the observer beyond the limits of its cosmic horizon. Blowing up the balloon in this accelerated way requires energy, which is the nature of dark energy.

Accelerated Expansion of Space

The surface of the balloon is the observer’s cosmic horizon that arises due to the expression of dark energy and the accelerated expansion of space. The accelerated expansion of space is always relative to the central point of view of the observer.

The surface of the observer’s event horizon is what allows for a computer-generated virtual reality world to be created. The two dimensional surface of the observer’s event horizon is just like a computer screen. When that two dimensional surface encodes information, just like a computer screen that encodes bits of information on pixels, the observer’s virtual reality world appears to come into existence. Everything the observer can perceive in its own virtual reality world is a form of information that is encoded on its own computer screen as those forms are projected like images to the observer’s central point of view and are animated in the flow of energy that flows through the computer.

In no significant way is the virtual reality world the observer perceives different from the projected and animated images of a computer-generated virtual reality being displayed on a computer screen. Everything the observer can perceive in its own virtual reality world is a form of information that can be reduced to bits of information encoded on the screen. Those forms are projected like images from the screen to the observer’s central point of view and are animated in the flow of energy that flows through the computer.

Universal Observer

Although this seems like a far-fetched idea, this is exactly what the holographic principle of quantum gravity is telling us about the nature of the physical universe. Everything that is perceivable in the physical universe is reducible to qubits of information encoded on a holographic screen. That holographic screen always arises as an event horizon due to the accelerated motion of an observer in its own accelerated frame of reference. Every accelerating observer has its own event horizon that limits its observations of things in three dimensional space due to the limitation of the speed of light as a means of information transfer in three dimensional space. The accelerating observer’s event horizon is a two dimensional surface of space that limits its ability to observe things in three dimensional space. With the holographic principle, we understand that everything the observer can observe in three dimensional space is reducible to qubits of information encoded on the two dimensional surface of the observer’s event horizon.

Accelerating Observer’s Event Horizon

With the holographic principle, the information for everything observable in the physical universe is encoded on an accelerating observer’s event horizon in terms of quantized bits of information, which are called qubits. A qubit is mathematically represented by a matrix, which is a two dimensional array of numbers. That two dimensional array of numbers must be encoded on a two dimensional surface of space, which naturally arises as an event horizon due to an observer’s own accelerated motion.

Qubit of Information Encoded on the Surface of a Planck-size Event Horizon

Encoding qubits of information on an accelerating observer’s event horizon in this way is called the holographic principle of quantum gravity. Everything an observer can observe in its own holographic world is a form of information that can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on its own holographic screen that arises as its event horizon due to its own accelerated motion. In effect, the accelerating observer is creating its own quantum computer that gives rise to the appearance of its own computer-generated virtual reality world. The quantum computer is created due to the observer’s own accelerated motion that gives rise to its event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon. Everything observable in the observer’s own holographic world is a form of information that is reducible to qubits of information encoded on its own holographic screen. Those forms are projected like images from the observer’s screen to its central point of view. Even the animation of those images arises from the energy of the observer’s own accelerated motion.

Holographic Principle

There are several aspects of the mystery that we need to unravel to scientifically understand the nature of this creation and perception process. Creation by its very nature implies the expression of energy and the encoding of information. How is energy fundamentally expressed? The answer from modern physics is the expression of dark energy and the accelerated expansion of space. It is the void, as an empty space of potentiality, that has the potential to express dark energy in this fundamental way. The accelerated expansion of space always appears to expand relative to the central point of view of an observer. What exactly is the observer?

In some mysterious way, the void, which can only be understood as an empty space of pure undifferentiated consciousness, differentiates itself into the central point of view of the observer whenever dark energy is expressed and space appears to expand relative to the observer’s central point of view. The perceiving consciousness of the observer’s own individual point of view is divided from the undifferentiated consciousness of the void whenever dark energy is expressed and the observer’s own holographic world appears to come into existence. That holographic world is always defined on the observer’s event horizon, which only arises due to the accelerated expansion of space that always expands relative to the observer’s central point of view.

Everything that the observer can observe in its own holographic world is reducible to qubits of information encoded on the observer’s own event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when its horizon encodes qubits of information. Just as the void is the source of the energy that underlies the accelerated expansion of space that gives rise to the observer’s event horizon, the void is also the source of the encoding of qubits of information on the observer’s event horizon that becomes its holographic screen.

Only the void has the potential to express dark energy through the accelerated expansion of space that always expands relative to the observer’s central point of view, which gives rise to the observer’s cosmic horizon, and only the void has the potential to encode qubits of information on the observer’s cosmic horizon.

Most importantly, the void is the source of the observer itself. In some mysterious way, the undifferentiated consciousness of the void has the potential to differentiate itself into the individual perceiving consciousness of the observer at the central point of view of its own holographic world whenever dark energy is expressed, space expands relative to the observer’s central point of view, information is encoded on the observer’s cosmic horizon, and the observer’s holographic world appears to come into existence.

The holographic principle is not a theory of everything or even a theory of quantum gravity. The holographic principle as implemented by a matrix model is a mechanism that constructs a three dimensional holographic world. That holographic world is naturally constructed as an observer enters into an accelerated frame of reference and its event horizon arises in space, and as qubits of information are encoded on the two dimensional surface of its event horizon. This construction process only requires the notion of the accelerated motion of an observer, the invariance of the speed of light as the maximal rate of information transfer in three dimensional space, and the idea of entropic information, which is inherent in a matrix model. A matrix model is the most general way to construct a holographic world and does not require the assumption of unitary time evolution. In general, the only valid definition of time in a dynamically curved space-time geometry with gravity is the observer’s own proper-time.

The holographic principle reformulates quantum theory in an observer centric and dependent way since it tells us that the observer is at the central point of view of its own holographic world and that the appearance of its holographic world is dependent on its own accelerated motion. The appearance of its holographic world is understood in terms of images displayed on its holographic screen that arises as an event horizon due to its accelerated motion. The images of its own holographic world that are perceived by the observer can always be reduced to qubits of information encoded on its own holographic screen. This way of understanding quantum theory is a radical transformation of our understanding of the physical reality of the observable world that we perceive. If we really want to get our understanding of the observable world correct, we first have to get our understanding of the observer of that world correct. We have to begin with a correct understanding of the observer. The existence of the observer must come first since the observable world the observer perceives can only appear to come into existence when the observer enters into an accelerated frame of reference.

In reality, there is no objective physical reality of the world out there, only a holographic world that appears to come into existence whenever the observer enters into an accelerated frame of reference and its event horizon arises that acts as its holographic screen when its horizon encodes qubits of information. Instead of an objective physical reality of the world that the observer can perceive, there is only a subject-object relation of perception that arises as the observer perceives objects of perception in its own holographic world. Those objects of perception are all forms of information that can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on its own holographic screen.

In reality, the observer’s holographic world is no more real than the projected and animated images of a computer-generated virtual reality. The observer itself creates the quantum computer that gives rise to the appearance of its own holographic virtual reality with its own accelerated motion. The quantum computer is created due to the observer’s own accelerated motion that gives rise to its event horizon that acts as its holographic screen when the horizon encodes qubits of information. In reality, that holographic world only appears to exist in the eye of the beholder.

Universal Observer

There are still a number of loose ends that we need to tie together to scientifically explain how the observer’s holographic world is created and perceived. To be clear about things, these scientific explanations are a story, and that’s all we’re really doing is telling a story about how an observer’s own holographic virtual reality world is created.

How do we explain a consensual reality shared by many observers, each present at the central point of view of its own holographic world? The answer is information sharing. When holographic screens overlap like a Venn diagram, they can share information.

Information Sharing Among Overlapping Holographic Screens

How do we explain the laws of physics that appear to govern events in a holographic world? The holographic principle gives a very straightforward scientific explanation in terms of the laws of thermodynamics, which are very general statistical rules that explain how things behave when things are at thermal equilibrium. At thermal equilibrium, the equipartition of energy tells us that all things move around in a random way due to the randomizing effect of thermal energy, which is called heat. Heat is nothing more than the random thermal motion of things, which we recognize in terms of the temperature of things. Hot things move around faster than colder things. Hot things also radiate away more thermal radiation than colder things, which is why they feel hot.

In the conventional physical description of things, we take all things to be composed of point particles, like the electrons that orbit the atomic nucleus of an atom. The atomic nucleus in turn is taken to be composed of other point particles called quarks. Even what we call thermal radiation is taken to be point particles of electromagnetic radiation that are called photons. Inside the atomic nucleus are point particles of the strong and weak nuclear forces, which are called gluons and W and Z particles. The whole conventional physical description of the world is based on these ideas of point particles.

Underlying the idea of thermal equilibrium and the equipartition of energy is the idea of dynamical degrees of freedom. If we’re talking about particles that exist at points of space and move through space over the course of time, those dynamical degrees of freedom can be considered to be the point particle’s position coordinates in space and its velocity or momentum through space over the course of time. This is the way the laws of thermodynamics are usually formulated in a conventional physical description of the world in terms of point particles that exist at points in space and move through space over the course of time, whether those point particles are matter particles like the electron or particles of electromagnetic radiation like the photon. In quantum field theory, these point particles are understood as quantum excitations of an underlying quantum field. The photon is a quantum excitation of the electromagnetic field, as formulated in terms of Maxwell’s field equations for electromagnetism, and the electron is a quantum excitation of the electron field as formulated by Dirac’s field equations.

The big problem with this conventional point particle physical description of the world is that we have to assume a background space-time geometry within which the particles can occupy position coordinates in space and move through space over the course of time. This is a problem because of the nature of gravity. Einstein’s theory of gravity tells us that the nature of the gravitational force is nothing more than the dynamical curvature of a space-time geometry, which is mathematically formulated in terms of Einstein’s field equations for the space-time metric. The space-time metric is a measurement of the dynamical curvature of a space-time geometry, which is the nature of a gravitational field that gives rise to the force of gravity, just as the electromagnetic field gives rise to the electromagnetic force. The big problem is that in order to formulate Maxwell’s field equations for the electromagnetic field, we have to assume a background space-time geometry within which the photon as a point particle can occupy position coordinates in space and move through space over the course of time, while Einstein tells us that the nature of the gravitational field is the dynamical curvature of that space-time geometry.

This is the basic reason why the quantization of the electromagnetic force as formulated by Maxwell’s field equations for the electromagnetic field are not consistent with the idea of gravity as formulated by Einstein’s field equations for the space-time metric. In order to quantize the electromagnetic field and have an idea of the photon as the quantum particle of the electromagnetic field, which is a point particle that occupies a point in space and moves through space over the course of time, we have to assumed the whole thing takes place in some fixed background space-time geometry, like gravity-free flat Minkowski space, but that is not consistent with the idea of gravity as the dynamical curvature of that space-time geometry. At the quantum or point particle level, the ideas of gravity and electromagnetism, as formulated by field theories, are not consistent.

The whole problem goes back to what we’re assuming to be the fundamental dynamical degrees of freedom at the quantum level. Gravity and electromagnetism are not consistent with each other if we assume that the fundamental dynamical degrees of freedom at the quantum level are point particles, for the simple reason that point particles have to occupy points in space and move through space over the course of time in some fixed background space-time geometry, which contradicts the whole idea of gravity as the dynamical curvature of a space-time geometry.

This problem goes back to the fundamental principle of equivalence that Einstein used to formulate the theory of gravity in terms of field equations for the space-time metric. The principle of equivalence tells us that the force of gravity that any observer perceives is always equivalent to the observer’s own accelerated motion. An accelerating observer always observes events that the observer will recognize as the force of gravity.

Principle of Equivalence

The principle of equivalence is telling us that every accelerating observer is creating its own dynamically curved space-time geometry, which is the nature of the force of gravity perceived by the observer, due to its own accelerated motion. The observer creates its own space-time geometry when it creates its own holographic world. That holographic world is created due to the observer’s own accelerated motion that gives rise to its event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when the horizon encodes qubits of information. We really don’t need the whole formalism of relativity theory to understand the nature of the observer’s event horizon, only the ideas of the observer’s accelerated motion and the constancy of the speed of light as a means of information transfer in three dimensional space. The observer’s event horizon then naturally arises as a two dimensional bounding surface of space that limits its observations of things in three dimensional space. With the holographic principle, we understand that everything the observer can observe in its own three dimensional holographic world can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on its own two dimensional holographic screen. In effect, the observer is creating its own quantum computer that gives rise to the appearance of its own holographic world due to its own accelerated motion.

The important thing to recognize is that the accelerating observer is creating its own holographic world, which is characterized by a dynamically curved space-time geometry, which is the nature of the force of gravity perceived by the observer in that holographic world. The problem with quantum field theory as a description of the world is that we’re assuming that all observers observe the same universe. That assumption is inherent in the idea of a fixed background space-time geometry within which point particles can occupy position coordinates in space and move through space over the course of time, which is the only possible way in which quantum field theory can be formulated. The problem with quantum field theory is that there is no force gravity in a fixed background space-time geometry since gravity is the dynamical curvature of a space-time geometry.

What if every observer observes its own universe from the central point of view of that universe? This sounds absurd, but this is exactly what the holographic principle is telling us. Different observers can only share a consensual reality to the degree their respective holographic screens overlap like a Venn diagram and share information.

What exactly is the observer? The observer is nothing more than a point of view that arises at the center of its own holographic world. The observer is observing events in its own holographic world. Those observable events are being displayed on the observer’s own holographic screen that encodes information for all those events. The perception of an event is like an image projected from the observer’s screen to its own point of view at the center of its own holographic world. In the sense of an object of perception, all perceivable objects are forms of information encoded on the screen. If that screen is like a computer screen that encodes bits of information, all perceivable objects are reducible to bits of information, which John Wheeler called “It from bit”.

What exactly does relativity theory tell us about the observer? Relativity theory doesn’t attempt to explain what the observer is, only that the observer is at the central point of view of its own coordinate system, which is a frame of reference. If that frame of reference is characterized by accelerated motion, which is called an accelerated frame of reference, the observer observes effects of gravity occurring in a dynamically curved space-time geometry. One of those effects of gravity is the observer’s event horizon, which limits the observer’s observations of events in space. The observer’s event horizon is a two dimensional bounding surface of space that limits its observations of events in three dimensional space. We really don’t need the whole formalism of relativity theory to understand the nature of an event horizon. We only need the concepts of an observer that undergoes accelerated motion and the invariance of the speed of light, which is the maximal rate of information transfer in three dimensional space. A light ray that originates on the other side of the observer’s event horizon can never reach the observer’s point of view as long as the observer continues to undergo accelerated motion along its world-line, and so nothing is observable beyond its event horizon.

Once we have an observer in an accelerated frame of reference and the observer’s event horizon, which naturally arises as a bounding surface of space due to the observer’s own accelerated motion, we can then construct the holographic principle. The basic idea is that the observer’s event horizon acts as its holographic screen that displays images of everything the observer can perceive in its own holographic world. How are those images constructed? The images are all forms of information that can be reduced to bits of information encoded on the observer’s event horizon. These bits of information are not classical bits in the sense of a classical computer, but are quantized bits of information in the sense of a quantum computer, which are called qubits.

The way the holographic principle solves the problem of the fundamental dynamical degrees of freedom for a holographic world at the quantum level is to assume that these fundamental dynamical degrees of freedom are qubits of information encoded on a holographic screen that arises as an event horizon in an observer’s accelerated frame of reference. The number of qubits of information encoded for a holographic world, which are the fundamental dynamical degrees of freedom for that holographic world, are given in terms of the surface area of the observer’s event horizon as n=A/4ℓ², where the Planck area is defined as ℓ²=ħG/c³. It is as though each Planck area on the observer’s event horizon encodes a single qubit of information, like pixels on a computer screen that encode bits of information in a binary code of 1’s and 0’s.

This encoding of qubits of information on an event horizon is more complicated than the way a classical computer encodes information because the qubits are all entangled with each other. Quantum entanglement is a result of the way information is encoded on the two dimensional surface of the observer’s event horizon in a rotationally invariant way, which results from the way qubits are mathematically represented on that surface by matrices, which are two dimensional arrays of numbers.

The holographic principle tells us that a Planck-size event horizon is the smallest event horizon that can be created since it encodes a single qubit of information, which is the smallest amount of information that can be measured. This explains why the Planck length is the smallest distance scale that can be measured. Larger event horizons encode more qubits of information, but always in terms of an integral number of Planck areas. It is as though each Planck area on the event horizon encodes a single qubit of information, like pixels on a computer screen. The basic idea of the holographic principle is the number of qubits of information encoded on the two dimensional surface of an observer’s event horizon is given in terms of the surface area, A, of the event horizon and the Planck area, ℓ²=ħG/c³, as n=A/4ℓ². These qubits of information are the fundamental dynamical degrees of freedom for the observer’s own holographic world.

A qubit is mathematically represented by a two dimensional array of numbers called a matrix, like a Pauli spin matrix, which is an SU(2) matrix. The eigenvalues of the matrix give a mathematical representation of information encoded in a binary code, like a spin variable that can only be observed to be in either a spin up or spin down state, but this information is encoded on the surface of a 2-sphere in a rotationally invariant way since the SU(2) matrix also gives a mathematical representation of rotational symmetry on the surface of the 2-sphere. At the level of qubits, what we call quantum entanglement is a mathematical representation of this rotational invariance.

Since qubits of information are encoded in terms of matrices, which are two dimensional arrays of numbers, this information must be encoded on a two dimensional surface of space. Where does that two dimensional surface of space come from? The answer is the two dimensional surface of space is the observer’s event horizon that arises due to its own accelerated motion, limits its observations of events in space, and acts as its holographic screen when that horizon encodes qubits of information. Everything the observer can observe in its own holographic world is a form of information encoded on its own event horizon that acts as its holographic screen. The holographic principle is simply a statement that everything the observer can observe in its own holographic world can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on its own event horizon that arises due to its own accelerated motion and acts as its holographic screen.

The equipartition of energy tells us that at thermal equilibrium, each fundamental dynamical degree of freedom carries the same amount of thermal energy. Where does this thermal energy come from? The answer is that this thermal energy comes from the observer’s own accelerated motion. If the observer accelerates with an acceleration, a, that thermal energy is given in terms of the Unruh temperature of the observer’s event horizon as E=kT=ħa/2πc. The accelerating observer is itself creating its own thermal energy, and at thermal equilibrium, each qubit of information, which is a fundamental dynamical degree of freedom for the observer’s own holographic world, carries the same amount of thermal energy given in terms of the observer’s own acceleration.

We now have all the pieces of the puzzle to explain how the laws of physics arise in an observer’s holographic world. The laws of thermodynamics tell us that ΔE=TΔS, where holographic entropy is given in terms of the surface area of the observer’s event horizon as S=kn=kA/4ℓ², and the Unruh temperature of the observer’s event horizon at thermal equilibrium is given in terms of the observer’s acceleration as kT=ħa/2πc. The laws of thermodynamics simply say that ΔE=kTΔn, where the fundamental dynamical degrees of freedom for the observer’s holographic world are defined in terms of the number of qubits of information encoded on the observer’s event horizon, which is proportional to the surface area of the event horizon. At thermal equilibrium, each qubit of information encoded on the event horizon carries the same amount of thermal energy given in terms of the observer’s own acceleration. A change in the surface area of the observer’s event horizon implies a change in the number of qubits of information encoded on the event horizon, which implies a change in energy for the observer’s holographic world.

Thermodynamics tells us that a change in energy implies a change in entropy, which the holographic principle tells us implies a change in the surface area of the observer’s event horizon, which implies a change in the space-time geometry of the observer’s holographic world. This chain of events is how Ted Jacobson derived Einstein’s field equations for gravity from the laws of thermodynamics. Einstein’s field equations are not really fundamental, but are more like an effective field theory that describes gravitational events in the observer’s holographic world when things are near thermal equilibrium.

The holographic principle demonstrates that the laws of physics in a 3+1 dimensional space-time geometry can be reduced to the way qubits of information are encoded on an observer’s holographic screen that arises as an event horizon in its accelerated frame of reference and to the thermal energy inherent in that accelerated motion. This is exactly what Ted Jacobson demonstrated when he derived Einstein’s field equations for the space-time metric from the laws of thermodynamics. Jacobson only had to assume the laws of thermodynamics, that entropy is given in terms of a holographic entropy that only depends on the surface area of the observer’s event horizon, S=kn=kA/4ℓ², and the thermal energy inherent in the temperature of the observer’s event horizon at thermal equilibrium is given in terms of the observer’s acceleration, kT=ħa/2πc. The holographic nature of entropy is best understood in terms of the number of qubits of information encoded on the surface of the observer’s event horizon, which is called a matrix model.

