The mind of man is a remarkable entity. Within it, he can calculate the rocket-fuel requirements from Cape Canaveral, Florida to the Sea of Tranquility on the moon, while simultaneously holding a love for and trust in his guardian angel.

This is humanity’s paradox: We are at once masters of our world and cowering animals terrified of our own impending demise. In the words of the poet, Yeats, “We are eternal beings fastened to dying animals.”

Throughout their existence, humans have searched for messages in the arrangement of sticks, animal bowels, and tea leaves; in crystal balls, Tarot cards, Ouija boards, palms of the hand, planetary movements, lumps in the skull; through the wisdom of spirit guides, prophets, gods, sorcerers…even science, for clues to their destiny, their purpose, the meaning of it all—The Plan.

What is it about the universe and their place in it that bewilders humans so profoundly?

Humans are enthralled with the magic, the inscrutability of it all. We sees ourselves at the universe’s center, as somehow integral to the Great Mystery, but at the same time, we distrust what we discover, what we know about how the universe works. We suspect that the world is capricious; randomness, uncertainty, and unpredictability create anxiety in us. Humans need to be assured that their lives are important.

The belief that we can somehow control nature is our illusion of salvation. Belief becomes obsession, addiction, because we are ultimately controlled by the universe rather than becoming the master of it. The need to predict and control our fate causes us to compulsively reduce the universe to fragments—to dissect, categorize, examine our world in an attempt to fashion it to own will. We invent science to understand our world, to lord over it, to harness it for our own uses, so that our own destiny is guaranteed. We become slaves to our inventions.

We also seek reassurance in gods and other miraculous processes to guide us, appease our fears of insignificance and loss of control. This drives us to invent order and purpose through magic and superstition, supplanting natural laws. We flounder and prostrate ourselves before our gods and our technology. We then become more miserable than ever because deep down we suspect the success we attribute to our magic are random and unpredictable

It is our doubt in our universe—and ultimately in ourselves—that incites us to impose impossible conditions on our fellow humans, seek justification of our belief systems through involving others in our rituals and ceremonies. We gather our flocks to believe as we believe, that we may continue to believe we are right, and therefore safe.

It is a deadly and limiting road humanity has chosen to walk. For in our few thousand years as thinking animals, we have failed to achieve our goal: making the universe behave. We know on some level that we are at the mercy of natural laws that we do not understand and cannot control. We function on despair, ultimately destroying all that we love.

Why am I here? How has “all of this” come to be? What purpose does it serve? What meaning does my life have in the Great Mystery? What am I supposed to do, or be? How do I matter in the Big Picture?

If you have ever asked yourself—or anyone else—any of these questions, then you have encountered this book to help you understand how you “fit” in the scheme of Everything That Is.

You will begin a magnificent journey—investigating the nature of reality and knowledge, how the universe works, the role consciousness plays in it, and your function as a conscious constituent of the Great Mysterious. May your life begin anew as you grasp the contents of these pages.

You will encounter mini-glossaries in appropriate sections throughout this book. This is to ensure that we speak the same language, that we understand the words used to have the same meaning. As it turns out, people do not have the same understandings of word definitions—even words we use commonly, such as love and try. There are emotional connotations associated with words that color their lexical denotations.

Words may denote something specific and concrete (the dictionary—lexical—definition) or connote something emotional and abstract. “Loaded” words are full of connotation. They contain subtle nuances and carry emotional baggage (a prime reason advertisers and politicians carefully select certain words in their campaigns). Consider the denotation or connotation of these pairs of similar words:

Consider how the following words can have different connotations, depending on your values:

The accents we place on words in speech—or writing—is known as prosody. Prosody is also important to our understanding of language. Consider the following sentence, and how the change in word accent changes the entire meaning of the sentence:

We may have heard of quantum physics—the so-called “new” physics. We may know that cosmology is the scientific inquiry into the origins and evolution of the universe. What then, is quantum cosmology?

Quantum refers to the world of the very small—subatomic particles—while cosmology concerns the largest structure known: the universe itself. The unity of these two disparate worlds gives rise to a new paradigm of reality—an understanding of how the very small and the very large interrelate.

