Transcription
Materialists love to throw rocks at idealists, both figuratively and, if given the chance, literally. If consciousness creates reality, they argue, then why does a rock remain a rock whether you believe in it or not? A fair question.
A rock is only a rock because your mind has trained itself to see it that way. Before humans existed, there were no rocks. There was just an amorphous mass of vibrating atoms, utterly indifferent to labels.
Before Saint-Exupéry would become a writer, he was an aviator in the French Air Force. And so, one day, he was tasked with flying mail from France to South America, a journey that, at the time, was very, very dangerous. By an unfortunate twist of events, his plane went down in the Sahara Desert. He was stranded without water in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth.
As Saint-Exupéry wandered through the sand dunes, he had what can only be described as a profound vision, an interaction that seemed more like a dream. A young boy, who appeared to be not of this world, approached him. The boy spoke to him about the nature of consciousness and the importance of the invisible. As Saint-Exupéry later mused, it was, in fact, the vision of a little prince, though the story had not yet been written and the boy had not yet come to life on paper.
Through this surreal ordeal, Saint-Exupéry's perspective shifted from a desperate battle against the elements to something far more profound: an intimate dialogue with life itself. He stumbled into a revelation, seeing existence not as a cruel test but as a strange, wondrous riddle.
The next day, he saw a Bedouin caravan, and this time, it was not only a vision. Later, Saint-Exupéry remembered seeing the caravan as an act of imagining, a desire of life into reality.
Consciousness doesn't need a brain to exist. You see it in the way a flower blooms toward the sun, how a river is carving its path through mountains. In a way, everything is constantly aware of its environment, adapting and adjusting, responding and reacting. We have to become free from the limiting idea that consciousness is only human or that it's confined to our minds. It's not about whether things have a mind of their own, but that everything, from the smallest grain of sand to the largest mountain, is participating in the same vast, interconnected awareness.
The rock is a habit. Reality is a habit. Your entire experience of life is an accumulation of assumptions so deeply ingrained that you forget you made them in the first place. The world is not made of things; the world is made of stories, and stories are made of perception. If enough people believe in a thing, it takes shape. Nations, currencies, traditions, laws – all mental constructs made so solid by collective agreement that we forget they are not tangible objects. They are spells cast by consciousness.
In Giordano Bruno's cosmology, reality was not a static thing but a vast, infinite, living mind. For Bruno, the universe was essentially a giant mind field where thoughts interacted to shape reality. Consciousness isn't some ghostly spectator hovering over reality; it's the ink in the pen. Rather than creating reality as isolated experiences, consciousness simultaneously creates and is created. Your mind resonates with other minds around you, like nodes in a cosmic thought network. The universe constantly reconfigures itself based on the mental states and thoughts of its conscious inhabitants, creating not only personal realities but our collective worlds.
Thomas Nagel, in his famous essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?", argued that consciousness includes a subjective aspect, the qualia, or in other words, what it's like to experience. According to Nagel, there's an inherent limitation to human understanding when it comes to consciousness. Even if we understand the physical processes of the brain, we can never fully know the subjective experience of other creatures, like a bat, because consciousness is not reducible to objective facts. Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable. It is the most puzzling feature of the universe.
Qualia is the subjective experience of things: the taste of a fruit, the sound of a bird singing, the color of the sky. All these are elements of the perceptual field created by consciousness. What we often forget is that these are not external objects but the experiences created by the mind. Consciousness filters and interprets sensory data to produce a coherent reality. We are not passive observers; we are active participants in the construction of our experience of the world. The reality that you perceive is not a neutral reflection of the world; it is shaped by the mind. Therefore, consciousness is the architect of reality, not merely its observer.
Take Joan of Arc, a teenage girl claiming to hear voices from celestial beings, convinced an army of hardened warriors to follow her into battle. The question isn't whether the voices were real; it's whether reality ever had a choice but to obey them. If belief is the engine of reality, then Joan didn't hallucinate; she created.