Einstein’s Field Equations for the Space-time Metric

This way of deriving Einstein’s field equations from the laws of thermodynamics tells us that Einstein’s field equations for gravity only have the validity of thermodynamic equations of state. Once we have Einstein’s field equations, then all the usual quantum field theories of the standard model of particle physics, which include the field theories for the electromagnetic and nuclear forces, can be derived using the usual unification mechanisms of super-symmetry and extra compactified dimensions of space. At the level of field theory, the final result of unification looks like 11-dimensional super-gravity. With unification, all particle spin arises from super-symmetry, and all particle charges arise from quantized momentum in extra compactified dimensions. The electromagnetic and nuclear fields arise as extra components of the space-time metric, and all point particles are understood as quantum excitations of the fields. This also tells us that all the usual quantum field theories of the standard model of particle physics are only valid as thermodynamic equations of state or as effective field theories.

Field theories are not incorrect, but they only have the approximate validity of thermodynamic equations of state. Einstein’s field equations for gravity, Maxwell’s field equations for electromagnetism and Dirac’s field equations for the electron can all be understood as quantum theory at the level of first quantization. The idea of the second quantization of field theories inherent in quantum field theory is only valid for small quantum fluctuations around thermal equilibrium, but it makes no sense to quantize gravity in flat, gravity-free Minkowski space when Einstein’s field equations for gravity must represent the dynamical curvature of space-time geometry.

It’s worth a brief review of how we got here. The idea of first quantization is based on the idea of a point particle that moves along some path through a space-time geometry. In quantum field theory, that space-time geometry is taken to be flat, gravity-free Minkowski space. The idea of first quantization is to sum over all possible paths that the point particle can follow through that space-time geometry and to weight each path with a probability factor, P=exp(iA/ħ), where the particle action is given in terms of the particle’s kinetic and potential energy as A=∫dt(KE−PE), and where the integral is along the particle’s path. The time variable in the integrand is the same time variable assumed for unitary time evolution, where the particle’s wave-function is assumed to evolve in time in terms of the Hamiltonian operator operating on the wave-function as ψ(t)=exp(−iHt/ħ)ψ(0). The Hamiltonian operator is composed of kinetic and potential energy parts as H=KE+PE. The sum over all possible paths or path integral formulation for quantum theory directly follows from unitary time evolution of the wave-function, and is a way to construct the wave-function.

Quantum State as the Sum over all Possible Paths

The wave-function is a field that obeys a field equation, which is how quantum theory is understood at the level of first quantization. The path integral constructs a wave-function that is a field that obeys a wave equation. The classical path of the particle is understood as the path of least action that results from minimizing the particle action and is like the shortest possible distance between two points in a curved space-time geometry. The second quantization procedure is to sum over all possible configurations of the field and to weight each possible field configuration with the same kind of probability factor, P=exp(iA/ħ), but now the field action is written in terms of the field. Just as a particle action gives rise to classical equations of motion when minimized, a field action also gives rise to classical field equations when minimized, but those field equations are really wave equations that give a representation of quantum theory at the level of first quantization. The whole idea of quantum field theory is based on the idea of the second quantization of fields that arise from a first quantization procedure. The problem is we have to begin with the assumptions of unitary time evolution and that a particle moves along some path through gravity-free Minkowski space, which is the only space-time geometry in which the assumption of unitary time evolution is valid. Only in Minkowski space is there a notion of time translation invariance that allows a time variable to be defined that all observers agree upon. The holographic principle totally reverses this process of quantization in that all field theories arise as thermodynamic equations of state from the way qubits of information are encoded on a holographic screen that arises as an event horizon due to an observer’s own accelerated motion.

Instead of quantum field theory, which assumes that point particles are the quantum level at which the fundamental dynamical degrees of freedom for the world are defined, the holographic principle tells us that the fundamental dynamical degrees of freedom for a holographic world are defined at the quantum level of qubits of information encoded on a holographic screen, which always arises as an event horizon due to an observer’s own accelerated motion. Quantum field theories for the electromagnetic and nuclear forces, like Einstein’s field equations for gravity, only have the approximate validity of thermodynamic equations of state, and are all deducible from the holographic principle. Qubits of information encoded on a holographic screen are more fundamental than point particles that appear to occupy position coordinates in space and move through space over the course of time. Qubits of information encoded on a holographic screen are even more fundamental than the space-time geometry of that holographic world.

Even more fundamental than that holographic world is the observer itself that creates and perceives its own holographic world due to the observer’s own accelerated motion that gives rise to its event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when its horizon encodes qubits of information. Everything the observer can perceive in its own holographic world is a form of information that can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on its own holographic screen. Those forms are projected like images from its own screen to its own point of view at the center of its own holographic world and are animated in the flow of energy that arises from its own accelerated motion.

What exactly is an observation or an observable event? At the level of point particles, quantum theory tells us the wave-function for a point particle is a probability amplitude that specifies the probability that the particle can be observed at some point in space at some moment in time. All wave-functions, including the wave-functions we call quantum fields, are probability amplitudes. The classical path of the particle, as specified in terms of the path of least action in a sum over all possible paths, is only the most likely path in the sense of quantum probability. The way this works for the ordinary quantum theory of point particles is that the wave-function for the particle is specified in terms of the position and time coordinates of the particle, x and t, and the particle’s momentum, p, and energy, E, as ψ(x,t)=Aexp(i(px−Et)/ħ). The exponential of an imaginary quantity specifies wave action in terms of Euler’s formula, as exp(iθ)=cosθ+isinθ. The particle’s momentum gives the wave-function a wavelength as p=h/λ, and the particle’s energy gives the wave-function a wave frequency as E=hf. A is a probability amplitude. The quantization of energy and momentum only results from imposing periodic boundary conditions. This kind of wave-function specifies the quantum probability for a particular position state of the particle. The most general wave-function for the particle is a sum over all possible position states, which is called a Fourier series. This sum over all possible position states results in a wave-function that typically is peaked at some particular position. This kind of wave-function is called a wave-packet. This peaking of the wave-function at a particular position allows us to assign the particle a classical position in space at some moment in time, but that classical position is only the most likely position in the sense of quantum probability. There is always some uncertainty in the position of the particle, which corresponds to some uncertainty in the particle’s momentum, and is reflected by the uncertainty principle as ΔxΔp≥ħ. This is simply a consequence of wave motion.

The most general wave-function is a sum over all possible position states of the particle, which is an entangled wave-function. Quantum entanglement means that this sum over all possible position states, where each position state is weighted with a probability amplitude that represents wave motion, is a probability amplitude that specifies the quantum probability with which the particle can be measured as some particular position in space. When the particle is actually observed at some particular position of space, this entangled wave-function collapses into a particular position state for the particle. The entangled wave-function for the particle becomes disentangled as it collapses into a particular position state for the particle. This collapse of the wave-function is called quantum state reduction, and is how measurement is understood in quantum theory.

With the holographic principle, we no longer talk about a wave-function for a particle that appears to occupy a particular position coordinate in space at a moment of time, but instead talk about a holographic screen that encodes qubits of information for everything an observer can observe in its own holographic world. The qubits of information are entangled because they arise as the eigenvalues of a matrix. The observer’s holographic screen is its event horizon that arises due to the observer’s own accelerated motion, which becomes its holographic screen when its horizon encodes qubits of information. That information is entangled because the qubits are entangled.

When the observer observes something in its own holographic world, like a point particle that appears to occupy a particular position coordinate in space at a moment of time, information becomes disentangled. What we call the collapse of the wave-function at a point particle level corresponds to the disentanglement of information on the observer’s holographic screen whenever the observer observes something in its own holographic world. In the sense of a computer-generated virtual reality, the observer’s observation of something in its own holographic world is like the projection of an image from its own holographic screen to its own point of view. The observer’s observation of something requires the disentanglement of the information encoded on its holographic screen. That entangled information is encoded in terms of qubits, which must become disentangled whenever the observation of something occurs.

The holographic principle goes a long way toward clearing up the mystery called the qualia problem. At the level of point particles, when we measure a particle’s wavelength, we’re measuring a mathematical quantity. The problem is that is not how we observe things. We do not directly observe the wavelength of light. We observe the color of light, which is a quality of light. Observing the color of light is not the same as measuring a mathematical quantity, like the wavelength of light. Color is a quality, not a quantity.

How does the holographic principle clear up the qualia problem? The answer is that the point particle formulation of quantum theory is not really fundamental. What we call a point particle can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on a holographic screen. When we observe light, we’re not really observing a point particle called a photon that is characterized by a wave-function. We’re observing the way qubits of information are encoded on a holographic screen. When we make an observation of light, we observe the quality of light, like its color, and not a quantity, like its wavelength. That quality of light is perceived as qubits of information encoded on the holographic screen become disentangled and the image of the form of something is projected from the screen to our own point of view, like the images of a virtual reality displayed on a computer screen.

The mystery of the qualia problem is inherent in the way those images are projected. We don’t just have consciousness in the sense of perceiving consciousness that arises at our own point of view, but we also have consciousness in the sense of illuminating consciousness. We not only perceive things with our perceiving consciousness, but we also illuminate things with our illuminating consciousness, which can be called the light of consciousness. It is our own illuminating light of consciousness that allows us to project the images of things to our own point of view. Inherent in the way we project the images of things is our perception of the quality of things. The quality of things is inherent in the light of consciousness, which is the solution to the qualia problem.

The whole concept of time and motion in theoretical physics is based on circular reasoning, or even worse, logical contradictions. The most fundamental theory we have of space and time is relativity theory, as formulated by Einstein’s field equations for the space-time metric, but even in relativity theory, there is no real understanding of the nature of time. We have to begin with the assumption that every observer carries with itself its own sense of proper-time, which is the only invariant quantity in relativity theory. One observer’s proper-time is then related to another observer’s proper-time due to their relative motion, as in the effect of time dilation. The observer’s own proper-time can only be understood in terms of a clock that the observer carries with itself. The operation of this clock is based on some kind of periodic motion. The most sophisticated notion of this periodic motion is a light clock, where a light ray bounces back and forth between two mirrors. The problem is that we have to assume periodic motion in the sense of the observer’s own clock to explain the nature of proper-time, which we then use to explain the nature of all other motion. This is nothing more than a case of circular reasoning. Without the periodic motion of the observer’s own clock, there is no notion of the observer’s own proper-time that allows us to explain the nature of all other motion.

The situation in quantum theory is even worse. Quantum theory is based on the notion of unitary time evolution, where the wave-function for anything we want to measure, like the position of a point particle, is assumed to evolve in time as iħ∂ψ(t)/∂t=Hψ(t), where H is the Hamiltonian operator that represents the total energy of the system of interest. The problem is when that system is the entire universe, which is characterized by a space-time geometry. The problem is the force of gravity, which in relativity theory is understood as the dynamical curvature of that space-time geometry. Quantum theory in the sense of unitary time evolution can only be formulated in gravity-free, flat Minkowski space, where there is a notion of time translation invariance, and so a time variable can be defined that all observers will agree upon. In a dynamically curved space-time geometry with gravity, there is no notion of time translation invariance, and so there is no universally valid definition of time that all observers will agree upon. Every observer only knows about its own proper-time. The idea of unitary time evolution as a defining principle of quantum theory is not logically consistent with the idea of gravity and breaks down in a dynamically curved space-time geometry with gravity.

What is the solution to this problem? The answer is found in the principle of equivalence that tells us that the force of gravity as perceived by any observer is equivalent to the observer’s own accelerated motion. As we’ll come to understand, the observer’s own motion is relative to the motionless void. That’s how the observer’s event horizon arises that becomes its holographic screen when its horizon encodes qubits of information. All notions of time and motion in the observer’s own holographic world, as animated images of that world are displayed on the observer’s own holographic screen, arise from the observer’s own motion relative to the motionless void. That’s how the notion of time arises.

The idea of quantum field theory as an effective field theory or thermodynamic equation of state goes a long way toward explaining how the physical world is created from the void. At the initial moment of the big bang creation event, all energy was in the form of dark energy that gives rise to the accelerated expansion of space that always expands relative to the central point of view of the observer. This expression of dark energy arises from the void, which has the potential to express dark energy as space appears to expand relative to the observer’s central point of view, which also gives rise to the observer’s cosmic horizon. The encoding of qubits of information on the observer’s horizon allows the observer’s holographic world to appear to come into existence. The encoding of information on the observer’s cosmic horizon also arises from the void, which has the potential to encode qubits on the observer’s cosmic horizon.

At the initial moment of the big bang event, all energy was in the form of dark energy. How do we explain the emergence of other forms of energy in the observer’s holographic world, like mass energy? The answer is found in quantum field theory, which we can understand as an effective field theory that describes thermodynamic events in the observer’s holographic world when things are near thermal equilibrium.

Early in the history of the universe, dark energy was very hot because the observer’s holographic world was very small. This is the result of a large cosmological constant that gives rise to a small radius to the observer’s cosmic horizon. The smaller the radius to the observer’s cosmic horizon, the hotter the effect of dark energy, since the Unruh temperature of the cosmic horizon is given in terms of its radius as kT=ħc/2πR. In the sense of quantum field theory, very hot dark energy can give rise to high energy photons that can create electron-positron pairs and proton-antiproton pairs.

The electrons and protons are initially massless, just like the photon, but as the universe expands and cools, the electrons and protons develop mass through the Higg’s effect. The Higg’s effect is an example of spontaneous symmetry breaking that gives masses to all the matter particles as the universe expands and cools. This effect is like a phase transition that results in the spontaneous magnetization of a magnet as the spin variables within the magnet begin to align with each other, which naturally happens as the temperature of the magnet cools. Just as the holographic principle tells us that all matter is reducible to qubits of information and is not really fundamental, the Higg’s mechanism tells us that mass is not fundamental, but spontaneously emerges in the universe as the universe expands and cools. The universe cools in temperature as the universe expands in size, which happens as the cosmological constant transitions to a lower value and the radius of the observer’s cosmic horizon increases in size.

The universe cools in temperature as it expands in size, which is a natural result of the cosmological constant transitioning to a lower value and the radius of the observer’s cosmic horizon increasing in size. As the universe cools in temperature, the Higg’s effect gives mass to all the matter particles through a process of spontaneous symmetry breaking. This mechanism also explains the second law of thermodynamics. As the universe expands and cools, heat tends to flow from hotter to colder objects because the hotter objects radiate away more heat. This naturally happens as the cosmological constant transitions to a lower value and the radius of the observer’s cosmic horizon increases in size, which gives the cosmic horizon a lower Unruh temperature.

As heat flows in a thermal gradient, entropy or disorder tends to increase. An increase in entropy is understood in terms of a larger surface area of the cosmic horizon that encodes more qubits of information. As heat flows, information becomes disordered due to the randomizing effects of thermal radiation and random thermal motion that occurs at thermal equilibrium. This flow of heat in a thermal gradient and increase in entropy as heat flows and things approach thermal equilibrium is the essence of the second law of thermodynamics, which explains the normal flow of energy through the observer’s holographic world. This normal flow of energy as heat flows in a thermal gradient also explains the nature of time’s arrow, which is always directed in the direction of increasing disorder. Ultimately, when the cosmological constant transitions to its final value of zero and the radius of the observer’s cosmic horizon increases in size to infinity, the universe becomes infinite in size and comes to thermal equilibrium at a final temperature of absolute zero. This is called the heat death of the universe, in which the flow of all energy comes to an end and even the flow of time comes to an end.

Normal Flow of Thermal Energy Through the Observer’s Holographic World

There is one last puzzle about how the physical world is created that quantum field theory can solve. Very hot dark energy can give rise to high energy photons that can create electron-positron pairs and proton-antiproton pairs, but how do we end up with a universe that’s full of electrons and protons? What happens to all the positrons and antiprotons? The answer is found in the quantum field theory of the weak nuclear force, which naturally exhibits a kind of spontaneous symmetry breaking called parity or chiral symmetry breaking. Parity refers to the handedness of spin ½ matter particles, like the electron and proton, which can spin in either a right-handed or left-handed spin state as they’re observed to spin in either a spin up or spin down state. Parity or chirality refers to symmetry under mirror reflection, in which right-handedness and left-handedness become interchanged. The weak nuclear force breaks this symmetry. The weak nuclear force allows protons to decay into positrons and antiprotons to decay into electrons at very high energies. Due to chiral symmetry breaking, there is a difference in the decay rates, which allows more antiprotons to decay into electrons than protons that decay into positrons, and so as more antiprotons decay, we end up with more protons and electrons than antiprotons and positrons. As the universe expands and cools, the protons become more stable, and so that’s the kind of universe we end up with.

The universe as we know it would not be possible without the expansion and cooling of the universe, which allows heat to flow from hotter to colder objects. The universe can only expand and cool due to the accelerated expansion of space that arises from the expression of dark energy, which allows the universe to expand in size and cool as the cosmological constant transitions to a lower value and the observer’s cosmic horizon increases in radius. That’s also how more qubits of information are encoded for the universe as the observer’s cosmic horizon increases in surface area. This expansion and cooling of the universe is the only reason we have the formation of stars, planets, galaxies and life-forms within the universe. This formation only occurs because of the tendency for bound states to form as heat flows from hotter to colder objects. As hotter objects radiate away their heat into colder space, the random thermal motion of their constituent particles slows down and the particles are more likely to bind together. For example, protons and electrons bind together into hydrogen atoms under the influence of the electromagnetic force, hydrogen atoms clump together into gas clouds that then collapse into stars under the influence of the gravitational force, and stars begin to burn their nuclear fuels and radiate heat as hydrogen atoms fuse together into helium atoms under the influence of the strong nuclear force. None of this would be possible without the expansion and cooling of the universe that is a direct consequence of the expansion of space. Even what we call a particle in space can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on an observer’s cosmic horizon, which again is a direct consequence of the expansion of space. All this formation of objects within the universe is only appearing to happen in the universe because space is expanding and information is being encoded.

There is strong scientific evidence that the energy that energizes the big bang creation event and puts the “bang” in the big bang is dark energy. Dark energy is the energy of the accelerated expansion of space, which in Einstein’s field equations for gravity is represented by a cosmological constant. This idea is incorporated in the theory of inflationary cosmology, which makes exquisitely precise predictions for the observed pattern of the background cosmic microwave radiation left over from the big bang. The cosmic microwave radiation is the thermal radiation of the big bang event, which has cooled due to the expansion of the universe and has come into thermal equilibrium, which makes it a form of black-body radiation. This is different from sunlight, which is not at thermal equilibrium. Sunlight is the thermal energy of the sun that has to flow from the hot sun to cold outer space before it can come into thermal equilibrium. Along the way, sunlight makes a pit-stop at planet earth. The thermal energy of sunlight, as it flows from the hot sun to cold outer space, is the energy that energizes all life on earth.

Inflationary cosmology assumes that the accelerated expansion of space is the energy that energizes the big bang event. This naturally happens as the cosmological constant transitions to a lower value. Unfortunately, inflationary cosmology is flawed because it’s based on quantum field theory, and can never be a fundamental theory since quantum field theory only has the validity of a thermodynamic equation of state, which can never really describe how things happen when things are not at thermal equilibrium. In spite of this flaw, the predictions are very good, most likely because the cosmic microwave radiation is at thermal equilibrium. The upshot is this is strong evidence for dark energy or the accelerated expansion of space as the energy that energizes the big bang event.

The nature of qubits of information encoded on the surface of an event horizon that acts as the observer’s holographic screen also explains the puzzle of quantum entanglement that Einstein called spooky action at a distance. We imagine that we have two particles with entangled spin states, so that the total spin adds up to zero. This means if the first particle spins up, the second particle must spin down, and vice versa. When those two particles appear in the space-time geometry of the observer’s holographic world and appear to become separated in space, the measurement of the spin state of the first particle instantaneously determines the spin state of the second particle, no matter how far apart the particles have appeared to become separated in space. There is really no puzzle here in terms of the holographic principle, since the appearance of both particles in the observer’s space-time geometry can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on the observer’s own holographic screen, and the qubits are inherently entangled until the observer makes an observation of its own holographic world, at which time the qubits become disentangled and the separated particles appear to take on definite spin states. This solves the mystery of spooky action at a distance because observation is never really a local phenomena, but rather a holistic phenomena that encompasses an observer’s entire world as an observer observes events in its own holographic world.

The holographic principle solves all these puzzles because the essential nature of the dynamical degrees of freedom for a holographic world are not particles defined in a space-time geometry, as assumed by quantum field theory, nor even the nature of the gravitational field as defined in a curved space-time geometry. The fundamental nature of the dynamical degrees of freedom for a holographic world are qubits of information encoded on a holographic screen that arises as an event horizon in an observer’s accelerated frame of reference. At thermal equilibrium ΔE=kTΔn, and the equal partition of energy tells us that each qubit carries the same amount of thermal energy, which is given in terms of the observer’s acceleration as E=kT=ħa/2πc. The holographic thermal entropy of that holographic world is given in terms of the surface area of the observer’s event horizon as S=kn=kA/4ℓ². When we add dark energy and the accelerated expansion of space to the holographic principle, all the mysteries of the world have a natural explanation.

