A Foundational Error in Human Understanding

Our world culture is founded upon the assumption that reality consists of two essential ingredients: mind and matter. In this duality, matter is considered the primary element, giving rise to the prevailing materialistic paradigm in which it is believed that mind, or consciousness — the knowing element of

... See more

Consider how this plays out in daily life. If we believe we are essentially physical bodies that happen to have consciousness, then death becomes the ultimate threat, other people become competitors for limited resources, and the world becomes something separate from ourselves that we must either exploit or defend against. The environmental crisis,... See more

This investigation doesn’t require you to change anything about your life or adopt any particular beliefs. It simply asks you to pay attention to what is already most obvious and intimate about your experience: the fact that experience is known, and that there is something that knows it.

For now, I simply invite you to notice: you are aware. However ordinary this may seem, it is the most extraordinary fact in the universe. It is the light by which everything else is known, and yet it never appears as an object in that light. It is closer to you than your own breath, and yet it is the vastness in which all experience appears.

This isn’t a denial of the physical world. The body, the brain, the stars and galaxies are all real in their own way. But their reality might not be what we think it is. Rather than being made of some substance called ‘matter’ that exists independently of consciousness, they might be modifications or appearances within consciousness itself.

Instead of trying to explain how dead matter gives rise to living awareness, we might ask: what if awareness is the primary reality, and what we call matter is simply how awareness appears from a particular point of view?

This recognition doesn’t solve the practical challenges of life, but it provides an unshakeable foundation of peace and understanding from which all of life’s activities can be approached with clarity and love.

The question that will guide our entire journey is deceptively simple: What is the nature of the knowing with which all experience is known?

But what if we’ve got it backwards? What if, instead of consciousness emerging from matter, matter is how consciousness appears when viewed through the prism of a limited mind?