The progression of physics from the classical model to the quantum model, likewise, has necessitated scrutiny and interpretation from outside physics, from disciplines such as cognitive science, psychology, and especially philosophy. While science is proficient at collecting and analyzing data, psychology allows us to understand how our perceptions affect our interpretations of reality, and philosophy and cognitive science have given scientific findings meaning. It is the strong interplay of these complementary disciplines that is at the heart of this book. Everything is connected to everything else. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the unity of quantum mechanics, cosmology, psychology, and philosophy. Indeed, it will become evident to readers that it is impossible to speak of one field of inquiry without invoking another.

While physics allows us to ask what is, philosophy compels us to ask why it is. Cosmology permits us to measure the universe, to trace its origins, and to contemplate its possible fate. But, we often find that the greater the knowledge, the deeper the mystery. When cosmology revealed that the universe may have sprung from nothingness, science paused, utterly dumbfounded. Philosophy stepped in and asked, “Why something from nothing?”

First, it is important to appreciate that the definition of nothing diverges among scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers. Nothing derives from the two words no and thing.

Nothing means zero to a mathematician—a placeholder for an absent value. It is as important as something, as silence is as important as musical notes to a musician. Computer programmers understand that nothing really is something in binary code, because without zero, one has no meaning. Zero—or nothing—means “off” or to close a circuit; one means “on” or to open a circuit.

To a philosopher, nothing has a deeper meaning. Nothing may mean something of no consequence. It may mean something that does not exist. (But, if we think of something that does not exist, then it is not nothing—it is something in our imaginations!) Nothing may also be a frightening metaphysical entity devoid of and opposed to being.

To a scientist, nothing simply means the absence of something—that is, something detectable. But as scientists continually discover, nothing may turn into something when the tools of observation become more sophisticated. This is the kind of nothing to which physicists and cosmologists refer: Nothing that may actually be something as we refine our observational techniques, extend our perceptions through technology. In physics, nothing is frequently a temporary perceptual state.

Another problem we may encounter in our philosophical journey through quantum cosmology is the definition of is. Lexically, is simply means a state of being actual. However, as we will discover, what is “actual” may not be what we perceive. Again, we are limited—or extended—by the sophistication of our observational tools.

Philosophers construct diverse and provocative visions of the universe and reality. Which philosophy do you favor?

What is reality? This is one of the most enduring philosophical questions ever.

Aside from the lexical definition of “the state of actually being or existent,” reality may be more simply defined as anything experienced. Well, what does that mean?

It means that reality is essentially subjective; that it depends on something—or someone—to experience it. Does that mean that there is no such thing as objective reality—of a reality “out there” independent of someone to experience it? By this definition, yes.

Human material existence—reality—is limited by ideas, not by stuff. It is what happens in the mind that constitutes and defines reality, resulting in the experience of it. We know this because there are two different kinds of reality: consensus reality and non-consensus reality. We can experience both kinds of reality, but for most people, our shared—consensus—experience of reality dominates.

The idea that we perceive things as they “actually are” has been refuted by philosophers and other investigators for thousands of years (case in point: optical illusions.) The “mundane” conscious, awake reality most of us experience on a daily basis may be considered consensus reality, in that we agree that certain things are actual, and consent to describe them and interact with them in specific ways. We reach a consensus that certain things are so, and that other things are not so. We concur on the truth. (However, as we will find out later, acknowledging a truth is not synonymous with accepting or endorsing it!)

We are able to enjoy magicians and illusionists, without believing that what they do is “real.” We delight in the understanding that we are being fooled, and are able to grasp that equating fiction with falsehood would be a mistake and diminish our enjoyment of magic. Indeed, without illusions, a clear grasp of reality is nearly impossible.

Everyone has a personal model of reality. Our perceptions structure our understanding of reality; what we think we know may be nothing more than an interpretation of our experiences. Humans have access to only the manifestations of reality, not its inherent unity. Reality always appears distorted by the imperfections of our human senses and the filters of our human minds.

Proponents of “perceptual reality” claim that the laws of physics are a mere agreement (consensus) within a community of scientists about how to discuss nature, that physical laws are products of concepts. We experience what we experience because that’s all we can experience.

However, as we will see later, mathematics is able to reveal aspects of reality that no one has ever observed or experienced. And just because we can’t see something, doesn’t mean we can’t infer its existence from the things we can see.

The most important thing science has learned about reality is the relationship and connectedness of everything. Not one property of reality is fundamental—all properties follow from the properties of other components. The overall consistency of their mutual interactions determines the structure and behavior of the entire web of existence.