This tells us that at a foundational level, physics is not really fundamental. The laws of physics are like the computational rules that govern the operation of a quantum computer that gives rise to the appearance of the observer’s own computer-generated virtual reality. That quantum computer is created when the observer enters into an accelerated frame of reference and its event horizon arises that acts as its holographic screen when the horizon encodes qubits of information.

The holographic principle tells us that the observer must come first. First the observer comes into existence, then its holographic world appears to come into existence due to its own accelerated motion that gives rise to its event horizon that acts as its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded. The observer’s holographic screen is displaying images of everything the observer can observe in its own holographic world. All the information for all those things can be reduced to qubits encoded on the screen. This gives an observer-centric and observer-dependent description of the observable reality of the observer’s own holographic world. In no significant way is this description of the observer’s own holographic world different from a computer-generated virtual reality. The observer itself creates the quantum computer that gives rise to the appearance of its own holographic world whenever the observer enters into an accelerated frame of reference.

The odd thing about this explanation is that there really is nothing inside a holographic world. Everything that an observer can perceive in its own holographic world is like the projection of a holographic image from its own holographic screen to its own point of view at the center of that holographic world. The observer’s holographic screen arises as an event horizon in its accelerated frame of reference when the horizon encodes qubits of information. Even the animating energy that animates those holographic images arise from the observer’s own accelerated motion. In reality, there is nothing inside the event horizon and nothing outside the event horizon. Things only appear to exist inside the event horizon because of the holographic projection of images of that holographic world from the observer’s holographic screen to its central point of view.

Remarkably, this is exactly the nature of our world. Evidence from measurements of the background cosmic microwave radiation tells us the world we perceive is asymptotically flat. An asymptotically flat world is like escape velocity, for which the total energy is zero. Escape velocity is defined for a particle that escapes away from a gravitational field when the particle has just enough positive kinetic energy to overcome the negative potential energy of gravitational attraction. When the particle reaches infinity, its motion comes to an end and the force of gravity also comes to end, which means its total energy is zero. For escape velocity, E=KE+PE=0. An asymptotically flat universe has a total energy of zero, just like escape velocity. This is possible since the negative potential energy of gravitational attraction can exactly cancel out all forms of positive energy, like mass energy, kinetic energy and dark energy. That’s the nature of a holographic world, in which everything exactly cancels out to zero. There really is nothing inside a holographic world since that world is only a holographic projection of images.

The holographic principle tells us that everything an observer can perceive in its own holographic world is a form of information that can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on its own holographic screen. The observer not only perceives the form of all things, which are projected like images from its own screen to its own point of view at the center of its own holographic world, but also perceives the flow of energy that animates the form of all things. That animating energy can be understood as the energy of the observer’s own accelerated motion that also gives rise to its event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when the horizon encodes qubits of information.

These forms of information not only include microscopic things, like point particles, but also macroscopic things, like living bodies. How do we understand the nature of a living body? Just as the science of modern physics allows us to understand the nature of point particles at the quantum level of quantum field theory, the science of modern biology also allows us to understand the nature of living bodies at a biological level.

The essential nature of a living body is as a coherently organized form of information that holds together and self-replicates its form in a recognizable way as the form is emotionally animated. There are several big ideas in the above sentence that we need to unpack in order to scientifically understand the nature of a living body, including the concepts of coherent organization, the self-replication of form in a recognizable form, and the nature of the emotional animation of forms. We already understand what a form of information is from the holographic principle. All forms of information can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on the observer’s own holographic screen.

The key idea is that we have to understand these concepts in terms of the observer, which can only be understood as the perceiving consciousness present at the central point of view of its own holographic world. That holographic world only appears to come into existence due to the observer’s own accelerated motion that gives rise to its event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when its horizon encodes qubits of information. This is already telling us that the emotional animation of biological forms can only arise from the energy of motion of the observer’s own accelerated motion.

What gives rise to the coherent organization of forms and to the self-replication of forms as recognizable forms? What allows a coherently organized form to self-replicate its form and hold together in a recognizable way over a sequence of observable events?

The answer to these questions is found in the science of thermodynamics, which spans the whole spectrum of science from the microscopic quantum level of point particles to the macroscopic level of living biological bodies to the universal level of a holographic world. The two key ideas of thermodynamics are the flow of energy and the encoding of information. We understand the flow of energy in terms of the flow heat, as heat flows from hotter to colder objects. The temperature of objects is a concept that really only applies at thermal equilibrium. Temperature is a measure of the thermal energy of random thermal motion. At the level of point particles and atomic theory, this thermal energy is the random thermal motion of the point particles like the electrons and atomic nuclei that bind together to form atoms. Objects only appear to have a temperature at thermal equilibrium due to the random thermal motion of the point particles within the objects. Even the nature of heat or thermal radiation is understood as the random thermal motion of photons that are also understood as point particles. The atoms inside the objects are radiating away photons. The hotter the object, the faster the point particles move. Heat tends to flow from hotter to colder objects because hotter objects tend to radiate away more heat in the form of thermal radiation or photons.

The concepts of thermodynamics only apply at the level of thermal equilibrium when we can discuss the motion of things in terms of random thermal motion. This is purely a statistical description. The first key idea of thermodynamics is the concept of the flow of heat as described above. The second key idea of thermodynamics is the concept of the encoding of information. The holographic principle tells us the encoding of information occurs on an observer’s holographic screen in terms of qubits. The concept of entropy represents the total number of qubits of information encoded for a holographic world, but only applies when that information is maximally disordered at thermal equilibrium. Information becomes maximally disordered at thermal equilibrium due to the random thermal motion of things. In the point particle description of the world, we think of point particles as the fundamental dynamical degrees of freedom for the world at the quantum level, but the holographic principle tells us that even point particles can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on a holographic screen. With the holographic principle, we understand the fundamental dynamical degrees of freedom for a holographic world at the quantum level are the qubits of information encoded on a holographic screen.

The equipartition of energy tells us that at thermal equilibrium, each fundamental dynamical degree of freedom carries the same amount of thermal energy, which essentially defines temperature as E=kT. This relation actually applies both at the level of qubits and at the level of point particles. The conservation of energy in the setting of the equipartition of energy requires that ΔE=TΔS. This is easiest to understand in terms of the holographic principle, where the number of qubits of information encoded for a holographic world is given in terms of the surface area of the observer’s event horizon as n=A/4ℓ². At thermal equilibrium, when all information becomes maximally disordered due to the random thermal motion of things, entropy is given as S=kn, which tells us that ΔE=kTΔn. This makes sense at thermal equilibrium when each qubit of information carries the same amount of random thermal energy.

The second law of thermodynamics tells us that as heat flows from hotter to colder objects, entropy tends to increase because things tend to become more disordered. Disorder is simply a consequence of the random thermal motion of things that can be understood at either the level of qubits of information or point particles. The easiest way to understand the second law of thermodynamics is in terms of thermal radiation, which is best understood in terms of the radiation of photons. Hotter objects, which are composed of faster moving point particles, tend to radiate away more heat in the form of photons. The energy of each photon is quantized in terms of its wave frequency as E=hf. Hotter objects radiate away more heat in terms of higher energy photons with a higher wave frequency. That heat in turn is absorbed by colder objects as heat tends to flow from hotter to colder objects. The colder objects also radiate away heat as photons, but with a lower photon energy due to a lower wave frequency. Since there is a net conservation of energy, the colder objects end up radiating away more photons than the hotter objects. At thermal equilibrium, the photons are randomly radiated away into space from all objects, but as heat tends to flow from hotter to colder objects, this radiation and dispersion of energy results in a net increase in disorder since the colder objects end up randomly radiating away a larger number of lower energy photons into space than the number of higher energy photons radiated away from hotter objects.

Thermodynamics explains the nature of the flow of heat from hotter to colder objects and the disordering of information that results from the random thermal motion of things, which leads to thermal equilibrium, but how do we explain the coherent organization of forms of information that are able to hold together and self-replicate their forms in a recognizable way over a sequence of observable events? The basic problem is that coherent organization does not occur at thermal equilibrium, where things are maximally disordered due to the random thermal motion of things. Coherent organization of form is a non-thermal equilibrium process. The problem we have to confront is to understand how forms become coherently organized when things are not at thermal equilibrium, and so the laws of thermodynamics can be of limited value.

The best way to approach this problem is in terms of the flow of heat from hotter to colder objects even when things are not exactly at thermal equilibrium. The flow of heat tends to randomize information and disorder things due to the random thermal motion of things, but there is a counterbalancing effect that tends to maintain the organization of things. At the level of point particles, this counterbalancing effect can be understood as the organizing effect of attractive potential energy that tends to hold things together into bound state, like the attractive electromagnetic potential energy of a negatively charged electron orbiting a positively charged atomic nucleus in the bound state of an atom, or the attractive gravitational potential energy of a planet orbiting a star in the bound state of solar system. At the level of qubits of information encoded on a holographic screen, this counterbalancing effect can be understood as the nature of quantum entanglement.

The standard model of particle physics, as formulated by quantum field theory, tells us that point particles tend to bind together under the influence of attractive forces, like the attractive electromagnetic force between oppositely charged electrons and atomic nuclei in atoms, or the attractive strong nuclear force between quarks in the atomic nuclei, or the attractive gravitational force between all matter and energy. At the level of qubits of information encoded on a holographic screen, these attractive forces can be understood in terms of quantum entanglement. Qubits encoded on a two dimensional holographic screen are mathematically represented by two dimensional arrays of numbers called matrices. Qubits are like spin variables, which are inherently entangled because they arise from the eigenvalues of the matrices. The matrices not only encode information in terms of qubits, but also give a mathematical representation of rotational symmetry on the surface of a 2-sphere. At the level of a qubit, quantum entanglement is a mathematical representation of rotational invariance on the surface of a 2-sphere.

The important thing about entangled spin variables is that they tend to either align or anti-align together over a sequence of observational events. A spin ½ variable can only be observed to point up or down, but when spin variables are entangled, they tend to either align or anti-align together over a sequence of observational events. This natural tendency for the alignment of spin variables is the mechanism by which a magnet becomes spontaneously magnetized as all the microscopic spin variables inside the magnet tend to either align or anti-align. The microscopic spin variables also carry electric charge and so have intrinsic magnetic moments due to their spin, which can add together into a macroscopic magnetic field when the entangled spin variables align. The bottom line is that attractive forces, like the force of gravity, are a natural consequence of encoding entangled qubits of information on the surface of a holographic screen.

For the purpose of simplicity, let’s limit the discussion of the nature of bound states to the level of point particles and the attractive potential energy between point particles that leads to the formation of bound states. Bound states of point particles naturally form because of the attractive potential energy of attractive forces between point particles. However, there is always a balance between the kinetic energy of the point particles and the attractive potential energy of attractive forces. If the point particles have too much kinetic energy, they overcome the force of attraction, and fly apart. The amount of kinetic energy that’s required to overcome the force of attraction is called escape velocity, just like a rocket ship with escape velocity that is able to escape away from the earth’s attractive gravitational force. If the kinetic energy of the particle or rocket ship is greater than the potential energy of attraction, the particle or rocket ship escapes away.

The reason this is important is because of thermodynamics and the random kinetic energy particles obtain due to the temperature of things, which represents the random thermal motion of things. If the temperature is too hot and the particles have too much kinetic energy due to their random thermal motion, they are able to overcome the attractive potential energy that tends to bind the particles into bound states. Bound states between particles cannot form if things are too hot and there is too much kinetic energy of random thermal motion. If the temperature is too hot, the particles tend to have escape velocity, and bound states cannot form. As the temperature is lowered, the kinetic energy of random thermal motion is also lowered, and at some point the particles no longer have escape velocity. That’s when the particles can bind together into bound states. The point at which the particles no longer have escape velocity is called the critical temperature, at which point bound states are able to form.

Bound states not only include microscopic objects, like atoms and molecules, but also macroscopic objects, like magnets, planets, stars, and living biological bodies. The formation of a macroscopic object always occurs in a phase transition characterized by a critical temperature at which the phase transition occurs. A good example is water. If the water temperature is too hot, the water molecules have too much kinetic energy of random thermal motion, and the water molecules take the form of water vapor. As the water temperature is lowered below the critical temperature of the condensation point of water, the water molecules no longer have escape velocity and condense into the form of liquid water. As the water temperature is lowered below the critical temperature of the freezing point of water, the water molecules freeze into a crystal structure and take the form of frozen ice. Both the condensation and the freezing of water are only possible due to the organizing effect of the attractive potential energy between water molecules.

The formation of the bound states of living biological bodies is significantly different from the formation of the bound states of physical macroscopic objects, like a magnet or a piece of ice, but some of the same ideas of critical phenomena that occur in phase transitions still apply. Instead of the idea of a critical temperature, there is the idea of a critical balance between the randomizing effect of the flow of random thermal energy that tends to disorganize things and the organizing effect of attractive potential energy inherent in bound states that tends to maintain the coherent organization of things.

The key thing about biology is the way living biological bodies are able to maintain this balance in favor of the organizing effect of attractive potential energy. The important point about the formation of living biological bodies is that this formation cannot occur at thermal equilibrium. Living biological bodies can only form in a non-thermal equilibrium setting. Thermal equilibrium means that everything is at the same temperature, while non-thermal equilibrium means that there is a temperature gradient in which heat can flow from hotter to colder objects. Non-thermal equilibrium also means that there is a source of organizing attractive potential energy that living biological bodies can feed on.

Living biological bodies can only form because they feed off of a source of organizing attractive potential energy. Living biological bodies have to feed off of a source of organizing attractive potential energy so that they can maintain the critical balance between the randomizing effect of the flow of random thermal energy that tends to disorganize the body and the organizing effect of attractive potential energy that tends to maintain the coherent organization of the body in favor of the organizing effect of attractive potential energy. Life is simply not possible unless living biological bodies are able to feed off of a source of organizing attractive potential energy.

As heat flows in a thermal gradient, there is always a balance between the randomizing effect of the flow of random thermal energy that tends to disorganize things and the attractive potential energy inherent in bound states that tends to maintain the coherent organization of things. For a living biological body, life is not possible unless the body is able to feed off of a source of organizing attractive potential energy that maintains the balance in favor of the organizing effect of attractive potential energy.

The big question is where can a body find the attractive potential energy it needs to feed on in order to survive? This is a question about how the body is able to maintain its own coherent organization in the form of a bound state that is able to self-replicate its form in a recognizable way. The answer for the bodies that we call animals is that the body finds that organizing attractive potential energy in other bodies. The biological body of an animal can only survive if it feeds on other biological bodies. The animal has to eat other bodies to survive. Survival means the self-replication of the form of the body as a recognizable form, which requires the maintenance of the coherent organization of the form of the body as a recognizable bound state. The biological body of an animal can only maintain its coherent organization if it feeds on other biological bodies, since that is how that body maintains the critical balance between the randomizing effect of the flow of random thermal energy that tends to disorganize the body and the organizing effect of attractive potential energy that tends to maintain the organization of the body in favor of the organizing effect of attractive potential energy. Eating other bodies is the only mechanism by which organizing attractive potential energy is added to the body.

The situation for the biological bodies we call plants is somewhat different. A plant can absorb high energy photons that arrive from the sun and convert some of the energy of the photons into the energy of carbohydrate molecules through the biological process of photosynthesis. Through this mechanism, the carbohydrate molecules store attractive potential energy in chemical bonds. That energy can be released as heat when the carbohydrate molecule is burned, and some of that heat energy can be utilized to perform useful work, like the heat of a steam engine that can be used to turn a wheel. In the process of first storing useful energy through the process of photosynthesis and then burning that energy to perform useful work, heat must flow in a thermal gradient. For the plant, the source of that thermal gradient is the hot sun that creates the high energy photons absorbed by the plant. The plant converts some of that photon energy into the energy of carbohydrate molecules through the process of photosynthesis. The heat released when the carbohydrate molecule is burned eventually makes its way into cold outer space. In the process of heat flowing in this thermal gradient, things tend to eventually become more disordered as heat flows from hotter to colder objects due to the disordering effect of the random flow of thermal energy. This disordering effect of the random flow of thermal energy is what is called an increase in entropy, which underlies the eventual disorganization of all organized forms of information.

How then is it possible for the plant to maintain its coherent organization in the form of a biological body that is able to self-replicate its form in a recognizable way? The answer is that the plant is able to maintain its coherent organization through the performance of useful work as carbohydrate molecules are burned and heat is released, like a steam engine that can perform useful work as the flow of heat is used to turn a wheel. The performance of useful work is how the plant maintains its coherent organization, but before that useful work can be performed, the plant must store some of the energy of high energy photons that arrive from the hot sun in the form of carbohydrate molecules through the process of photosynthesis. Heat released when carbohydrate molecules are burned eventually makes its way into cold outer space. In the process, there is a net increase in entropy or disorder due to the disordering effect of the random flow of thermal energy, and the second law of thermodynamics is not violated.

The reason the second law of thermodynamics is not violated is because we cannot consider the plant to exist in isolation. We have to consider the plant together with its environment, which doesn’t just include the plant’s ecosystem on planet earth, but also the hot sun and cold outer space. The plant’s environment is really the entire universe. Even as the plant is able to maintain its coherent organization in the form of a biological body that’s able to self-replicate its form in a recognizable way through the performance of useful work, the total system of the plant and its environment become more disordered with an increase in entropy. This increase in entropy arises because a larger number of lower energy photons are eventually radiated into cold outer space than arrive from the hot sun. A larger number of lower energy photons are randomly radiated away and dispersed throughout the entire universe, which results in a net increase in entropy or disorder for the entire universe. This increase in entropy is purely a quantum effect, since the energy of a photon is given in terms of its wave frequency as E=hf. As heat flows in a thermal gradient from hotter to colder objects, energy becomes randomly dispersed into lower and lower frequencies, which results in a net increase in entropy.

The story for the biological body of an animal that eats other biological bodies is very similar to the story for the body of a plant. The only significant difference is that the body of a plant can eat photons through the process of photosynthesis, while the body of an animal must eat other bodies. Eating other bodies is the only mechanism available to the animal by which organizing attractive potential energy is added to its body. That addition of organizing attractive potential energy to the body is necessary so that useful work can be performed, which is how the body maintains its coherent organization.

At the level of thermodynamics, this is all we can say about how a biological body is able to maintain its coherent organization and self-replicate its form as a recognizable form. A body must keep the balance between the randomizing effect of the flow of random thermal energy that tends to disorganize the body and the organizing effect of attractive potential energy that tends to maintain the organization of the body in favor of the organizing effect of attractive potential energy by adding attractive potential energy to the body through a process of eating other bodies. That’s really what life is all about.

To go further in this analysis, we’ll have to understand the nature of biological bodies in biological terms, specifically in terms of Darwinian evolution, natural selection, and the survival of the fittest body. There is one last possible connection with thermodynamics. The survival of the fittest bodies may ultimately come down to nothing more than the most efficient mechanisms that transfer thermal energy down a thermal gradient. The fittest bodies that are most likely to survive may be those bodies that most efficiently transfer heat down a thermal gradient as heat flows from hotter to colder objects, which is only about the flow of heat from the hot sun to cold outer space, and is ultimately about the flow of heat as the universe expands in size and cools due to the expansion of space. The only reason we have a hot sun in the sky and cold outer space is because space is expanding in the universe due to the accelerated expansion of space, which allows heat to flow from hotter to colder objects as the universe expands in size.

The evidence for this idea is found in all regions of the earth where vegetated regions remain cooler than non-vegetated regions. Vegetated regions remain cooler because vegetated regions are more efficient at transferring heat from the hot sun to cold outer space. This efficiency of heat transfer may be what the survival of the fittest body is all about. Living bodies may just be the most efficient mechanisms that transfer heat.

At the level of animals, biological bodies only survive because they eat other biological bodies. Darwinian evolution and natural selection are all about the survival of the fittest body. Darwinian evolution and natural selection are about designing those bodies that are best able to survive. Darwinian evolution allows for the genetic diversity of bodies, and natural selection selects those bodies for survival that are most fit for survival. The bodies that are fittest and best able to survive are the bodies that are selected for by natural selection. Body survival only means the coherent self-replication of the form of the body or sexual reproduction of the form of the body. Body survival is really nothing more than the self-replication of the form of the body in a recognizable form or the sexual reproduction of the form of the body, both of which require the maintenance of the coherent organization of the form of the body as a recognizable form of information.