But to actually see, in the depth of consciousness, rather than seeing it as something distinct from the physical world, we ought to think of it as inseparable from reality itself. Neuroscientist Karl Pribram worked many years on a theory that the mind is a hologram. Think of a hologram: every part of it contains the whole image. In the same way, every part of your brain holds a blueprint of the entire universe. So, consciousness isn't confined to a single location in your brain; it's distributed, all-encompassing, and constantly interacting with the larger reality around you. This means that the world isn't something outside of you waiting to be perceived. The universe and your consciousness are intertwined in a continuous loop, each shaping and reshaping the other.
There is no such thing as a self in the world, and there is no such thing as consciousness in the world either. The self is a story, and consciousness is the stage upon which it plays out. What we call "you" is simply an experience arising within this vast, interconnected field of awareness, and what we call consciousness is simply the backdrop against which all experiences unfold. In essence, there is no isolated self and no contained consciousness.
Ancient philosophers have flirted with the idea that the self and consciousness are not singular, separate entities. The Vedic tradition in Hinduism suggests that the self, or Atman, is ultimately identical with Brahman, the universal consciousness that permeates all things. There is no individual self outside of this larger consciousness; it's an illusion, a reflection of the whole.
In the Talmud, sacred Jewish text, Rabbi Joshua ben Levi explains that every individual should see themselves as if the entire world was created for them. "The world was created for you," he says. This is an intriguing, almost paradoxical statement. It suggests that the entire world, with all of its complexity and vastness, has been created for the sake of one individual's consciousness. This is not a statement of selfishness but rather one that emphasizes the personal relationship each individual has with the universe.
Many who stumble or trip spectacularly into deep spiritual awakening report an unsettling realization: they are alone in the world. Not in a conventional social sense, but in a way that suggests that their consciousness is the only certainty. Mystics and philosophers throughout history have circled this understanding like moths around a flame. They all have encountered this eerie, yet liberating, understanding that the world, in a strange way, is themselves.
When one peels back the layers of conditioning, the realization dawns: there is no external reality independent of perception. This is why many who awaken describe a sensation of being utterly alone, not in despair, but in the recognition that there is no other, only consciousness dreaming itself into form.
"The world was created for you, yet you are but dust and ashes." This contradiction is central to human experience. We are both insignificant specks of dust in the cosmos and yet the center of reality from our own vantage point. A mystical interpretation suggests that reality itself is projected through each observer's consciousness, meaning the world literally exists for you, but also for everyone else.
Before you even had the thought to watch this video, reality was already conspiring. Not in the paranoid, shadowy sense of governments whispering behind closed doors, but in the far more insidious, cosmic sense: a grand illusion assembling itself around your awareness.
So, is this good news or bad news? The great Bard, Shakespeare, who may have been more of a magician than a playwright, gave us Hamlet muttering to himself: "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." A perfect distillation of consciousness shaping reality. That wretched breakup or that job rejection are nothing but interpretations, painted and repainted by the brush of your mind.
Through deep states of awareness and altered states of consciousness, we might access these other realms and consciously shift timelines or dimensions of existence. This world is like a corridor before the world to come, a liminal space where one refines their soul before stepping into the real reality. This aligns with so many esoteric traditions, which suggest that physical reality is merely a school for consciousness, an initiation rather than an end in itself. Consciousness does not end with physical existence; this world is merely a threshold, a preparatory state.
But if reality is consciousness-based, what is this world to come? The Kabbalists speak of *Olam Haba*, the world to come, not as a distant afterlife but as a condition of perception. The more one aligns with truth, the more the next world becomes visible. Even here, the world to come is not a different world, but a deeper vision of this one.
Consciousness is the thread that runs through it all: the corridor, the world to come, the illusion of separation, and the unveiling of what was always there. "Show me your original face before you were born," asks the old story. And what is this original face, if not consciousness itself?