Sequence of Latent Truths (eBook)

Chapter 1:
All That Is

The psychological and metaphysical interpretation of the mystical experience, includes interviews with Cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman, NASA Physicist Tom Campbell, and inventor Federico Faggin

A few years ago I was sitting at a beach with my brother. He looked at the ocean thoughtfully and said, “Do you know the feeling of being one with all that is?”

I was irritated by his esoteric jargon, and we got in an argument about science and mysticism. At the time, I was a freshman at the New School in New York. I had been taking philosophy classes and I wanted to show off some of my new ideas.

In the 1920s, Sigmund Freud had written about the sensation my brother was talking about, referring to it as the “oceanic feeling.” Freud believed that people who experienced a feeling of oneness with everything in the world were actually temporarily accessing thoughts and emotions they had as infants, before they were capable of perceiving the difference between things that were part of them and things that were separate from them. As far as Freud was concerned, these people weren’t describing a genuine connection so much as they were experiencing a psychological regression.

When I tried to explain this to my brother, he just smiled and said, “So you’ve never experienced it, huh?”

He was right. I had never experienced anything like that. I told my brother that his mystical feelings were all in his head, that his epiphanies were nothing but electrons flying back and forth between his neurons. Back then I believed in the philosophical doctrine known as materialism or physicalism. Materialism is the philosophy that everything, including consciousness, can be reduced to physical processes.

My perspective changed a couple of years later when I signed up for a Vipassana meditation retreat. I had read some scientific studies conducted by Harvard scientists that proved that meditation can lower stress hormones and even help with chronic illnesses. Living in New York City had been quite stressful, and I figured that if meditation could help me cope with stress and anxiety, it might be worth to sign up for a retreat.

When I arrived at the retreat center, I tried my best to tolerate the spiritual atmosphere. I didn’t have any interest in singing spiritual songs and listening to people talk about their past lives. However, it turned out that just a few days of silent meditation put me in a completely different mindset.

Initially, it was extremely difficult to sit for 10 hours a day and to keep my attention on my breath. My back and my legs began to hurt and all sorts of thoughts tormented me, blaming me for signing up for this. Despite the physical and emotional pain, I remained seated. Eventually my mind became quiet and my attention steady. I no longer felt the need to get up, and I often remained seated during the breaks. On the sixth or seventh day I had a breakdown — or a breakthrough, depending on how you look at it.

It wasn’t complicated, and at the same time it was far too complicated to describe with words. I simply looked at a tree and couldn’t hold back my tears. I felt that the same energy that went through me also went through the tree. In this state, I experienced consciousness as an all-pervasive energy that had manifested itself in various forms. I understood that my separate identity was an illusion and that I was one with all.

Within this expanded state of consciousness, I experienced a transcendental intelligence that seemed beyond anything I had previously experienced. My rational brain was trying to come up with an explanation. I was telling myself that this was all in my head, but this other form of intelligence demanded to be recognized as an awareness far beyond my current level of understanding. In fact, it told me that “the world of forms” wasn’t real and that I had been identifying with an illusion. If I had been religious, I would have thought that I had an encounter with God, but instead, I was shocked and utterly confused.

This experience changed my life, because it felt more real than anything I had previously experienced. It made me question the reality of the so-called physical world. It shifted my perspective on life. I began to ask myself whether mystical experiences were more than just fabrications of the mind, as I’d previously believed. I began to wonder if perhaps they were glimpses of a deeper reality, a truth beyond the physical realm.

Before I had this experience, I would have agreed with Freud that the experience of unity with all is a psychological phenomenon, but now it seems equally plausible that I had experienced a deeper reality and that everything I thought was real is more like a dream.

Mystics from all ages have long had this type of experience. The descriptions vary, but the idea that something like “God is beyond the illusion of the physical reality” pops up in all spiritual traditions. Christians, Buddhists, Taoists, Hindus, Muslims, and shamans from around the world have said in one way or another that the supreme reality is beyond the illusion of the physical reality. You also find this idea expressed in Gnosticism and the thoughts of various Greek philosophers.

It’s not too surprising that various religious and spiritual traditions share some underpinning concepts. What is quite surprising is that in the last couple of decades, these same ideas have also begun to emerge in physics.

Traditional physicists feel that mystical experiences should not be considered part of science. Many mystics are willing to step outside of reason and logic to explain what they experience, while physicists use mathematics and experimental evidence to carefully explore and define their findings. Mystical writings are often mixtures of vague terms and poetic phrases which aim to conceptualize otherwise indescribable experiences, while scientific writings are rigorous and detailed theories addressing observable and verifiable modifications of material interactions. It is easy for these two worlds to talk past each other, but I don’t believe that science and mysticism are mutually exclusive.

The first decades of the 21st century have seen a growing movement among physicists that proposes that physical reality is actually an illusion. This simulation hypothesis proposes that the physical universe is not actually physical, but rather is made of information. In this model, the information that we perceive as matter is computed by a more fundamental reality that is not based on a physical substance, but on consciousness.

In physics, this is a relatively new and outrageous idea, but it is gaining popularity because materialism — the traditional belief that nothing exists except matter and its interactions — has continued to fail in explaining quantum mechanics and its apparent relationship to consciousness. The assumption that our universe is a simulation seems counterintuitive, but is better at explaining why the speed of light is fixed, how the Big Bang happened, and why large objects like planets and stars warp space.

Any simulation has a limit to how fast things can move. That limit is defined by how often the simulation updates. For example, in a video game, a character or object cannot move faster than the sample rate which determines when all pixels are updated. To create the illusion of movement, a simulation changes the colors of its pixels, which we interpret as moving objects. In our reality we also find a sample rate and pixels, which physicists refer to as quantized time and quantized space. Both make sense if we assume that we live in a simulation.1

Warped spacetime is another artifact that we would expect to find in a simulation. The simulation hypothesis argues that huge objects like planets and stars warp space and time because their processing load is larger than the empty space around them. It takes longer to compute their activity, which is what we experience as warped space and time.

The nature of the Big Bang is another mystery that makes more sense from the perspective of the simulation hypothesis. Instead of the belief that the entire universe was stored in an infinitely small point and then exploded suddenly, the simulation hypothesis suggests that the Big Bang was actually the launch of an iterative program.

Although the simulation hypothesis explains several of the big mysteries of the universe, it’s still considered an outrageous idea by most scientists, because it renders all aspects of our reality an illusion. Skeptics argue that it would be impossible to prove or disprove whether we live in a simulation. However, theoretical physicist Dr. James Gates of the University of Maryland famously claimed in 2011 that he’d found evidence of a form of computer code in the laws of physics. Gates discussed this idea with fellow physicist Neal deGrasse Tyson during a panel discussion at the 2011 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate:

GATES: I’ve been for the last 15 years trying to answer the kinds of questions that my colleagues here have been raising. And what I’ve come to understand is that there are these incredible pictures that contain all of the information of a set of equations that are related to string theory. And it’s even more bizarre than that, because when you then try to understand these...