The coherent self-replication and sexual reproduction of the form of the body is only possible because the biological bodies of animals eat other biological bodies. That is the only way biological bodies of animals can survive. Eating is necessary to survive so that energy is available for the body to perform useful work that maintains the coherent organization of body structures. In a similar way, not being eaten is necessary to survive so that the body can maintain the coherent organization of body structures.

The way the body survival of animals works is through the expression of emotions and the pleasure-pain principle. At the level of eating, the body expresses a desire to eat when it wants to eat another body. The problem is that the desire to eat another body is in conflict with the fear of being eaten by another body. When the body expresses the desire to eat another body, the body moves toward the other body. When the body expresses the fear of being eaten by another body, the body moves away from the other body. At the level of the expression of fear and desire, emotional expressions are all about movement toward and movement away, which are in conflict with each other.

Darwinian evolution and natural selection have designed the expression of emotions to promote the survival of the fittest body. The way this works is through the pleasure-pain principle, which underlies the expression of the primitive emotions of the desire to eat and the fear of being eaten. The satisfaction of the desire to eat feels good, since eating maintains body structures and promotes body survival, while the manifestation of the fear of being eaten feels bad, since being eaten disrupts body structures and threatens body survival. The pleasure-pain principle underlies the survival of the fittest body in that satisfying the desire to eat is pleasurable and promotes body survival, while manifesting the fear of being eaten is painful and threatens body survival. That’s how Darwinian evolution and natural selection have designed the expression of the emotions of fear and desire along the lines of the pleasure-pain principle, which serves no other purpose other than the survival of the fittest body.

The expression of the emotions of fear and desire are body survival emotions, pure and simple. They serve no other purpose. The bodies that are best able to express the emotions of fear and desire are the bodies that are best able to survive. These primitive survival emotions not only include the desire to eat and the fear of being eaten, but also desire for sexual reproduction. That’s what the survival of the fittest body is all about.

The human animal is a social animal, so in addition to the primitive survival emotions of the desire to eat, the fear of being eaten, and the desire for sexual reproduction, social emotions are also expressed within the context of a social group. These social emotions include expressions like shame and guilt, anger, resentment and hatred, and emotional attachments. Shame and guilt are expressions of the fear of being rejected by the social group for actions that are not acceptable to the social group, which is a movement away from others that defends body survival by bringing those socially unacceptable actions to an end. Anger, resentment and hatred are movements against others, either within one’s own social group or in other social groups that are perceived to be a threat to the survival of one’s own body or to one’s own social group. Like the expression of primitive survival emotions, the expression of social emotions within a social group or against other social groups only serves the purpose of defending the survival of the body.

Even emotional attachments are body survival emotions, since the immature body of an infant cannot fend for its own survival and must emotionally attach its body to the body of its caregiver in order to survive. Like all social emotions, the expression of emotional attachments only serves the purpose of defending the survival of the body.

All of these body survival emotions are designed to defend the survival of the body through the process of Darwinian evolution and natural selection that selects those emotional expressions that are best able to defend the survival of the body. That’s what the survival of the fittest body is all about. At an emotional level, the defense of body survival is only an emotional mechanism that maintains the coherent organization of the body and allows the form of the body to become coherently self-replicated in form in a recognizable way over a sequence of observable events.

The next question we naturally have to ask is who exactly is recognizing the form of the body as the body becomes coherently self-replicated in form in a recognizable way over a sequence of observable events? Who exactly is the observer? Is the body its own observer? This is where the holographic principle can give some fundamental answers.

The holographic principle tells us that the form of the body is a form of information that appears in an observer’s holographic world. That holographic world only appears to come into existence due to the accelerated motion of the observer that gives rise to its event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when its horizon encodes qubits of information. Everything the observer can observe in its own holographic world is a form of information that can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on its own holographic screen. The observer itself can only be understood as the perceiving consciousness that arises at the central point of view of its own holographic world.

The holographic principle is telling us in no uncertain terms that the body is most definitely not its own observer. The perceiving consciousness of the observer cannot arise within the holographic world that the observer perceives. The perceiving consciousness of the observer must have its own source of consciousness that is beyond the holographic world it perceives. That source of perceiving consciousness is called the void, which is the underlying truth of what you are and what everyone is.

A peculiar aspect of living in a holographic world is the nature of personal self-identification. Perception always occurs in a subject-object relation, where the true nature of the subject is the observer, which is the perceiving consciousness present at the central point of view of its own holographic world, while all the observer’s objects of perception are forms of information that appear in its holographic world. The observer perceives both the forms of things, which are projected like images from its own holographic screen to its point of view at the center of its own holographic world, and also the flow of energy that animates those forms. Just as the observer’s holographic screen arises as an event horizon due to its own acceleration, the animating flow of energy also arises from the observer’s own accelerated motion. That accelerated motion gives rise to the expression of emotional energy that animates the form of the observer’s own body. The observer’s body is just a form of information that appears in its holographic world, but its body is animated by the flow of emotional energy that arises from the observer’s own accelerated motion. The expression of the emotional energy that animates the form of its body relative to the form of other things that appear in its holographic world is what makes the observer emotionally identify itself with the form of its body, which is called personal self-identification.

As the observer perceives the flow of emotional energy that emotionally animates the form of its body relative to the form of all other things that appear in its holographic world, the observer feels emotionally self-limited to that personal form, which makes the observer emotionally identify itself with that personal form. When the observer emotionally identifies itself with its body and takes itself to be its body, it is as though its body is the subject in the subject-object relation of perception. The observer’s body is taken to be the perceiving subject, and all other objects that appear in the observer’s holographic world are perceived as objects of perception.

In reality, the observer itself is the subject, and its body is just another object of perception that appears in its holographic world among all the other objects of perception, but when the observer emotionally identifies itself with its body and takes itself to be its body, it is as though its body is the perceiving subject and everything else that appears in its holographic world is an object of perception. The only thing that makes the observer’s body different from all other forms is that its body is the central form and is always emotionally animated relative to the other forms, which creates feelings of self-limitation and leads the observer to identify itself with its body. This strange state of affairs is called personal self-identification, which gives rise to the observer’s experience of self and other. The observer’s experience of self and other within its holographic world is only possible because the observer emotionally identifies itself with the emotionally animated form of its body that appears as the central form of information within its own holographic world.

This explanation for personal self-identification is not new. The basic idea for this explanation was given in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s by a group of psychoanalysts, who called the explanation object relations theory. In the 1990’s, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio gave a similar explanation based on the findings of neuroscience. The linguist Noam Chomsky understands the nature of language in a similar way. The basic idea is that perception always occurs in a subject-object relation, where the true nature of the subject is the observer and the object of perception is whatever the observer observes. When the observer emotionally identifies itself with its body, it is as though its body is the perceiving subject. The observer’s body is always emotionally related to all other objects that appear in its world. The observer’s perception of the emotional energy that animates the form of its body relative to all other forms is what makes the observer feel emotionally self-limited to that personal form and emotionally identify itself with its body. Personal self-identification can only happen as the observer perceives the flow of emotional energy that animates its body in relation to the form of all other things that appear in its world, which leads the observer to emotionally identify itself with the form of its body. With personal self-identification, there is a mistaken assumption that the source of the observer’s consciousness is its character that appears in the holographic virtual reality world that it perceives, which is logically impossible.

To paraphrase Shakespeare, nothing is good or bad except thinking makes it so. Inherent in every thought is an emotion. All emotional expressions are body survival emotions that defend the survival of the body. When we express fear and desire, our bodies are moving toward those things that promote body survival or moving away from those things that threaten body survival. Even emotional attachments are body survival emotions, since the immature body of a child cannot fend for its own survival and must emotionally attach itself to the body of its caregiver in order to survive. Nature has designed the expression of our emotions along the lines of the pleasure-pain principle. Whatever promotes body survival feels good and whatever threatens body survival feels bad. In the sense of Darwinian evolution and the survival of the fittest body, natural selection has selected those emotions that best defend the survival of the body. When we judge things to be good or bad, we are only judging things in terms of the survival of our own body. When we construct a personal self-concept, we are conceptualizing ourselves in terms of our own body, and that self-conceptualization is emotional in nature, which inherently is all about defending the survival of our own body. That’s how we judge things to be good or bad, which leads to feelings of emotional self-limitation to the emotionally animated form of the body and personal self-identification.

Darwinian evolution and natural selection have designed the expression of our emotions along the lines of the survival of the fittest body. When we’re defending ourselves, we’re really only defending the survival of our body or our body-based personal self-concept. The way the survival of the fittest body works is through the pleasure-pain principle that operates as we express fear and desire. Whatever promotes body survival as a desire is satisfied feels good, and rewards us with pleasure for defending body survival. Whatever threatens body survival as a fear is manifested feels bad, and punishes us with pain for failing to defend body survival. Even our emotional attachments to others are self-defensive, since the immature body of a child cannot fend for its own survival and must emotionally attach itself to the body of its caregiver in order to survive.

All we’re really doing as we express desire is to pursue pleasure as we move toward the things that make us feel good, and all we’re really doing as we express fear is to avoid pain as we move away from the things that make us feel bad. When we express fear and desire and defend ourselves, we’re under the sway of the pleasure-pain principle. We’re able to express our own individual will in our own unique way because we can focus our attention and express our emotions in our own unique way, but when we feel compelled to express fear and desire in defense of the survival of our body as though our existence depends on it our individual will becomes hijacked by Darwinian evolution.

This system of reward and punishment is how nature has designed the expression of our emotions to force us to defend the survival of our body, which leads to feelings of emotional self-limitation to the emotionally animated form of the body and personal self-identification. Once we emotionally identify ourselves with the form of the body, we feel compelled to continue to express these self-defensive emotions as though our existence depends on it. When we conceptualize ourselves in terms of our own body, we’re defending our body-based personal self-concept, which is the nature of the ego.

The important point to realize is that we have become conditioned to defend the survival of our own bodies as though our existence depends on it by Darwinian evolution, natural selection, and the survival of the fittest body. This conditioning doesn’t occur over a single life-time, but over millions of life-times. That’s how Darwinian evolution and natural selection have designed the expression of our emotions to defend the survival of our bodies. That’s what the expression of fear and desire are all about. That’s what the pleasure-pain principle is all about, which rewards us with pleasure when we defend body survival and punishes us with pain when we fail to defend body survival. That system of reward and punishment is how we have become conditioned.

When we focus the attention of our consciousness on appearing to live an embodied life in the world we perceive, we energize that embodied life with the expression of our emotions. We have the freedom to focus our attention in our own unique way, which leads to the expression of our emotions in our own unique way, which we call free will. The problem is that we are under the sway of Darwinian evolution and natural selection in the sense of the survival of the fittest body. We are under the sway of the pleasure-pain principle. When we express fear and desire, we are pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. Whatever we do that promotes body survival as a desire is satisfied feels good, and rewards us for defending the survival of the body, while whatever we do that threatens body survival as a fear is manifested feels bad and punishes us for not defending the survival of the body. Our free will has become hijacked by Darwinian evolution to force us to focus the attention of our consciousness only on defending body survival, as though our existence depends on it, as we express fear and desire in the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, which creates feelings of emotional self-limitation to the body and leads us to emotionally identify ourselves with the body.

Once we emotionally identify ourselves with the emotionally animated form of the body, we’re screwed. We feel compelled to continue to express fear and desire in the defense of body survival as though our existence depends on it. In reality, our existence does not depend on body survival, but the only way we can become aware of this fact of existence is if we become enlightened.

The only thing that is lacking in this explanation for personal self-identification is an understanding of the true nature of the observer. The holographic principle tells us the observer can be nothing more than the perceiving consciousness that arises at the central point of view of its own holographic world. That holographic world can only appear to come into existence when the observer enters into an accelerated frame of reference and the observer’s event horizon arises that acts as its holographic screen when the horizon encodes qubits of information. Even the flow of emotional energy that animates the observer’s body arises from its own accelerated motion.

Why should we accept the validity of the holographic principle? There are a number of puzzles in theoretical physics that physicists have not been able to solve, but all these puzzles have a natural solution in terms of the holographic principle once it’s understood in terms of the consciousness of the observer. All the pieces of the scientific puzzle fit together perfectly in terms of the holographic principle, which is an argument for its essential correctness. All the mysteries of physics have a perfectly natural explanation once we accept that the consciousness of the observer is the most fundamental aspect of the explanation. It’s hard to envision how all the pieces of the scientific puzzle could fit together so perfectly if the holographic principle was not fundamentally correct.

The other argument for the essential correctness of the holographic principle is that it’s totally consistent with what enlightened beings tell us about the nature of reality and the world. Again, it’s hard to envision how this could be possible if the holographic principle was not fundamentally correct, as long as it’s understood in terms of the consciousness of the observer, which is the most fundamental aspect of the explanation. The fact that the holographic principle allows us to perfectly fit together all the pieces of the scientific puzzle and do so in a way that is totally consistent with what enlightened beings tell us about the nature of reality and the world cannot just be some random coincidence. That’s why at some fairly deep level this explanation must be fundamentally correct.

Everything we can perceive is imaginary in the sense that everything perceivable is composed of images, like the animated images of a movie projected from a computer screen to the point of view of an observer. The projected images are reducible to bits of information encoded on the screen and are animated in the flow of energy. Every observer has its own point of view and its own screen, but when those screens overlap like a Venn diagram, they can share information, and so different observers can observe similar things, just from different points of view. This explains the nature of consensual reality shared by many different observers, each present at its own point of view.

An interesting phenomena is what’s called disconnection syndromes. When information is not shared between different observers, an observer can observe the form of things without sharing those observations with other observers. This is the nature of personal imagination. An example of personal imagination is dreaming sleep. When we dream during sleep, all external sensory inputs are disconnected from the dreaming mind, and so dreams are a personal experience. Daydreams are another example. Thinking about ourselves in a personal way is another example. When we think about ourselves in a personal way, we take ourselves to be a person. When we emotionally identify ourselves with a personal form, we are disconnecting ourselves and feel disconnected.

When people take LSD and other hallucinogens, they often have an experience of what’s called cosmic consciousness. Although this kind of experience can be very moving and can be transformative of consciousness, it is not an experience of the ultimate nature of reality, which is literally the absence of all experiences. LSD doesn’t stimulate brain activity. LSD shuts down brain activity so that we can directly see what’s out there without the interference of brain activity. Meditation does the same thing. Brain activity filters and distorts what we see by processing the information. Shutting down brain activity allows us to see the nature of things directly without that processing. There is an evolutionary body survival value in seeing things in a certain way, which is why our brains have evolved to see things that way. If we all had an experience of cosmic consciousness all the time, our bodies wouldn’t survive for very long. This shutting down of brain activity with meditation or ingestion of LSD and other so-called hallucinogens has been demonstrated with MRI scans. The experience of cosmic consciousness is not really a hallucination, but a direct experience of seeing what’s actually out there without the interference of evolution, which is only concerned with the survival of the body. In order for our bodies to survive, our brains have to block out the experience. With an experience of cosmic consciousness, we feel connected to all things.

At the Darwinian level of natural selection, it seems that the expression of emotions is predetermined, but there’s an aspect of free will that arises from the freedom the observer has to undergo its accelerated motion in its own unique way that leads to the emotional animation of its body. The expression of free will arises from the way the observer can focus the attention of its consciousness, which it can focus on things in its own unique way and which allows its emotions to be expressed in its own unique way.

The observer is nothing more than a point of perceiving consciousness that arises at the central point of view of its own holographic world, and all the images of its holographic world are displayed on its own holographic screen that arises in a void of nothingness. The observer’s holographic screen is the boundary of its own holographic world. That boundary is an event horizon that arises due to the observer’s own accelerated motion, which limits its observations of things in space and becomes its holographic screen when its horizon encodes qubits of information. That holographic world only appears to come into existence due to the observer’s accelerated motion. In reality, there is nothing inside that holographic world and nothing outside that holographic world. There only appears to be something inside the observer’s holographic world due to the holographic projection of images from its own holographic screen to its point of view at the center of that holographic world.

Nothingness

The observer’s accelerated motion is not really along an accelerating world-line that it follows within its space-time geometry. The observer’s space-time geometry is only a perceivable aspect of the holographic world it perceives that only appears to come into existence when it enters into an accelerated frame of reference. The observer’s accelerated motion is relative to nothingness, which is inherently motionless. The observer’s event horizon is arising within that nothingness.

What exactly is this nothingness? Theoretical physics really has no explanation for the nature of this all-pervading nothingness, which physics simply calls the void or vacuum state. In terms of the holographic principle, this mysterious all-pervading nothingness is not a space-time geometry. The perceived space-time geometry of the observer’s holographic world is a holographic effect that can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on the observer’s own holographic screen. Like everything else that it can perceive, the space-time geometry the observer perceives in its own holographic world is a holographic effect that only appears to come into existence due to the observer’s own accelerated motion relative to that motionless nothingness.

Where does the observer come from? The answer is the observer comes from the same nothingness within which it undergoes accelerated motion. The observer’s motion is relative to that motionless nothingness, which is also the source of the observer. If we think of the observer as a presence of individual consciousness at the central point of view of its own holographic world, then that nothingness can be understood as a void or empty space of pure undivided or undifferentiated consciousness. In some mysterious way, the individual consciousness of the observer, present at the central point of view of its own holographic world, is dividing or separating itself from its undivided source of pure undifferentiated consciousness, which is only understandable as a void of absolute nothingness. When the observer begins to move with accelerated motion relative to the motionless void, the observer’s holographic world appears to come into existence. At the level of existence of the observer and its holographic world, the observer must come first. First the perceiving consciousness of the observer comes into existence, and then the holographic world the observer perceives appears to come into existence as the observer enters into an accelerated frame of reference. What exists prior to the existence of the observer and its holographic world? What exists when the observer’s acceleration comes to an end and its holographic world disappears from existence?

What happens when that accelerated motion comes to an end? In relativity theory, the end of accelerated motion is called a freely falling frame of reference. In an ultimate freely falling frame of reference, the observer no longer has an event horizon, and therefore no longer has a holographic screen that displays images of its own holographic world. The concept of time only applies at the level of the space-time geometry of that holographic world. The observer’s perception of that holographic world is like the perception of the projected and animated images of a computer-generated virtual reality. The observer’s experience of time can only arise from the animation of that holographic world in the sense of the animation of the projected images of a virtual reality. In an ultimate state of free fall, the animation of the observer’s holographic world comes to an end, which means the experience of time also comes to an end as the observer’s own holographic world disappears from existence from its own point of view.

What happens to the observer when its experience of time comes to an end and its own holographic world disappears from existence from its own point of view? The answer is the individual consciousness of the observer returns to and dissolves back into its undivided source of pure undifferentiated consciousness, like a drop of water that dissolves into the ocean. This experience of the dissolution of individual consciousness into undivided consciousness is called spiritual enlightenment. Individual being dissolves into undivided being. Enlightened beings describe the experience of becoming enlightened as a state of free fall in which they fall into the void and their individual consciousness dissolves back into its source of pure undivided consciousness.

Spiritual enlightenment is a timeless state of being. The experience of time only applies at the level of the observer perceiving the animation of its own holographic world as the images of that world are projected from its holographic screen to its point of view at the center of that world and are animated in the flow of energy through that world. The animation of the observer’s holographic world only arises from its own accelerated motion relative to the motionless void, which is how its event horizon arises that acts as its holographic screen. The observer’s own accelerated motion is the nature of the energy that animates its own holographic world.

When its accelerated motion comes to an end, the observer’s experience of time also comes to an end. When its accelerated motion comes to an end, the observer no longer has an event horizon that acts as its holographic screen, its observations in space become unlimited, but it perceives nothing as its holographic world disappears from existence. When its accelerated motion comes to an end, the observer’s individual consciousness, present at the central point of view of its own holographic world, dissolves back into its source of pure undivided consciousness, like a drop of water that dissolves back into the ocean. Individual being dissolves back into undivided being. This is exactly how enlightened beings describe the experience of spiritual enlightenment.

Spiritual enlightenment is only about discovering the true nature of our existence. At the level of being an observer of our own world, which is the level of individual existence, we can only know ourselves to be a presence of consciousness at the central point of view of that world. The only true thing we can ever know about ourselves at the level of being an observer of our own world is our own sense of being present as we perceive that world, which is the sense of I-Am-ness. That’s where we have to focus our attention if we really want to awaken to the truth of what we really are.

We have to begin the awakening process by shifting the focus of our attention away from the world we perceive and refocusing our attention on our own sense of beingness. We do this because we see that the world we perceive is an illusion, like a virtual reality game that we’re playing on a computer screen, and we see our character in that virtual reality world is an illusion of what we really are. When we withdraw our attention away from the world we perceive, we also withdraw our investment of emotional energy in that world that emotionally animates our character in that world. We do that because we see the whole thing is an illusion, and we lose interest in paying attention to an illusion. That’s how we stop animating the illusion.