Non-consensus reality describes any experience that is essentially unshared with the majority of the population. It is unique to specific mind or body states, and there is little agreement as to its character or meaning. Non-consensus reality is internal and personal, and is difficult to convey to others. Four percent of the population—the majority female—experiences non-consensus reality in which spiritual, religious, or paranormal incidents dominate everyday events. Non-consensus reality is commonly attributed to “fantasy-prone” personalities, mental illness, hallucinogens, or exposure to unusual environmental influences, but it may still impart great meaning for those whose experience it, and therefore has value for that reason alone.

Novel mental states are frequently initiated by brain abnormalities and alterations in chemistry, producing a variety of unusual experiences.

An anatomical abnormality may produce perceptual distortions such as synesthesia, a rare sensory condition in which the normal five senses become “cross-wired,” generating unusual effects such as tastes that have shape and sounds of certain colors, and may be due to a fault in the sensory channeling area of the brain called the locus coeruleus.

External environmental influences can alter perceptions of reality. Anomalous electromagnetic fluctuations—from solar flares, seismic activity, radio and microwave transmissions, and other sources—can produce disturbances in the brain resembling epileptic seizures. Epileptic seizures in the left temporal lobe can generate intense mystical experiences.

Illness, injury, and stress can revise perceptions of reality. Migraine headaches, epileptic seizures, dreams, delirium tremens, high fever, sensory deprivation, hypoxia, and psychosis can all generate visual distortions. (The visual disturbances most commonly reported comprise four geometric patterns—lattices, spirals, tunnels, and cobwebs.)

Hallucinogens such as mescaline and LSD can also produce geometric visual distortions. Drug flashbacks (especially those due to LSD) may produce sensations of “strangeness” and unreality, even physical dissociation. (Habitual drug-users may confuse altered states of consciousness with spirituality.)

Hallucinations and dreams can impart meaningful and true information—even life-altering revelations. Dreaming is a “natural” altered state. It is interesting to note that in dreams, we frequently observe ourselves as if outside ourselves. (Sometimes we even see ourselves from the outside when recollecting memories—a sure sign that memory is not accurate; it is constructed and modified!)

Out-of-body and near-death experiences are altered states that usually occur during traumatic events. Many researchers believe that out-of-body experiences (OBEs) may be nothing more than an altered state born of the human compulsion to construct models of the self. The near-death experience is frequently expressed as heavenly, peaceful, and loving, but at least 50% of those experiencing NDEs report them as hellish, like being trapped in a terrifying emptiness. Altered states can even be purposefully self-induced through meditation for purposes of healing and relaxation. However, habitual meditation may also produce adverse effects, such as suggestibility, neuroticism, depression, insomnia, nightmares, dysphoria, anxiety, and psychosis.

The ultimate non-consensus reality is insanity—the recurrent or permanent break from consensus reality. The most interesting thing about insanity is that its definition and diagnosis are not static—they change with the decades, with changes in social “norms” and standards of acceptable behavior. Some researchers assert that insanity is merely an adaptation to stressful circumstances, to needs gone unmet for too long; others reason that insanity may be a heightened awareness of a reality above and beyond the one on which we agree. In fact, all great spiritual teachers challenged social norms to the point they could have been diagnosed as insane.

As consciousness expands, so does the risk of insanity (or of being judged insane). Schizophrenia frequently meets three or more of the criteria for mystical experience. Mysticism that persistently places the subject at the center of the action is usually regarded as mental illness. Powerful mystical experiences can retard psychological development and support delusions of grandeur. Frequent mystical or religious experiences may lead to narcissism (to the point of pathology, in which the ego expands to encompass everything), fanaticism, even hatred.

The most important thing to know about non-consensus reality is that the current consensus reality paradigm was most likely non-consensus in nature at some time in the past. Most of our accepted truths were once regarded as balderdash, as delusions of twisted minds, before they were accepted as satisfactory representations of reality. This is assuaged by the distinction between belief and empiricism, discussed in “Part III—How Do We Know What We Know?”

Ultimately, reality itself may be nothing more than metaphor—a description of our experiences shaped by the symbolism and allegory of the times in which we live. Our brains tell us stories about what we experience, and we relate these stories to others, share our experiences through imagery and elaborate translations, such as language. As metaphors vary throughout history and from culture to culture, reality must also vary culture to culture…and mind to mind. In the end, we may each live in our own metaphorical universe. In a metaphorical sense, we may not “really” share the same space or time with others.

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