Ultimately, at the level of being a moving point of consciousness at the center of the world we perceive, when we withdraw all emotional energy away from that world, we stop moving. We not only stop emotionally animating our character, but ultimately, we stop animating the world that our character appears to live within. When we completely withdraw our attention away from that world, our accelerated motion relative to the motionless void comes to an end. We enter into an ultimate state of free fall, and the holographic world we perceive disappears from existence from our own point of view. If we remain aware of our own beingness while we fall into the void, our individual being dissolves back in the undivided being of the void, and we become aware of the true nature of our existence as that pure undivided, unlimited and timeless being.

Everything we perceive is imaginary. Even space and time are imaginary. The space and time we perceive, like everything else, is no more real than the projected and animated images of a holographic movie that’s being displayed on a computer screen.

Enlightened beings tell us that the only thing that’s really real is our own being, which really isn’t a thing. It’s the nothingness of consciousness. Even our individual being, in the sense of being a presence of consciousness at a point of view, is not really real. Only the unlimited being of the void is real. Enlightened beings also tell us that we can only discover the truth of what we really are if we look within. We can’t discover that truth by looking outward, since everything we can perceive when we look outward is imaginary. We have to look within, into the emptiness of our own being.

When we look outward, whatever we perceive is limited because our perceptions are limited by an event horizon. That limitation of perception is what makes whatever we perceive imaginary, like the projected and animated images of a holographic movie that’s being displayed on a screen. All limited existence is imaginary. Only unlimited being is real. Unlimited being is not perceivable because it is the source of perception. When we look within, into the inner emptiness of our own being, we’re looking into that unlimited being, which we will never perceive because it’s unperceivable. We can only be that unlimited being, but to be it, we have to become willing to be nothing. The secret of becoming nothing is doing nothing and knowing nothing. When we do nothing, the holographic movie we’re perceiving is no longer animated or projected, and disappears from existence from our own point of view. That’s when our limited being returns to and dissolves back into unlimited being. We become that infinite nothingness.

At the end of the day, there is no energy out there other than the energy that we are expressing due to our own motion as a point of consciousness relative to the motionless void. We can only become nothing if we become willing to do nothing, and that means we have to stop moving. That’s the meaning of the gateless gate. We have to become motionless to pass through the gateless gate and to become the motionless void. In the process of becoming motionless, everything we perceive disappears from existence.

The void is not a part of the universe. The universe is created within the void. The void is like an empty space of potentiality. That potentiality is undifferentiated consciousness, which has the potential to create energy in the sense of dark energy, which is the accelerated expansion of space, as reflected by the cosmological constant of Einstein’s field equations for gravity. That expansion of space always expands relative to the central point of view of an observer, which is the individual perceiving consciousness of its own holographic world. The holographic principle tells us the observer’s holographic world is defined in terms of the information encoded on its own cosmic event horizon.

As the void expresses dark energy through the accelerated expansion of space, the individual consciousness of the observer is differentiated from the undifferentiated consciousness of the void, the observer’s own cosmic horizon arises and encodes information for its own holographic world, and that world appears to come into existence. The appearance of that world is really no different than the projection of images from a computer screen to the point of view of the observer, just like in a computer-generated virtual reality, like the Matrix. The projected images can all be reduced to information encoded on the screen. The energy that animates the images arises from dark energy, which is also how the screen arises as a cosmic event horizon.

When we tap into the energy of the void, we are not really tapping into the energy of the universe, but what is beyond the universe. In reality, there really is no universe. There is no spoon as the Matrix says, because what we call the universe is only a holographic projection and animation of images from a screen to the point of view of an observer. Just as the point of view of the observer and the observer’s own holographic screen both arise within the void, that projection and animation of images also occurs within the void. As observers present at our own individual points of view, we only share a consensual reality because our respective holographic screens overlap like a Venn diagram and share information, just like computer screens connected by the internet.

This is the best way to understand what’s really going on here. When we tap into the dark energy of the void, we’re tapping into the energy of the accelerated expansion of space, which is not actually occurring within the universe, but is what is giving rise to the appearance of the universe. In a very real sense, the expression of dark energy is what creates the quantum computer that encodes qubits of information on an event horizon that gives rise to the appearance of a computer-generated virtual reality. The expression of dark energy not only creates the quantum computer, but also energizes its operation.

What we call the laws of physics are like the operating system of the quantum computer. This can only appear to happen because space is expanding away from our own point of view in an accelerated way due to the expression of dark energy, which gives rise to our own cosmic event horizon that becomes our own holographic screen when the horizon encodes qubits of information. That’s how our own quantum computer is created, which taps into a computer network shared by many other observers due to the overlapping of their respective holographic screens and information sharing.

At the end of the day, the only part of it that’s really real is our own consciousness. Ultimately, only the undifferentiated consciousness of the void really exists. That is what exists when everything else disappears from existence. When we totally withdraw our attention away from the world we perceive and withdraw our investment of energy in that world, we stop expressing energy and our own holographic world disappears from existence from our own point of view. There’s nothing mysterious about this process. It happens each night when we fall into a deep sleep. The only tricky part of the process, in the sense of becoming spiritually enlightened, is remaining aware of our own being as our own holographic world disappears from existence. We have to become aware of the nothingness of our own being. We can only do that if we stop emotionally identifying ourselves with something we perceive in that world. We have to remain aware of our own being while we stop moving and the world we perceive disappears from existence.

Spiritual enlightenment is described as a return to the Source. It is the individual being and consciousness of the observer that is returning to its Source of pure undivided being and consciousness. The Source is not only the source of all the information and energy that characterize the observer’s own world and the source of the laws of physics that govern events in that world, but also the source of the observer’s own individual being and consciousness. The observer’s individual being and consciousness is divided from the Source when the observer’s holographic world appears to come into existence, which can only happen due to the observer’s own accelerated motion. When that accelerated motion comes to an end in an ultimate state of free fall, the observer’s individual consciousness must return to the undivided consciousness of its Source. That return is described as a dissolution, like a drop of water that dissolves into the ocean. The observer’s return to the Source is the nature of spiritual enlightenment, which is the only way the observer can become free from the illusion of duality.

The nature of the illusion of duality is the experience of self and other that an observer can only experience in its own holographic world. The observer only has an experience of self and other when the observer emotionally identifies itself with the emotionally animated form of a person that appears in that holographic world due to the observer’s perception of emotional feelings of self-limitation to that personal form. That personal form appears as the central form of the observer’s body in its own holographic world. As that personal form is emotionally animated relative to all other forms that appear in its holographic world, the observer has the experience of self and other. This experience of self and other only becomes possible when the observer emotionally identifies itself with the form of its body, which is the central form that appears in its holographic world. When that personal self-identification comes to an end, the observer’s experience of self and other also comes to an end, and the illusion of duality comes to an end.

The observer lives in a state of emotional bondage due to its state of emotional self-identification with the emotionally animated form of a person that appears in the holographic world it perceives. The observer falsely identifies itself with the central form of a person that appears in its own world due to its perception of emotional feelings of self-limitation to that personal form. When the observer returns to the Source and discovers the truth of its own existence as pure undivided, unlimited and formless being and consciousness, it becomes free from this state of emotional bondage. Only consciousness itself has real being, the sense of I-Am-ness, the sense of being present. Even that sense of I-Am-ness is not the ultimate state of existence that can only be described as pure undivided, unlimited, timeless being. The forms that appear in a holographic virtual reality are unreal, no more real than projected and animated images of a holographic world, and have no being. In the immortal words of the Bhagavad Gita: The unreal has no being; the real never ceases to be.

What is the nature of God? The world we perceive is built upon three fundamental ingredients: information, energy and consciousness. Perception of the world always occurs in a subject-object relation as an observer perceives its objects of perception. In physics, we call the perceiver the observer and call the objects of perception the observables. Modern physics tells us the observables are constructed out of nothing more than information and energy. Spirituality tells us that the observer is nothing more than a focal point of consciousness. The individual spirit is present as a presence of individual consciousness at the central point of view of the holographic world that it perceives. That holographic world only appears to come into existence due to its own accelerated motion as a point of consciousness relative to the motionless void, which is how all energy arises. That accelerated motion gives rise to its own event horizon that acts as its holographic screen that displays all images of its own holographic world as qubits of information are encoded on the horizon. The perception of time, as an aspect of the space-time geometry of that holographic world, can only arise from the animation of that world, which fundamentally arises from the observer’s own accelerated motion.

The holographic world we perceive is just like a computer-generated virtual reality that consists of nothing more than forms of information encoded on a holographic screen that are projected like images from the screen to our point of view and are animated in the flow of energy that arises from our own accelerated motion. At the level of individual being, we can only know ourselves to be a point of consciousness at the center of our own holographic world. When we undergo the experience of spiritual enlightenment, we know that the source of our individual being is an ocean of pure undivided being. That ocean of pure undivided being can only be described as a void of absolute nothingness.

Spirituality tells us that what we call God is the Source of all information, energy and consciousness. Take away all that information, energy and consciousness, and what remains? The answer is nothing. What we call God is that ultimate nothingness, which is the Source of everything, including our own individual consciousness. That absolute nothingness is only describable as a void of pure undifferentiated consciousness.

When one becomes spiritual enlightened, one sees things from the highest possible level of consciousness. One not only sees the nature of one’s own world from the highest possible level of consciousness, like the projected and animated images of a virtual reality movie that’s being displayed on a computer screen as those images are projected to the point of view of the observer, but one also sees the nature of the observer from the highest possible level, which is the perspective of the silence, darkness, deepness and emptiness of the void. One sees that one’s world only appears to come into existence because of the motion of the observer’s point of view relative to the motionless void. One sees that it is the observer’s own motion that allows that world to become emotionally animated. One sees that it is the light of consciousness that is being focused onto that world through the observer’s own point of view that allows that world to be illuminated and perceived as all the images of that world are projected from the observer’s own screen to its own point of view. One sees this from the highest possible perspective of the silence, darkness, deepness and emptiness of the void.

Incredibly, this whole scenario is described in the first few lines of Genesis:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth
And the earth was without form and void
And darkness was upon the face of the deep
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters
And God said ‘Let there be light’; and there was light
And God saw the light, that it was good
And God divided the light from the darkness

The face of the deep is a holographic screen and the Spirit of God moving over the face of the deep is the observer moving in an accelerated frame of reference, which is how the screen arises as an event horizon. The waters refer to the void as an ocean of undifferentiated consciousness, which is also called the deep. The ocean is motionless, and the observer is moving relative to the motionless ocean, which is how the surface of the ocean arises as an event horizon. The face of the deep is a surface of the ocean, which arises as an event horizon due to the motion of the observer relative to the motionless ocean. The observer as a moving point of consciousness must divide and separate itself from the motionless ocean of consciousness for this creation to occur.

The light Genesis refers to is the light of consciousness, which is the light by which the observer’s world must be illuminated for that world to be perceived. The darkness refers to the void. To illuminate and perceive its own world, the observer must divide itself from its source, which is the void, which also divides the light of consciousness from the darkness of the void. Genesis describes the observer as a point of consciousness that must move in relation to its own holographic screen for that screen to display all the projected and animated images of its world, which are called forms. A form is a form of information encoded on the screen that is projected to the central point of view of the observer like a projected image. Forms are images projected from the screen, which are illuminated as the light of consciousness is divided from the darkness. The forms are animated due to the energy that arises from the motion of the observer. The observer is creating the holographic screen with its own motion and is perceiving the forms as they’re illuminated, animated and projected like images back to itself. That’s how the observer’s own holographic world is created. Why does this creation occur? For no other reason than it can and it feels good. Creation is the potentiality of the void.

This hierarchy of consciousness is represented by the symbolism of the All-Seeing-Eye:

All-Seeing-Eye

In terms of the symbolism of the All-Seeing-Eye, the central eye represents the observer, which is the perceiving consciousness of the individual spirit present at the central point of view of its own holographic world; the triangle represents the hierarchy of consciousness, with the source of consciousness, which is the undifferentiated consciousness of the void that is the one source of all individual spirits, at the apex or highest possible level of consciousness; the rays emanating from the central eye represent the light of consciousness that illuminates the observer’s own holographic world; and the encompassing circle represents the boundary of that holographic world, which is the observer’s event horizon or holographic screen. That boundary only arises due to the observer’s own accelerated motion relative to the motionless void.

When one becomes spiritually enlightened, one no longer has the perspective of the individual consciousness of the observer at the central point of view of one’s own world, but one’s perspective ascends to the highest possible level of consciousness as the ascended perspective of the undifferentiated consciousness of the void. This highest possible level of consciousness is described in the Bhagavad Gita:

In the knowledge of the Atman, which is a dark night to the ignorant,
The recollected mind is fully awake and aware.
The ignorant are awake in their sense life, which is darkness to the sage

In the language of Advaita Vedanta, Atman refers to the presence of individual consciousness at the center of its own holographic world, which one becomes aware of from the ascended perspective of Brahman when one becomes enlightened. Brahman refers to the undifferentiated consciousness of the void. In other words, when one becomes enlightened, Brahman becomes aware of Atman.

This ascended perspective is also described in the Tao Te Ching:

In the silence and the void
Standing alone and unchanging
Ever present and in motion
I do not know its name
Call it Tao

Tao refers to the Atman, which is the presence of individual consciousness of the observer at the central point of view of its own holographic world that is in a state of perpetual motion relative to the motionless void. The silence and the void refers to the ascended perspective of Brahman.

The Tao Te Ching describes that this ascended perspective only becomes possible when one becomes desireless, which is the ultimate state of becoming motionless. As long as one continues to express desires through one’s own continued motion relative to the motionless void, one will perceive the manifestations of one’s own holographic world. Only when one becomes desireless and motionless can one see the mystery of one’s own individual consciousness from the ascended perspective of the darkness and the deepness of the undivided Source of consciousness:

Ever desireless, one can see the mystery
Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations
These two spring from the same source
This appears as darkness
Darkness within darkness
The gate to all mystery

The Tao Te Ching describes the path of return:

Tao in the world is like a river flowing home to the sea

Returning is the motion of the Tao

It returns to nothingness
It leads all things back to the great oneness

Mu-mon describes the gateless gate paradox:

The great path has no gates
Thousands of roads enter it
When one passes through this gateless gate
One walks the universe alone

Passing through the gateless gate can only happen when one becomes motionless in an ultimate state of free fall. Enlightened beings describe this experience as falling into the void and the dissolution of their own individual consciousness into the undifferentiated consciousness of the void, like a drop of water that dissolves back into the ocean. After this dissolution experience, when one again perceives one’s own holographic world, one knows that one is all-one. One is truly alone in one’s own world.

Chuang Tzu describes that the enlightened man remains unknown, has no-self, and is nobody. When one becomes enlightened, one no longer perceives things from the dualistic perspective of self and other, but from the ascended perspective of one undivided consciousness. Perfect virtue is the virtue of becoming desireless and motionless, which produces nothing:

The man of Tao remains unknown.
Perfect virtue produces nothing.
No-self is true self
And the greatest man is nobody

The Buddha succinctly stated the nature of spiritual enlightenment:

Truly, I have attained nothing from total enlightenment

The Bhagavad Gita describes that the true nature of one’s own reality and existence is as consciousness itself, and not the holographic world one perceive, which in reality is no more real than the projected and animated images of a virtual reality being displayed on a computer screen, which is unreal. Only consciousness itself has timeless being:

The unreal has no being
The real never ceases to be

Never the spirit was born
The spirit shall cease to be never
Never was time it was not
End and beginning are dreams

The Tao Te Ching describes that freedom from desire is the only path to enlightenment, which results in formless being:

Without form there is no desire
Without desire there is tranquility
Therefore the sage seeks freedom from desire

Being at-one with the Tao is eternal because there is no place for death to enter:

Being at one with the Tao is eternal
And though the body dies, the Tao will never pass away

Because there is no place for death to enter

Adapted from the teachings of Nisargadatta Maharaj:

To be born means to create a world around yourself as the center.
You are that point of consciousness.
By your movement the world is ever created.
Stop moving and there will be no world.

Nothing perceivable is real. Only the onlooker is real, call him Self or Atman. That which makes you think that you are a human is not human. It is a dimensionless point of consciousness.

All you can say about yourself is I Am.

At the root of my being is pure awareness, a speck of intense light. This speck, by its nature, radiates and creates pictures in space and events in time.

Even the sense I Am is not continuous, though it is a useful pointer; it shows where to seek, but not what to seek.

The Supreme reality is the void beyond being and non-being, beyond consciousness.

The Supreme state is the very center of consciousness and yet beyond consciousness. The center of consciousness is That which cannot be given name and form, for it is without quality and beyond consciousness. It is a point in consciousness which is beyond consciousness. It is an opening in the mind, a void, through which the mind is flooded with light. It is but an opening for the light of consciousness to enter the mental space.

To the mind the light of consciousness appears as darkness. It can be known only through its reflections. The highest state of awareness is to be the point of light tracing the world.

Beyond the highest state of awareness is to be the source of light.

The person is never the subject. You can see a person, but you are not the person. You are always the Supreme, which appears at a given point of time and space as the witness, a bridge between the pure awareness of the Supreme and the manifold consciousness of the person.

The objects in the world are many, but the eye that sees them is one. The higher always appears as one to the lower and the lower as many to the higher.

In ignorance the seer becomes the seen and in wisdom he is the seeing.

When you refuse to open your eyes, what can you be shown?

You see yourself in the world, while I see the world in myself. To you, you get born and die, while to me, the world appears and disappears. It is your imagination that misleads you. There is a deep contradiction in your attitude which you do not see.

The source of consciousness cannot be an object in consciousness. To know the source is to be the source. When you realize that you are not the person, but the pure and calm witness, and that fearless awareness is your very being, you are the being.

Give attention to the witness to break the spell of the known, the illusion that only the perceivable world is real.

To become free your attention must be drawn to the witness.

I see only consciousness, and know everything to be but consciousness, as you know the pictures on the cinema screen to be but light.

It is enough to shift attention from the screen onto oneself to break the spell.

The world you can perceive is a very small world, entirely private. The world is but a reflection of imagination. Take it to be a dream and be done with it. What you call survival is but the survival of a dream. By forgetting who you are and imagining yourself a mortal creature you create so much trouble for yourself that you have to wake up, like from a bad dream.

Some go on a journey and come back, some never leave. What difference does it make since they travel in dreamlands, each wrapped up in his own dream. Only the waking up is important.

Once you have seen that you are dreaming, you shall wake up, but you do not see because you want the dream to continue. A day will come when you long for the ending of the dream. You become willing to pay any price. The price will be dispassion and detachment, the loss of interest in the dream.

What you call survival is but the survival of a dream.

Death is preferable to it. There is a chance of waking up.

As life before death is but imagination, so is life after death. The dream continues.

There is no such thing as a separate person. Everything is the cause of everything.

Everything is as it is because the entire universe is as it is.

The universal trend towards balance, harmony and unity, at every moment, whatever is happening, is always for the best.

The law of balance rules supreme.

Every action creates a reaction, which balances and neutralizes the action. There is a continuous cancelling out, and in the end it is as if nothing happened.

All appearance and disappearance presupposes a change against a changeless background.

There must be a source from which all flows, a foundation on which all stands.

Consciousness itself is the source of everything.

At the root of all creation lies desire.
The projecting power is imagination prompted by desire.
Desire and imagination foster and reinforce each other.

Desire for embodied existence is the root-cause of trouble.

All that is, lives and moves and has its being in consciousness.
I Am in and beyond that consciousness.
I Am in it as the witness.
I Am beyond it as Being.

Before the mind happens, I Am.
Before all beginnings, after all endings, I Am.
All has its being in the I Am that shines in every living being.

The dreamer is one.
I Am beyond all dreams.
I Am the light in which all dreams appear and disappear.

You must realize yourself as the silent witness of all that happens. Your consciousness raised to a higher dimension, from which you see everything much clearer.

Awareness comes as if from a higher dimension.

The witness that stands aloof is the watchtower of the real, the point at which awareness, inherent in the unmanifested, contacts the manifested.

Find the immutable center where all movement takes birth. Be the axis at the center, not whirling at the periphery. Nothing stops you except fear. You are afraid of impersonal being.

If you desire nothing, then you are as good as dead, or you are the Supreme.

Self-identifications are patently false and the cause of bondage.

You create bondage when you desire and fear and identify yourself with your feelings.
You identify yourself with your desires and become their slave.
Your bonds are self-created as chains of attachment.

Your attachment is your bondage.

There is trouble only when you cling to something.
It is your desire to hold onto it that creates the problem. Let go.
When you hold onto nothing, no trouble arises.

Cut the knot of self-identification.

Freedom means letting go.
Spiritual maturity lies in the readiness to let go of everything.

Liberation is never of the person, it is always from the person.

One becomes self-conscious only when caught in the conflict between pleasure and pain, which demands choice and decision. The personal self by its very nature is constantly pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. The ending of this pattern is the ending of the self. The ending of the self with its desires and fears enables you to return to your real nature.

As long as you are locked up with your mind and ego, you cannot go further. Were you really at war with your ego, you would question its reality. You don’t question because you are not really interested. You are moved by the pleasure-pain principle, fear and desire, which is your ego. You are going along with your ego, not fighting against it. You are not even aware how totally swayed you are by personal considerations. Be in revolt against your ego, for the ego narrows and distorts. It is the worst of all tyrants. It dominates you completely.

As long as you take yourself to be a person, a body and a mind, separate from the stream of life, having a will of its own, pursuing its own aims, you are living merely on the surface and whatever you do will be short-lived and of little value, mere straw to feed the flames of vanity.

Ego is in resistance until the very end.

In the end you get fed up with the waste of time and energy.

When you refuse to play the game, you are out of it.

The world is but a mistaken view of reality, unreal to its core.

As long as you believe that only the perceivable world is real you remain its slave.

The world is but a show, glittering and empty. It is there as long as I want to see it and take part in it. When I cease caring, it dissolves. It has no cause and serves no purpose. It appears exactly as it looks, but there is no depth in it nor meaning.

Once you realize that there is nothing in this world which you can call your own, you look at it from the outside as you look at a play on the stage or a picture on the screen. To know the picture as the play of light on the screen gives freedom from the idea that the picture is real. In reality I only look. Whatever is done is done on the stage.

Joy and sorrow, life and death, they are real to the man in bondage.

To me they are all in the show, as unreal as the show itself.

To the Self the world is but a passing show. The world just sprouts into being out of nothing and returns to nothing. As long as the Self is merely aware, there is no problem.

You can stop it any moment by switching off attention.

You make it possible by giving it attention.

My life is a succession of events just like yours. Only I Am detached and see the passing show as a passing show, while you stick to things and move along with them.

There is no such thing as an expression of reality. Neither action nor feeling nor thought express reality. I know that life itself is only a make-believe.

I just watch events happening, knowing them to be unreal.

Externalization is the first step in liberation. Step away and look. Separate yourself and watch. The physical events will go on happening, but in themselves they have no importance.

Seeing that you are not the person you take yourself to be, step out and look from the outside.

It is disinterestedness that liberates.

If you lose interest, you break the emotional link that perpetuates the bondage.

The unreal appears to be real only because you believe in it. You impart reality to it by taking it to be real. Doubt it and it ceases.

Nothing stands in the way of your liberation here and now except for your being more interested in other things. You must see through them as mere mental errors.

As long as you are interested in your present way of living, you will shirk from the final leap into the unknown.

Moments when one feels empty and estranged are desirable moments, for it means the soul has cast its moorings and is sailing for distant places.

The search for reality is the most dangerous of all undertakings for it will destroy the world in which you live.

As long as there is the sense of identity with the body, frustration is inevitable. It is because of your illusion that you are the doer.

As long as you have the idea of influencing events, liberation is not for you. The very notion of doership, of being a cause, is bondage.

There is no such thing as free will. Will is bondage. You identify yourself with your desires and become their slave.

To imagine that you are in control is the aberration of the body-mind. There is a universal power that is in control. The illusion of personal control is in the mind only. Stand without desire and fear, relinquishing all control. This is the shortest way to reality.

Some unknown power acts and you imagine that you are acting.

You are merely watching what happens.

You must begin by being the dispassionate observer.

Then only will you realize your full being.

Only in complete self-negation is there a chance to discover our real being.

The urge must come from within as a wave of detachment.

The way to truth lies through the destruction of the false. To destroy the false you must question your most inveterate beliefs.

Of these the idea that you are the body is the worst.

Destroy the wall that separates; the I-am-the-body idea.

Investigate your world, apply your mind to it, examine it critically.
Scrutinize every idea about it.
Everything must be scrutinized and the unnecessary ruthlessly destroyed.
There cannot be too much destruction.
For in reality nothing is of value.

Everything is a play of ideas. In the state free from ideation nothing is perceived. The root idea is I Am. It shatters the state of pure consciousness and is followed by the innumerable sensations and perceptions, feelings and ideas which in their totality constitute God’s world. The I Am remains as the witness, but it is by the will of God that everything happens.

We have enclosed ourselves in a cloud of personal desires and fears, images and thoughts, ideas and concepts.

You can only start from where you are. You are here and now. You cannot get out of here and now. You are aware of thinking, feeling, doing. You are not aware of your being. You can only be aware of your being here and now.

Wherever you go, at all times, you carry with you the sense of being present and aware, here and now. It means that you are independent of space and time. Space and time are in you, not you in them. It is only your self-identification with the body, limited in space and time, that gives you a sense of limitation. In reality, you are limitless.

Struggle to find out what you are in reality. To know what you are you must first investigate and know what you are not. Discover all that you are not: body, feelings, thoughts, time, space, this or that. Nothing, concrete or abstract, which you perceive can be you. The very act of perceiving shows that you are not what you perceive. The clearer you understand that on the level of mind you can be described in negative terms only the quicker will you come to the end of your search and realize that you are the limitless being.

All limited existence is imaginary.
Even space and time are imaginary.
Pure being, filling all and beyond all, is not limited.
All limitation is imaginary.
Only the unlimited is real.

The witness is both real and unreal, the last remnant of illusion, the first touch of the real. The moment you say I Am, the entire universe comes into being.

Your world is created with the emergence of the I Am idea. In your world everything has a beginning and an end. Timeless being is entirely in the now.

Once you are well established in the now, you have nowhere else to go.

From my point of view everything happens by itself, quite spontaneously.

I do nothing. I just see them happen.

What begins and ends is mere appearance. The world can be said to appear but not to be. It is your memory that makes you think that the world continues. Memory creates the illusion of continuity. I see the world as it is, a momentary appearance in consciousness.

You are the source of reality, a dimensionless center of perception that imparts reality to whatever it perceives, a pure witness that watches what is going on and remains unaffected.
It is only imagination and self-identification with the imagined that encloses and converts the inner watcher into a person.
The person is merely the result of a misunderstanding.
In reality there is no such thing.
Feelings, thoughts and actions race before the watcher in endless succession.
In reality there is no person, only the watcher identifying itself.

I am like a cinema screen, clear and empty.
The pictures pass over it and disappear, leaving it as clear and empty as before.
The screen intercepts and reflects the pictures. These are lumps of destiny, but not my destiny; the destinies of the people on the screen.
The character will become a person when he begins to shape his life instead of accepting it as it comes-identifying himself with it.
All this I perceive quite clearly, but I am not in it.
I feel myself as floating over it, aloof and detached.
There is also the awareness of it all and a sense of immense distance as if the body and the mind and all that happens to them were somewhere far out on the horizon.
To myself I Am neither perceivable nor conceivable.
There is nothing I can point out and say “this I am”.

Delve deeply into the sense I Am and you will discover that the perceiving center is universal. All that happens in the universe happens to you, the silent witness.

Whatever is done is done by you, the universal and inexhaustible energy.

There can be no universe without the witness, no witness without the universe.

Be aware of being conscious and seek the source of consciousness.

In pure being consciousness arises.
In consciousness the world appears and disappears.
Consciousness is on contact, a reflection against a surface, a state of duality.
The center is a point of void and the witness a point of pure awareness; they know themselves to be as nothing.
But the void is full to the brim.
It is the eternal potential as consciousness is the eternal actual.

The Supreme is both creation and dissolution, the beingness of all beings, the ground from which all grows, alone. Words do not reach there, nor mind.

The totality of all mental projections is the Great Illusion.
When I look beyond the mind I see the witness.
Beyond the witness is infinite emptiness and silence.

As long as you are engrossed in the world, you cannot know yourself. To know yourself, turn your attention away from the world and turn within.

Turn within. I Am you know. Be with it all the time, until you revert to it spontaneously. There is no simpler and easier way.

Know yourself as you are. Stay with the sense I Am.

Everyone sees the world through the idea one has of oneself. As you think your Self to be, so you think your world to be. If you imagine your Self as separate from the world, the world will appear as separate from you and you will experience desire and fear. Your own creative power projects on it a picture and all your questions refer to the picture.

Your questions are about a non-existing person. Realize that whatever you think yourself to be is just a stream of events; that whatever happens, comes and goes, is not real; that you alone are, the changeless among the changeful. Separate the observed from the observer and abandon false identifications. Be a fully awakened witness of the field of consciousness.

Whatever you perceive is not you. It is there in the field of consciousness, but you are not the field and its contents.

To realize that is the end of all seeking. You come to it when you see all you think yourself to be as mere imagination and stand aloof in pure awareness. It is not difficult but detachment is needed. It is the clinging to the false that makes the truth so difficult to see. Discard what is not your own until nothing is left which you can disown. You will find that what is left is nothing.

In reality nothing happens. Nothing happens to space itself. In pure consciousness nothing ever happens. Onto the screen of the mind destiny forever projects its pictures, and thus illusion constantly renews itself. The pictures come and go as light intercepted by ignorance. See the light and disregard the pictures.

You can spend an eternity looking elsewhere for truth, all in vain. You must begin in yourself, with yourself. Realize that your world is only a reflection of yourself. All you need is to stop searching outside what can only be found within.

Dive deep into yourself and find the source from where all meaning flows. It is not the superficial mind that can give meaning. You are not what you think yourself to be. You cannot think yourself to be what you have not experienced. You are the perceiving point, the nondimensional source of all dimensions, which is as nothing and yet the source of everything. You can know what you are not, but you cannot know your real being. You can only be what you are.

In reality there is only the source, dark in itself, but making everything shine with the light of consciousness.

Unperceived, it causes perception. Being nothing it gives birth to all being.

It is the immovable background of motion.

The Supreme state neither comes nor goes. It is.
It is a timeless state, ever present.

In the timeless state there is no Self, no I Am, no witness.

Awareness is beyond all.
Awareness is primordial; it is the original state.
Awareness is undivided, aware of itself.

Death gives freedom. To be free in the world you must die to the world.

I Am dead already. Physical death will make no difference. I Am timeless being.

The realized man is beyond life and death. Life and death appears to him but a way of expressing movement in the immovable, change in the changeless.

He has died before his death and he saw that there was nothing to be afraid of.

The moment you know your real being you are afraid of nothing.

Do nothing. There is nothing to do. Just be.
To be, you must be nobody.
You make yourself mortal by taking yourself to be a body.
That which is alive in you is immortal.

For the path of return naughting oneself is necessary.
My stand I take where nothing is.
To the mind it is all darkness and silence.
It is deep and dark, mystery beyond mystery.
It is, while all else merely happens.
It is like a bottomless well, whatever falls into it disappears.

Reality is essentially alone.
To know that nothing is, is true knowledge.

First we must know ourselves as witnesses only, dimensionless and timeless centers of observation, and then realize that immense ocean of pure awareness.

On the surface of the ocean of consciousness, names and forms are transitory waves. Only consciousness has real being, not its transformations.

As long as you are enmeshed in the tribulations of a particular personality, you can see nothing beyond it. Ultimately you will come to see that you are neither the particular nor the universal. You are beyond both.

The witness-consciousness is the reflection of the real in the mind. The real is beyond.

The witness is the door through which you pass beyond.

The door that locks you in is also the door that lets you out.

I Am is the door. Stay with it until it opens. It is always open, but you are not at it.

Between desires and freedom from all desires is an abyss which must be crossed.

Cross the door and go beyond.

Go back to that state of pure being, the I Am in its purity before it became contaminated with false self-identifications. Abandon them all. Focus the mind on pure being. In it all disappears: myself, the life I live, the world around me. Only peace and unfathomable silence remains.

The experience of the inner void is an explosion into reality.

Realization is in discovering the source and abiding there.

By itself nothing has existence

Your true home is in nothingness.

The timeless and spaceless reality is undifferentiated, the infinite potentiality, the source. It cannot be perceived, but can be experienced as ever witnessing the witness, perceiving the perceiver, the origin and end of all manifestation, the root of time and space.

Realization is sudden and irreversible. You rotate into a new dimension.

There is no journey to Supreme reality. One is undeceived only.

You see everything as it is. The world of illusions is left behind.

Adapted from the teachings of Osho:

We call Buddha the awakened one. This awakening is really the cessation of inner dreaming. When there is no dreaming you become pure space. This non-dreaming consciousness is what is known as enlightenment.

If you go on inquiring ‘Who am I?’ you are bound to come to the conclusion that you are not. This is an inquiry to dissolve. There is no answer. Only the question will dissolve. There will be no one to ask ‘Who am I?’ And then you know.

When the ‘I’ is not, the real ‘I’ opens. When the ego is not, you are for the first time encountering your being. That being is void.

You fall into an abyss, and the abyss is bottomless: you go on falling. That is why Buddha has called this nothingness emptiness. There is no end to it. Once you know it, you also have become endless. At this point Being is revealed: then you know who you are, what is your real being, what is your authentic existence.

The inner emptiness itself is the mystery.
When the inner space is there, you are not.
When you dissolve, the inner emptiness is there.
When you are not, the mystery will be revealed.
You will not be a witness to the mystery, you will be the mystery.

Other testimonies:

Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

We are such stuff as dreams are made on
And our little life is rounded with a sleep.

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil.

To be, or not to be, that is the question-Shakespeare

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

I discovered the secret of the sea in meditation upon a dewdrop-Kahlil Gibran

He must dare to leap into the Origin so as to live by the Truth and in the Truth, like one who has become one with it. He must become a pupil again, a beginner; conquer the last and steepest stretch of the way, undergo new transformation. If he survives its perils then is his destiny fulfilled; face to face he beholds the unbroken Truth, the Truth beyond all truths, the formless Origin of origins, the Void which is the All; is absorbed into it and from it emerges reborn-Eugen Herrigel

“I cannot live with myself any longer”. This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the ‘I’ and the ‘self’ that ‘I’ cannot live with. Maybe, I thought, only one of them is real.

I was so stunned by this strange realization that my mind stopped. I was fully conscious, but there were no more thoughts. Then I felt drawn into what seemed like a vortex of energy. It was a slow movement at first and then accelerated. I was gripped by an intense fear, and my body started to shake. I heard the words ‘resist nothing’, as if spoken inside my chest. I could feel myself being sucked into a void. It felt as if the void was inside myself rather than outside. Suddenly, there was no more fear, and I let myself fall into that void.

I knew that something profoundly significant had happened to me. I understood that the intense pressure of suffering that night must have forced my consciousness to withdraw from its identification with the unhappy and deeply fearful self, which is ultimately a fiction of the mind. This withdrawal must have been so complete that this false, suffering self immediately collapsed, just as if a plug had been pulled out of an inflatable toy. What was left was my true nature as the ever-present ‘I am’: consciousness in its pure state prior to identification with form. Later I also learned to go into that inner timeless and deathless realm that I had originally perceived as a void and remain fully conscious-Eckhart Tolle

When the joy of my own emptiness began to wane I decided to rejuvenate it by spending some solitary time gazing into my empty self. Though the center of self was gone, I was sure the remaining emptiness, the silence and joy, was God Himself. Thus on one occasion, with full hedonistic deliberation, I settled myself down and turned my gaze inward. Almost immediately the empty space began to expand, and expanded so rapidly it seemed to explode; then, in the pit of my stomach I had the feeling of falling a hundred floors in a non-stop elevator, and in this fall every sense of life was drained from me. The moment of landing I knew: When there is no personal self, there is also no personal God. I saw clearly how the two go together-and where they went, I have never found out-Bernadette Roberts

Now she’s in freefall. At the precise moment of impact, the planet will disappear, and nothing will take its place. Her freefall won’t end, but it will no longer feel like falling because there will no longer be anything to reference it against. This is where dual awareness ends. From then on she will live in boundless awareness, never again able to differentiate between self and non-self. Abiding non-dual awareness.

Truth is one, is non-dual, is infinite, is one-without-other. Truth is dissolution, no-self, unity. There’s nothing to say about it, nothing to feel about it, nothing to know about it. You are true or you’re a lie, as in ego-bound, as in dual, as in asleep.

All belief systems are just the stories we create in order to deal with the void. Ego abhors a vacuum, so everybody’s scrambling to create the illusion of something where there’s nothing. Belief systems are simply the devices we use to explain away the unthinkable horror of no-self.

We erect ego to compensate for the lack of direct self-knowledge. There is no true self to perceive, there is only false self and no-self. One looks for true self and finds nothing. It’s the dread of that nothingness that keeps one’s attention outwardly fixed.

We are madly, desperately, insanely afraid of the truth, and it is that fear that walls us off from our unbounded nature.

The wall separating the awakened and unawakened states is a force field empowered by the emotional energy of fear. Only ego-death defeats the barrier because the barrier is ego itself.

It is the emotional energy of fear that erects and maintains the egoic shell.

Fear of what? Fear of no-self. The nameless, faceless dread of non-being. Not just fear of death, which anyone can deny or explain away, but fear of nothingness, which no fairytale can fix.

Truth is, non-truth isn’t. The false is purely an apparition; it exists only in the eye of the beholder. There is no true self and the false self is irrelevant, a character in a dream.

Understanding consensual reality as a dreamstate is unbreakable. Life is but a dream. Reality has no basis in reality.

Enlightenment is comprehensive. It’s an entirely different paradigm. My reality is not your reality.

I view dualistic reality as a dream.

All beliefs, all concepts, all thoughts, they’re all false. If you’re going for the truth, you’re not taking any of them with you. Nothing that says two, not one, survives.

Self is an untruth.

To know the lie is to hate it; to see it is to slay it.

There is no such thing as objective reality. Nothing can be shown to exist. Nothing but the subjective I am is true.

The truth of the situation is that eventually, there’s nothing. Infinity. Eternity. The void.

Like a child flicking a switch that turns the world off like a light. What can you say when the thing that ends isn’t within a context, but context itself?

There is the place where all the paradoxes disappear and where no questions remain, but there’s no point trying to describe this place.

That’s where I am now. Empty space is my reality. The void. No-self. I abide in non-dual, non-relative awareness.

Come see for yourself-Jed McKenna

The I Am in movement creates the world; the I Am at peace becomes the Absolute-Nisargadatta Maharaj

Do not try to bend the spoon. That is impossible. Only try to realize the truth.
What truth?
There is no spoon. Then you’ll see it is not the spoon that bends, but only yourself.

The Path to Spiritual Awakening

Begin by bringing yourself into focus. Focus on your own sense of being present. Center yourself. Be with yourself. Know yourself to be a presence of consciousness at the center of the world you perceive existing in the present moment. Focus on the now. Be here now to be with yourself. Become aware of your own beingness and presence.

Allow yourself to feel connected. You feel connected when you allow the flow of energy through your body, mind and world to come into alignment. Put your trust in the normal flow of things to sort out what is for the best. Do nothing at a personal level. Just watch from your own point of view as you allow things to play out in the normal way. Accept everything as it appears to be every moment with no desire to change anything or for anything to be any different than it appears to be. Accept everything as it is, which is the appearance of the things that you’re perceiving. Stop interfering with the normal flow of things. Lose that personal bias in the focus of your attention. Lose that personal bias in the way you express emotions. Stop emotionally projecting yourself into an imaginary past or future as you remember a personal past and anticipate a personal future.

Your desire to control things is self-defensive, but you’re only defending the survival of a personal illusion of what you really are. You’re defending the survival of a personal self-concept, which is only an illusion of what you really are that appears in the world you perceive. To keep your attention focused only on the present moment, you have to stop defending the survival of that illusion of being a person in the world you perceive.

You have to stop trying to control things in your futile attempt to defend the survival of a personal illusion of yourself. You have to stop expressing fear and desire as you pursue pleasure and avoid pain in a futile attempt at self-defense. You have to stop expressing fear and desire as you emotionally attach yourself to things and are unwilling to let go. You have to stop regretting a personal past and hoping for a better personal future. You have to stop remembering a personal past and anticipating a personal future by expressing emotions and projecting yourself into an imaginary past or future.

Focus on the now. Turn your attention away from the world you perceive, which is only an appearance of things, look within, and refocus your attention on your own sense of being present. Bring yourself into focus. Know yourself to be a presence of consciousness at the center of the world you perceive existing in the present moment.

Externalize yourself from the world you perceive. Sever your emotional attachment to your character that appears to live a life in the world you perceive and cut the knot of personal self-identification. Stop caring about the life your character appears to live in that world. Whenever you sever an emotional attachment to something, it feels like something dies inside because that thing becomes dead to you. When you sever your emotional attachment to your character and stop caring about the life your character appears to live in the world you perceive, your character becomes dead to you. That’s the only way you externalize yourself from the world you perceive and stop emotionally identifying yourself with the personal form of your character that appears in that world.

When you sever your emotional attachment to your character and externalize yourself from the world you perceive, you step out of that world and see that world from the outside. You see that world from a higher level of consciousness, like a movie you’re watching as the animated images of the movie are displayed on a movie screen. You see that the whole thing is imaginary and is an illusion. You see your character as an illusion of what you really are and you lose interest in paying attention to that illusion.

When you see your character as an illusion and lose interest in your character, you’re able to withdraw your attention away from the life your character appears to live in the world you perceive and withdraw your investment of emotional energy in that life that emotionally animates that life. That’s how you sever your emotional attachment to your character. That’s when you can turn your attention away from the life your character appears to live in the world you perceive, look within, and refocus your attention on your own sense of being present for that world. That’s when you can know yourself to be a presence of consciousness at the center of the world you perceive that exists in the present moment. That’s where you have to stabilize the focus of your attention.

When you stabilize your attention on your own sense of being present, you come to know yourself as a presence of consciousness at the central point of view of the world you perceive. You become aware of your own motion as a point of consciousness. You see that the world you’re perceiving is only animated because of your own motion as a point of consciousness. Just like the animated images of a movie being displayed on a movie screen, you see that your own motion as a point of consciousness is animating the images of your own world. Just like the light of a movie projector, you see that your own light of consciousness is illuminating and projecting the images of your own world.

When you see that world as an illusion and lose interest in emotionally animating that world, you totally withdraw your attention away from that world and stop moving. When you stop moving and stop emotionally animating the world you perceive, that world disappears from existence from your own point of view. You enter into an ultimate state of free fall and fall into the void. Your individual being returns to its source of undivided pure being as your individual consciousness dissolves back into the undifferentiated consciousness of the void. That’s when your consciousness rises to its highest possible level, and you see things from the infinite silence, darkness and emptiness of the void.

Spiritual awakening occurs at both an individual and absolute level. You awaken within the dream when you surrender and do nothing at a personal level. You awaken from the dream when you sever all emotional attachments and do nothing at an absolute level.

Why I Dislike Star Trek and Like the Bhagavad Gita

Except for a brief period of time when Ronald Moore was writing scripts for Star Trek, I find the whole Star Trek enterprise to be dislikable.

The basic problem with Star Trek is that it’s not really science fiction. There is no science in Star Trek. Star Trek is an adolescent fantasy of what science is all about. A typical Star Trek episode has no more real science in it than you’ll find in an Iron Man comic book. These are stories for adolescents. What’s called science in Star Trek is only an adolescent fantasy.

The other problem with Star Trek is that it’s an adolescent fantasy of what life is all about. There are only two types of characters in a typical Star Trek story: sentimental agents that want to save life in the universe at all costs, and evil monsters that want to destroy all life or destroy the universe. In the spirit of Lord Krishna, who gave the ultimate instructions for how one becomes spiritually enlightened in the Bhagavad Gita, I often find myself rooting for the evil monsters:

Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds

Never the spirit was born
The spirit shall cease to be never
Never was time it was not
End and beginning are dreams

The unreal has no being
The real never ceases to be

All the sentimental agents of Star Trek are dislikable because they suffer from the same kind of immaturity found in adolescents. The nature of this immaturity is emotional attachment. Children emotionally attach themselves to their parents or caregivers because that’s how they survive in the form of a body. That body survival is what we call life. All emotional attachments are immature, as they represent a kind of needy, dependent, immature kind of love. This is the kind of love that allows the body to survive. As long as you take yourself to be a body, that’s the kind of love you’ll express. That’s the kind of love found in the sentimental agents of Star Trek, who are only concerned with saving life. This is the kind of love found in adolescents and children. This emphasis on the needy, dependent, immature kind of love found in adolescents and children is what makes Star Trek dislikable, unless you have the maturity of an adolescent.

Lord Krishna’s instruction to abandon all emotional attachments and reach a state of spiritual maturity is what makes the Bhagavad Gita likable.

The Harsh Business of Awakening

If it sounds like I’m being harsh, that’s because the process of awakening is a harsh business. You have to be relentless in action and single-minded in purpose. Contrary to what the Buddha is reported to have remarked about the role of compassion in awakening, the emotional energy that drives the process of awakening is more akin to self-hatred. Compassion is an outcome of the process, not its driving force. The expression of self-hatred is what counteracts the expression of self-love found in all emotional attachments. Self-destructiveness counteracts self-defensiveness and self-preservation. To quote Jed McKenna: “To know the lie is to hate it; to see it is to slay it“. When you clearly see the lie of your own personal self-concept to the point that you come to hate it, that’s when you become willing to destroy it. The way you destroy your personal self-concept is by severing emotional attachments. When you sever an emotional attachment, you’re bringing to an end the expression of the self-love that underlies the love of embodied existence upon which all personal self-concepts are based. The only reason you will ever bring that expression of self-love to an end is if you develop self-hatred, which is hatred for the lie of embodied existence.

Every time you sever an emotional attachment, it feels like something dies inside because part of your emotionally energized, mentally constructed ego-structure dies away. In effect, you’re killing your own personal body-based self-concept or ego through the process of severing emotional attachments, which is the only way you can awaken to the truth of what you really are. Your ego has to become dead to you. To use a useful metaphor, when you’re living a life at the level of the ego, you’re asleep and dreaming. The only way you can awaken to the truth of what you really are is through a process of severing emotional attachments, which leads to ego death. You have to die at the level of the person, and that ego death is always a harsh business because you are the one who has to kill it. The way you kill your ego is by severing emotional attachments.

Excerpts from Jed McKenna:

Battling past the ego to get to the truth has been at the heart of countless spiritual teachings. Ego-death as a means to no-self is what this journey is all about. Anyone headed for truth is going to get there over ego’s dead body or not at all.

Spiritual enlightenment is self-defeating. It is a battle we wage upon ourselves. Truth is a uniquely challenging pursuit because the very thing that wants it is the only thing in the way of it. It’s a battle we must die to win. The great enemy is the very self that wages the war. When self is destroyed, who wins?

Enlightenment is untruth-unrealization, and self is an untruth. Despite the apparent paradox, being enlightened means there’s no one left to be enlightened.

It doesn’t require knowledge to be enlightened any more than it requires knowledge to obey the law of gravity or to be bathed in sunlight. Enlightenment is nothing more than truth realization. If anything requires knowledge and effort and seemingly superhuman powers of imagination it’s not truth but delusion.

Spiritual awakening is about discovering what’s true. Anything that’s not about getting to the truth must be discarded. Truth isn’t about knowing things. It’s about unknowing. It’s not about becoming true, it’s about unbecoming false so that all that’s left is truth.

The deepest truth of any person is no-person. You don’t wake up by perfecting your dream character; you wake up by breaking free of it. There’s no truth to the ego so no degree of mastery over it results in anything true. Putting attention on the ego merely reinforces it.

The process of awakening looks like it’s about destroying ego, but that’s not really accurate. You never completely rid yourself of ego-the false self-as long as you’re alive, and it’s not important that you do. What matters is the emotional tethers that anchor us to the dreamstate; that hold us in place and make us feel that we’re a part of something real. We send out energetic tendrils from the nexus of ego like roots to attach ourselves to the dreamstate, and to detach from it we must sever them. The energy of an emotion is our life force, and the amount of life force determines the power of the emotion. Withdraw energy from an emotion and what’s left? A sterile thought. An empty husk. In this sense, freeing ourselves from attachment is indeed the process of awakening, but such attachments aren’t what we have, they’re what we are.

All attachments to the dreamstate are made of energy. That energy is called emotion. All emotions, positive and negative, are attachments. Humans are emotion-based creatures and all emotions derive their energy from one core emotion; fear. Fear cannot be confronted or slain because it is fear of nothing, of no-self. The desire to slay fear is itself a fear-based emotion. Fear can only be surrendered to; the thing feared, entered.

The enlightened view life as a dream, so how could they possibly differentiate between right and wrong or good and evil? How can one turn of events be better or worse than another? Of what real importance is anything in a dream? You wake up and the dream is gone as if it never was. All the characters and events that seemed so real have simply vanished. The enlightened may walk and talk in the dream world, but they don’t mistake the dream for reality. Members of movie audiences don’t leap out of their seats to save characters in the film. If they did, they would be hauled off to the nearest mental health facility and treated for a delusional disorder.

The only sin is ignorance. Ignorance of what? It’s not the kind where you don’t know something. It’s the kind where you do know something that’s not true. The false self is ignorance. Ego. The personality. Everything you think of as you.

Ignorance isn’t an aspect of self; it’s the essence of self. It’s not nothing where there should be something, it’s the delicate weaving of something from nothing. That nothingness woven into somethingness is what you call reality. The part you call you is ego.

Truth doesn’t need to be sought because it isn’t lost. It’s not at the end of some path waiting to be discovered. It’s not the result of practice or growth or learning. Truth is everywhere at all times, never absent, never distant. Truth isn’t the tricky thing, it’s the simplest thing there is. Truth is that which cannot be simplified further.

The fact is that no amount or combination of knowledge can bring about truth realization. It’s not an emotion or a state of consciousness. Truth realization isn’t a state of consciousness.

It is not possible to knowledgeably choose or want spiritual enlightenment. To desire it is to misunderstand it. Ego cannot desire egolessness. One does not undergo the process of awakening out of love for the true but out of hatred for the false; a hatred so intense that it burns everything and spares nothing.

If you want to be more true, then the way to do that is by becoming less false. Go inside yourself with the spotlight of discrimination-and illuminate it. Illumination destroys it. Lies disappear when you really look at them because they never had real substance, they were only imagined.

Success in realizing one’s true nature is absolutely assured because it’s one’s true nature. The greatest wonder isn’t that you’ll make it back, it’s that you made it away. Struggling to achieve truth is as preposterous as struggling to achieve death. Neither death nor gravity, nor tomorrow’s sunrise is as certain as the fact that everyone will end up fully “enlightened”, regardless of the “path” they take.

Everything is in a constant process of returning to its true state. To really be ‘off the path’ would mean to be outside of consciousness. There is no such place.

Enlightenment is about truth. It’s not about becoming a better or happier person. It’s not about personal growth or spiritual evolution. There is no higher stakes game in this world or any other, in this dimension or any other. The price of truth is everything, but no one knows what everything means until they’re paying it. In the simplest terms, enlightenment is impersonal, whereas what is commonly peddled as enlightenment is personal in the extreme.

Enlightenment is exactly the same for anyone, anytime, anyplace, whereas the journey to it is as unique and varied as there are people to make it, the nature of delusion, the ego, false constructs, and human nature.

There’s nothing wrong with being a dream character, unless it’s your goal to wake up, in which case the dream character must be ruthlessly annihilated. If your desire is to become the best dang person you can be, then rejoice, you’re in the right place, the dream-state, the dualistic universe. If your interest is to cut the crap and figure out what is true then you’re in the wrong place and you’ve got a very messy fight ahead and there’s no point in pretending otherwise.

Have you already confirmed duality as truth? Have you confirmed that you are a separate physical being in a physical universe with the ability to perceive?

No one can say ‘I am enlightened’ because there is no ‘I’ to it. There is no such thing as an enlightened person. My personality, my ego, what appears to be me, is just an afterimage-a physical apparition based on residual energy patterns.

You have to have a clear desire, a strong and specific intent.

If you don’t know where you’re going then there’s no basis for judging one direction better or worse than another.

I want to stop being a lie. I want to stop not knowing who and what and where I am. I want to stop being confused and unclear. I want to stop pretending lies are true and that I understand things when I don’t. I want to stop playing make-believe and find out what’s real. I want to know what’s true. I will give anything to do it. I would rather be dead than continue a life of ignorance and self-deceit.

People completely in character. No inkling that things may be other than they seem. Still shackled in Plato’s cave. The degree to which one is unaware of one’s fraudulent nature might be considered the degree to which one is the grip of Maya, delusion, the dreamstate. Increased awakeness would naturally translate into greater dissatisfaction with fraudulence, falseness and delusion, and a corresponding desire to know what is real. Extend the line forward and it results in a complete break with ego and an awakening into one’s true nature.

You, the reader, are at the exact center of the universe, your universe. It’s all yours, it’s all about you, and you are all alone in it. Anything that tells you otherwise is a belief, and no belief is true.

The Gita is the dialogue between the false self and the true state; the bridging of the paradigm gap. The prize to be won in this battle is not wealth or fame or power, but the transition from untrue to true, from dream to awake, from delusion to reality.

Truth is beyond opposites. Duality is a dream. The truth contains no element of the false and the false contains no truth. There is only truth and illusion, and within illusion there is only fear and denial. Fear of truth is the foundation upon which Maya’s Palace of Delusion is erected. She has no power but that we give her. Denial of fear is the motivation underlying all activities in which humans engage. This is Vanity in the biblical sense: I have seen all the works that are done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a chasing after wind.

The end of illusion is the end of you.

The worms won’t care how your epitaph reads and the truth of you will outlive time itself.

We need the boundaries ego provides. They’re a necessary part of life in the amusement park. Self is the complex, shifting set of dimensions that give us shape and form and which distinguish us from other shapes and forms. The amusement park isn’t ‘come as you are’, it’s a costume party. Who you come as doesn’t matter, only that you come as someone. You can’t come as no-one.

Spiritual enlightenment is the state in which the self is free of all delusion, including self itself. The process of becoming enlightened is a deliberate act of self-annihilation. It is the false self that does the killing and the false self that dies; a suicide in all but the physical sense. Because there is no true self to fill the vacancy created by the passing of the false self, no-self remains.

To know the lie is to hate it; to see it is to slay it.

Before enlightenment I believed my ego was me, then enlightenment comes along and no more ego, only the underlying reality. Now it’s after enlightenment and this ego might be slightly uncomfortable or ill-fitting at times, but it’s all I’ve got. The idea that your ego is destroyed in the process of becoming enlightened is roughly correct, but it’s not complete. Before enlightenment, you’re a human being in the world, just like everyone you see. During enlightenment you realize the human being you thought you were is just a character in a play, and that the world you thought you were in is just a stage, so you go through a process of radical deconstruction of your character to see what’s left when it’s gone. The result isn’t enlightened-self or true-self, it’s no-self. When it’s all over it’s time to be a human being in the world again, and that means slipping back into costume and getting back on stage. Now you’re actually in the audience, watching the drama. I could never mistake the play for reality again, or my character for my true state. Happily, I never know what my character is going to do or say until he does it or says it, so the whole thing stays interesting.

The you that you think of as you is not you. The you that thinks of you as you is not you. It’s just the character that the underlying truth of you is dreaming into brief existence. Enlightenment isn’t in the character, it’s in the underlying truth.

Even now it takes a conscious effort to maintain my false self, my dream character, to animate it, to keep it running. And this trajectory I’m on will take me as close to nonexistence as anyone can get and still have a body. In other words, I will continue to channel progressively less and less energy into my dreamstate being, my teaching will reduce down to its most refined and least tolerant form, my interest will withdraw from the world, and I will become as minimal as a person can be.

Ego doesn’t need to be killed because it was never really alive. You don’t have to destroy your false self because it’s not real, which is really the whole point. It’s just a character we play. What needs to be killed is that part of us that identifies with the character. Once that’s done-really done, and it can take years-then you can wear the costume and play the character as it suits you, in the character but not of the character.

You’re not struggling to climb from hell into heaven, you’re just having an in-the-body experience. It’s not evil, it’s just life, and when it’s over, you die, easy as falling off a log.

We live in fear of death. We don’t want to think about it, we don’t want to look at it, we don’t want to acknowledge that it exists. No matter how we might try to deny it, death is the fact of life. We can turn away from it, but we can’t push it away. It is always with us. Death is what’s left when everything else is gone. Death awareness is a vehicle out of the state of death denial in which we reside.

This isn’t about death in the abstract; it’s about death in the most personal, intimate sense. Death is the meaning in the dream, the dreamstate shadow of no-self.

We have taken death out of life and that allows us to live unconsciously. Death never left, we just turned away from it. If we wish to awaken-and that’s a mighty big if-then we must welcome death back into our lives.

Death awareness is the universal spiritual practice. Death always delivers. It slices through every lie, ridicules every belief, mocks every vanity and reduces ego to absurdity. Death doesn’t lie. Death awareness is about life awareness and life awareness is about waking up. Death isn’t morbid, fear is morbid. Death doesn’t oppose life, fear opposes life.

What’s more mind bending than your own looming death? What could be more devastating to ego than the contemplation of meaninglessness and insignificance, of nothingness, of no-self?

Death denial, the fear of no-self, is at the very heart of the paralysis that grips all spiritual aspirants and everyone else as well.

Death denial, in all its many forms, is the hole at the bottom of which we sit huddled and trembling, scared to death of our own lives.

Death awareness is the act of coming out of that hole and beholding the world in which we live and the creation of which we are a part. To venture out of that hole, to declare freedom from childish beliefs, to turn toward death, to look the unslayable arch-demons of futility and insignificance in the eye, this is where the journey begins, and no journey begins elsewhere.

Futility. No belief is true. Life has no meaning. Nothing we do matters. All is vanity and a striving after wind. We’re going to die and it will be as if we never lived. Everything we think is true is false, all our beliefs are delusions, and everything we know is a lie. Nothing we do can make any possible difference.

The process of waking up can look a lot like a massive breakdown, a complete break from what one has assumed to be reality. That’s why depression can be a perfectly rational response to a highly irrational situation, namely, life, especially when the depression revolves around futility and insignificance. You can’t be much more futile or insignificant than a character in a dream. The way to defeat rational depression is not to try to turn back from it or to cling to the illusion of meaning, but to plow right on through it and see what’s on the other side.

The only escape possible is one person on their own, alone, slipping off by themselves into the black. You have to go into that darkness you’ve spent your life avoiding and denying. You have to get to the place where you’d rather go into that blackness than continue avoiding it.

For this whole dualistic universe thing to work, it’s important that everyone doesn’t just go wandering off; that they stay on stage and play their role. Fear is the glue that holds the whole thing together and keeps everyone in character.

The fundamental conflict in the spiritual quest is that ego desires spiritual enlightenment, but ego can never achieve spiritual enlightenment. Self cannot achieve no-self. The fundamental conflict can only be resolved by altering the equation. It’s cheating, but everyone is okay with it. Spiritual enlightenment gets redefined as something attainable by ego. Ego gets to continue the noble quest. No one gets the grail, but no one really wanted it anyway. The quest for the grail is about the quest, not the grail.

Waking up isn’t a theoretical subject one masters through study and comprehension, it’s a journey one makes, a battle one fights.

The vast majority of spiritual seekers are motivated by desire so the failure of their search is a foregone conclusion, as is amply evidenced by mankind’s history of near total inability to find the one thing that can never be lost. How is it possible that something as simple as seeing what is manages to elude our most devout seekers and our greatest minds? Because no one really wants what awakening really is. The true desire that drives the process of awakening is more akin to a psychotic madness-a wickedly profound and protracted crisis.

Waking up from the dreamstate is a very straightforward business. It doesn’t take decades. It doesn’t look like tranquility or like a calm, peaceful mind. It doesn’t look like saving others or saving the world or even saving yourself. It doesn’t look like a thriving marketplace where merit is determined by popular appeal or commercial success. Waking up looks like a massive mental and emotional breakdown because that’s exactly what it is, the granddaddy of all breakdowns.

To move forward, you must figure out exactly what is obstructing you. Whatever it is, it isn’t really there; it has no reality, no substance. It’s your own creation, a phantom lurking in the shadows of your mind, a shadow demon. Your obstructions are your demons, and your demons are shadow dwellers. They live and thrive in the half-light of ignorance, so the way to slay a demon is by illuminating it with the full force and power of your focused attention; by looking at it, hard. Banish shadow with light and see for yourself that no obstruction exists, nor ever did. We create our demons and we feed them. To awaken we must slay them.

The person on a search and destroy mission must have a way of making-the subtle demonisms of life and thought-assailable. Destroying thoughts with thoughts. Seeing things clearly. Nothing false can survive illumination by a steady and focused mind.

Come up with the right question. There’s always only one. All other questions are fear-based ego-sparing time-killers. Forget concepts and ideas, forget past and future, forget mankind and society, forget God and love, forget truth and spirituality. Find that one question; the exact question that ego doesn’t want you to ask. Put your full attention on it. That’s how progress is made. Everything else is a stall tactic.

“Who am I?” That is the question. That’s the question at our very center. Life turns on that center, and everyone who is alive has one of two relationships to that center: Toward or Away. Toward is perfectly simple. Away is infinitely complex.

Stay with the question. Don’t worry about the answer, just get the question right. Examine your assumptions. Soon enough the question itself has been destroyed and, along with it, many layers of delusion.

The question itself is the obstacle to progress, not the lack of an answer. The question is the key. Once we truly understand the question, we’ll have the desired answer. The desired answer is always the removal of the obstruction a correct question represents.

The answer is never the answer. It’s not that I know the answers, it’s that I don’t know the questions. I see that the questions that haunt a mind have no reality outside of it. There’s only one true answer and it lies at the exact center of the question.

You want answers, but there are no answers, just beliefs, and if you want to awaken, either within or from the dreamstate, beliefs are not your friends. They only hold you back. Demanding answers and explanations is an egoic stall tactic.

The same tactic employed by all people all the time in order to maintain the state of denial necessary to continue a meaningless existence in a fictional universe.

We are both protagonist and antagonist in this conflict, both attacker and defended. We can’t win by fighting. The very thing that fights, that resists, is the thing we seek to overthrow. Only by vanquishing ego can we prevail. Only in surrender can we find victory. This is the part so few get, and fewer get beyond. If you want to say all religions and spiritual teachings share a core truth, it can only be this: Surrender is victory.

To surrender is to relinquish the illusion of control, which initiates the death part of the death/rebirth process, which is the transition from the bondage of the womb-like Segregated State to the freedom of the ever-expanding Integrated State. No faith or belief is required to accomplish this act of surrender, only clear-seeing. When one begins to understand ego and fear for what they really are, then this process becomes as easy and natural as dropping a heavy weight.

Surrender follows naturally from seeing what is.

The person who arrives at this point is not the person who goes beyond. In this process, resistance is conquered and non-resistance takes its place, acceptance, recognition, surrender. The segregated self is slain and the integrated self is born. To the onlooker it looks like one thing becomes the other, but to the participant it is quite unmistakably the end of one thing and the beginning of another. The necessary letting-go is itself a kind of death. It is the primary death/birth process, and nothing proceeds until it happens.

Ego is obstruction, surrender is flow. Surrender is the basis and precursor of growth. There is no growth possible within egoic constraints, only the illusion of growth. Once we free ourselves, we come into alignment.

Nothing else means anything. No amount of knowledge or understanding or spiritual experience could be of any value if you’re still stuck in the segregated state. You have one goal, die to the flesh and be born of the spirit.

There is only one possible objective, you must die to be reborn, and to do that begin the process of thinking clearly and freeing your thoughts from emotion-dense clouds of self-limiting belief.

It’s all about finding and illuminating the next obstacle to our progress. It is not concerned with finding answers, but questions. There are no answers to be found, only questions that define our limitations. Understand the question, and you destroy the limitation. It is through courageous thought and clear-seeing that delusion is destroyed.

The difference between us isn’t that I’m enlightened and you’re not. The difference between us is that I know it and you don’t. I possess selfless awareness and you don’t.

To me you’re a minor character in my dramatic dreamscape. A semi-coherent energetic pattern making a brief appearance on the stage of my awareness.

In the world but not of the world means that you’re playing a role on the stage, but you don’t confuse your role with yourself or the stage with reality. It means you know that you’re playing a character. It’s like lucid dreaming. You achieve normal waking consciousness within the dream so that you’re in the dream but not of the dream. There’s no benefit to understanding it. It’s something you’re familiar with because it’s your reality or you’re not because it isn’t.

All we’re really talking about is unbelieving what is untrue, not seeing what is not really there, getting back to our clean uncontaminated uncorrupted state.

This isn’t about personal awareness or self-exploration. It’s not about feelings or insights. It’s not about personal or spiritual evolution. This is about what you know for sure, about what you are sure you know is true, about what ‘you are’ that is true. With this process you tear away layer after layer of untruth masquerading as truth. It burns bridges that can never be rebuilt, and the only real reason to do it is because you can no longer stand not to.

Every step in the process of awakening has three components: Seeing what needs to be killed, killing it, and cleaning up the mess. You must process the loss. A step begins with seeing and understanding. That seeing and understanding becomes the very thing that destroys the thing seen and understood. But it doesn’t end there. Just because you killed something doesn’t mean you killed your attachment to it. Seeing the thing is the beginning of killing the thing, and killing the thing is the beginning of detaching from it.

With every step we leave behind that which we move beyond.
The pain giving thing is the thing removed; when it’s gone, so is the pain.

The thing one leaves isn’t just the prison of self but self itself, so the freedom thus won is something of a booby prize.

Every step is a loss and as long as there’s more to lose, there are more steps to take.
Everything is lost. Nothing is gained.

How can you want nothing? Words ascribed to the Buddha are often fraudulent, but there’s one very clear exception: “Truly, I have attained nothing from total enlightenment”. It’s not so much that he didn’t gain anything as that he did gain nothing.

The idea of the individual self, valid and separate, unravels very quickly under any serious scrutiny. All beliefs do. What takes time and effort is to put the idea of self under such scrutiny and make sense of what’s left after the belief is gone.

From the unawakened side, the gate blocking one from enlightenment is enormous and impassable. Delusion fills one’s entire field of view because it resides prior to perception. Once delusion has been destroyed, we can see it never really existed.

Whenever you’re sure you’ve arrived, there is always further.

The word further is like a talisman, a power object. We must pull it out and gaze upon it after every battle, every time we think we must be done, that we must, at last, have arrived. As much as it may seem otherwise, there is always further.

When you reach the top, keep climbing.

The price of truth is everything. The price of truth is nothing. This is another way of stating the gateless gate paradox.

There is nothing to learn, nothing to know, nothing to practice, nothing to become.

Why is nothingness better than somethingness? Why is unity better than duality? Why is truth better than the lie? Why is the infinite better than the finite? Why is awake better than dreaming? Our fragile little bubbles are what let us float around in the infinite, able to enjoy the experience of somethingness-good and bad-where only nothingness exists. The bubble is a magnificent amusement park and leaving it is a damn silly thing to do unless you absolutely must.

The dreamstate is a big amusement park and I would never encourage anyone to try to escape. That would be as absurd as suggesting that you commit suicide for your own good.

Enlightenment is literally the biggest nothing of all time. Enlightenment is life-negative. Spiritual enlightenment is pointless and meaningless, and should only be sought by those who have absolutely no choice in the matter.

Who wants to spend the rest of their life tumbling through infinite space?

You Create Your Own Falseness

You create your own falseness. You create it by paying attention to it. You create falseness both at the level of your emotionally driven self-identification with the emotionally animated form of a person that appears in the world you perceive, which is the falseness of your personal self-concept, and at the level of being a perceiver of that world, which is the level of being a Self. You can only awaken to the truth of what you really are if you destroy delusion. You have to destroy delusion at the level of both your emotionally energized mentally constructed personal self-concept and your own sense of being a Self and having your own individual existence.

The sense of individual existence, the sense of being present, the sense I Am, is part of delusion. The sense of being a Self, as a perceiver of your own world, is how the illusion is created. If you really want to destroy delusion, you have to destroy that sense of individual existence. You only have a sense of individual existence when you focalize yourself into a focal point of perceiving consciousness at the center of your own world as you perceive that world, which you do as you focus your attention on that world. That’s also how you emotionally energize that world with your own motion and how you illuminate that world with the light of consciousness. If you want to awaken to your own truth, you have to stop perceiving, energizing and illuminating that world. You have to stop being present for that world. You have to stop focusing your attention on that world and stop shining the light of consciousness on that world. You have to stop moving, emotionally animating and energizing that world. You have to stop perceiving that world.

In reality, you do not exist. You are part of the illusion, both at the level of being a person in the world you perceive and at the level of being the perceiver of that world. Both levels are an illusion. In reality, there is no you. The truth of existence has no individual existence. Individual existence is part of the illusion. At the ground level of truth, there is only the undivided ocean. At the level of individual existence, you are only a drop of water that momentarily spits itself out of the ocean. If you want to awaken to your own truth, the truth of existence, the ground of being, in which there is no individual existence, you have to return to and dissolve back into the ocean.

The instructions for awakening are very clear. You have to look within, but you really can’t look within as long as your attention is firmly focused on the world you perceive and on your false identity as a person in that world. That false identity is emotionally driven, which is why you have to remove all the emotional energy from the mental construction of your personal self-concept if you really want to awaken. The way you take all the emotional energy out of the mental construction of your personal self-concept is by surrendering to divine will and severing emotional attachments. That is what you have to do first. You have to detach yourself from the world you perceive before you can deconstruct your personal self-concept. Deconstructing your self-concept means you no longer emotionally energize it. You do that through surrender and by severing emotional attachments. The goal of detaching yourself from everything in the world you perceive is to have nothing in that world so you can do nothing, be nothing and know nothing.

When you surrender, you can only know yourself to be a presence of consciousness at the center of the world you perceive. When you detach yourself from that world, you see that world from a higher level of consciousness with a sense of distance and detachment, like a movie you’re watching. You know yourself to be a presence of consciousness at the center of that world, out in the movie audience, and not to be a character in the movie, which is no more real than an animated image projected from a movie screen to your point of view in the audience. You see the whole thing as an illusion and you lose interest in paying attention to an illusion. That’s when you can withdraw your attention away from the illusion, look within and shift your attention onto your own sense of being present at the center of the illusion. You have to detach yourself from the world you perceive before you can know yourself to be that presence of consciousness at the center of that world. When you finally become selfless and desireless, when you stop moving and become motionless, when you stop focusing your attention on that world and stop focusing yourself into a focal point of consciousness, when you become unfocused, that’s when the world you perceive disappears from existence, your own sense of individual existence dissolves away, you pass through the gateless gate, you fall into the void, and your individual being dissolves back into the undivided being of the void like a drop of water that dissolves into the ocean.

People in Character

Consciousness wears its ego like a costume. That costume is really nothing more than a personal form of information projected like an image from the observer’s own holographic screen to its central point of view and emotionally animated in the flow of energy. The observer is only a moving point of perceiving consciousness at the center of its own holographic world that is emotionally identifying itself with the emotionally animated personal form of its character.

People act completely in character when consciousness emotionally identifies itself with its character. The costume is emotionally constructed and the character is emotionally animated, which is why consciousness emotionally identifies itself with its ego. The problem isn’t really emotions. The problem is emotional self-identification. When you emotionally identify yourself with your character, you’re wearing the costume too tightly and your behavior is completely in character. When you totally emotionally identify yourself with your character, you don’t know what you really are at the level of being a presence of consciousness. You only know what you are at the level of the emotionally animated form of a person you perceive, which is like the central character of a movie you’re watching. You’ve totally identified yourself with your character in the movie and you’re ignoring the true nature of what you really are as the consciousness that’s out in the audience watching the movie. When you do that, you’re completely in character. The solution for emotional self-identification isn’t to abandon the expression of all emotions. If you did that, you’d have nothing. What do you have without your emotionally animated costume? Nothing but your own being. The solution for emotional self-identification is to wear the costume of your character loosely. Wear your emotions loosely and don’t take them too seriously. Don’t take your emotionally animated embodied existence too seriously. Don’t defend the survival of your body as though your existence depends on it. Stop focusing your attention on the survival of your character in the movie you’re watching as though your existence depends on it.

When you stop focusing your attention on your character, you see your character as the central character of a movie you’re watching, and you stop expressing emotions in a personally biased way. You stop expressing self-defensive emotions that only defend the survival of your character as though your existence depends on it. When you stop doing that, the behavior of your character naturally comes into alignment with the normal flow of energy through the world you perceive. You don’t have to do anything to come into alignment with the normal flow of things except to stop focusing your attention on your character in a self-defensive, personally biased way and stop trying to defend the survival of your character as though your existence depends on it.

When you stop doing that, the behavior of your character naturally comes into alignment with the normal flow of things. You wear the costume of your character loosely. When you come into alignment, you feel connected and your focus of attention naturally shifts to expressing creativity. Your attention is no longer focused on your character, but on expressing creativity. This state of feeling connected and expressing creativity is the natural state of a presence of consciousness that knows itself to be the consciousness present at the center of its own world.

Karma

People use the word karma as though it’s something magical or mysterious, but it’s not. Karma is your emotional inheritance. Karma is all about the survival of your body. You can thank evolution, natural selection and the survival of the fittest body for that emotional inheritance. Karma is all about the emotional mechanisms that defend the survival of the body, like the expression of fear and desire and the pleasure-pain principle. The only reason the body survives is because evolution has designed these survival mechanisms to defend the survival of the body. That’s all you’re really doing when you express fear and desire or when you feel pleasure as a desire is satisfied, which feels good, or when you feel pain as a desire is frustrated, which feels bad. All you’re really doing at the level of the body is moving toward whatever feels good and moving away from whatever feels bad. When the same thing causes you to feel both good and bad, you’re really in a pickle. You don’t know how to resolve the emotional conflict.

Emotions are survival mechanisms. That’s all emotions are. Emotions can be understood as the coherently organized flow of energy through a form of information that allows for the coherent self-replication of that form. The expression of emotions defends the survival of that form, hence, they’re survival mechanisms. The expression of emotions is not the same as the awareness of that emotional expression. People tend to conflate their awareness of their emotions with the expression of their emotions, but they’re not the same. Consciousness, or the ability to know about, is not the same as a form of information or the flow of energy that animates that form, which is what is known about. This conflation occurs because nothing can appear to happen if consciousness does not know about that happening. Everything that happens, happens within the awareness of consciousness. Every time an emotion is expressed, consciousness knows about it. Every living thing, even a virus, that expresses some kind of survival mechanism is expressing emotions, and consciousness knows about all those emotional expressions.

At the level of the body, survival mechanisms only defend the survival of the form of an emotionally animated body in the world. At the level of the ego, survival mechanisms only defend the survival of the form of a mentally constructed, emotionally energized, body-based personal self-concept. The important point to realize is that it is your consciousness that is aware of your body and is aware of your ego. It is your consciousness that is aware of the expression of these survival mechanisms that defend the survival of the body and the ego. If you want to awaken to the truth of what you really are, you have to become aware of yourself at the level of your consciousness. Nisargadatta says that it is not difficult to become aware of yourself at the level of consciousness, but emotional detachment is necessary. You have to stand back in pure awareness and watch the events of your life happen as though those events are only like a movie that you’re watching. That’s what it means to emotionally detach yourself from those events. The expression of emotions is simply the flow of energy that’s animating those events. When you detach yourself, you see those events as no more real than the animated images of a movie that are being projected from a movie screen to your point of view out in the movie audience. That kind of emotional detachment is the only way you can awaken to the truth of what you really are.

Conditioning

You’re trying to break free from your conditioning, but the problem isn’t the conditioning that occurs in a single life-time. The problem is Darwinian conditioning that takes place over millions of life-times. That’s what the survival of the fittest body is all about as you express desire in the pursuit of pleasure and express fear in the avoidance of pain. That’s how you emotionally project yourself into an imaginary past and future as you do things at a personal level and move toward what feels good and move away from what feels bad. That’s how you remember a personal past and anticipate a personal future. That’s the nature of your conditioning.

The only way you can break free of this conditioning is to surrender, accept everything as it is every moment with no desire to change anything or to make anything different than it appears to be in the present moment, and do nothing at a personal level. You just watch from your own point of view as things play out in the normal way. That’s the only way your attention can become focused on the present moment, which is where you have to focus your attention if you are to bring yourself into focus and know yourself to be nothing more than a presence of consciousness at the center of the world you perceive that exists in the present moment.

Awakening isn’t about what’s good or bad. Awakening is only about what’s true and false. Awakening is only about realizing the true nature of what you really are. All concepts of good and bad, all emotional expressions of fear and desire, all experiences of pleasure and pain, only apply at the level of the illusion of what you really are. You cannot discover the truth of what you really are in the illusion. If you want to know the truth, you have to leave the illusion behind. You have to leave all experiences of good and bad behind. In the truth, nothing is good or bad because the truth is nothingness.

The experiences of good and bad, of pleasure and pain, all emotional experiences, only apply at the level of the illusion, which is the virtual reality movie that you’re perceiving as you perceive the form of things and the flow of emotional energy that animates the form of all things. Awakening has nothing to do with what appears to be good or bad in the illusion, only with true and false, the true nature of what you really are, which is the consciousness that’s perceiving the virtual reality movie from its own point of view as all the images of the movie are projected to its central point of view from the movie screen and are animated in the flow of energy. The only true thing you can ever know about yourself is your own sense of being present, your own beingness and presence. In relation to all the projected and animated forms of the virtual reality movie and the animating flow of energy, that beingness of consciousness is nothingness. You can falsely believe yourself to be a form and emotionally identify yourself with an emotionally animated form that appears in the virtual reality movie, or you can know the true nature of what you really are, which is the nothingness of the beingness of consciousness.

There’s nothing intentional about whatever appears to happen in the virtual reality movie. Your only intention was to play a virtual reality game, which has to be created the only way the game can be created. Once the game is created the only way it can be created, the rules of the game spontaneously emerge in the game. These are rules like the laws of physics, Darwinian evolution, natural selection, the pleasure-pain principle, and the survival of the fittest body. It’s not intentional. That’s just the way the game is organized.

The illusion is unreal, no more real than the projected and animated images of a virtual reality movie. The illusion is imaginary. All concepts of past and future are imaginary and only apply at the level of the illusion. All concepts of good and bad are emotional and only apply at the level of the illusion. The only thing that’s really real and really exists, that has its own being, is the true nature of what you are, which is consciousness itself.

The reason you can’t awaken is because your attention is totally focused on the illusion. As long as your attention is focused on whatever appears to happen in the illusion and you continue to express your personally biased desire for embodied existence in the illusion as you emotionally animate your body and mind in the illusion by expressing personally biased self-defense emotions in the illusion that defend the survival of the form of your body that appears in the illusion as though your existence depends on it, you can’t awaken because you’ve emotionally identified yourself with the embodied form of a person that appears in the illusion. You’re totally focused on pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain as you express fear and desire, which is your desire to do things in the illusion at a personal level. That’s the nature of your conditioning. That’s why your attention is totally focused on the illusion. You emotionally identify yourself with the emotionally animated form of your body as you express self-defensive emotions. You feel emotionally self-limited to that personal form, which only perpetuates the vicious cycle of personal self-defense and personal self-identification as you defend body survival as though your existence depends on it. In reality, your existence does not depend on body survival. Your body is just another emotionally animated form that appears in the illusion. You’re only defending an illusion of what you are, but before you can stop defending the illusion, you have to see the illusion as an illusion. You have to step out of the illusion and see it from the outside.

You can only awaken if you see the illusion as an illusion, lose interest in paying attention to the illusion, withdraw your attention and investment of emotional energy away from the illusion, look within, and refocus your attention on your own sense of being present as a presence of consciousness existing in the present moment at the center of the world you perceive. That sense of being present is where you need to stabilize the focus of your attention if you are to awaken to the truth of what you are. That’s how you break free from and overcome your conditioning.

Concepts can only take you so far in the awakening process. No one can tell you how to awaken, not even yourself. A direct perception is needed to awaken. You have to see the illusion as an illusion for yourself. You have to see the nature of the illusion for what it really is, as an illusion of what you really are. You have to directly see for yourself that you are nothing that you can ever perceive. Everything that you can perceive is a part of the illusion. That’s why you have to externalize yourself and see things from the outside. That’s when you can really look within, withdraw your attention away from the illusion, and refocus your attention on your own sense of being present as a presence of consciousness existing in the present moment at the center of the world you perceive. That sense of being present is where you need to stabilize the focus of your attention if you are to awaken to the truth of what you are.

A direct perception is needed. You have to directly see for yourself that you are nothing that you can perceive, that everything you can perceive is part of the illusion, that the true nature of what you are is nothing that you can perceive. That’s why you have to externalize yourself, step out of the world you perceive, see things in that world from the outside, sever your emotional attachment to your character that appears as a part of that world and cut the knot of personal self-identification. Your character has to become dead to you. You have to stop caring about whatever appears to happen to your character in the illusion. You have to lose interest in paying attention to an illusion. That can only happen when you externalize yourself and see the nature of the illusion from the outside. You have to directly see the nature of the illusion for yourself.

When you lose interest in the illusion and withdraw your attention away from the illusion, you also sever your emotional attachment to your character by withdrawing your investment of emotional energy in the illusion that emotionally animates your character. That’s how you stop emotionally identifying yourself with your character. That’s how you externalize yourself and see your character from the outside. That’s when you can look within, withdraw your attention away from the illusion, and refocus your attention on your own sense of being present as a presence of consciousness existing in the present moment at the center of the world you perceive. That sense of being present is where you need to stabilize your focus of attention if you are to awaken to the truth of what you are. That’s the only way you can overcome your conditioning and break free.

Life and Death

Life-forms appear to live a life in the world due to the coherent self-replication of their forms in a recognizable way over a sequence of observational events in the context of the emotional animation of the life-form. The coherent organization of information that underlies the coherent self-replication of the life-form is a consequence of the way entangled qubits of information are organized in a holographic world. The life-form always goes through a period of development of form a