Solving For eXistence: Part 6

The Root Of The Matter

This time, we get to the answer of the biggest question of all time. It’s our last stop. Everybody off.

At the very root of our problem, we’re wondering why Existence exists. No matter what explanations we toss into the ring, infinite regression decimates them. But that’s because we’re looking at the problem in the wrong way. We’re trying to understand why there’s stuff, but stuff is merely a symptom. An artifact. it doesn’t cause itself; it’s an outcome. A result. What comes before stuff? What predates it?

When we look at ourselves—the human race—we recognize that thought precedes all the stuff we make. We invent things left and right, but every single invention is the outcome of thinking. And we know that thinking is simply the active state of consciousness. We can deduce that consciousness is the coherent condition of awareness. Awareness is the passive state of consciousness, and thinking is the active state of consciousness. Consciousness itself appears to be the fundamental base of everything else.

As we’ve already seen, consciousness has no survival needs. It doesn’t need to eat or drink, it doesn’t need to keep warm or cool down; it doesn’t need to fend off predators; it doesn’t consist of components; there are no quantum particles that make up whatever the substance of consciousness might be. We don’t know of any energy fields that must arise from nothingness in order for there to be consciousness. As far as we’re able to tell, consciousness is whole. It is entirely self-sufficient because it has no needs. It needs no environment. It simply...is.

This is another way of saying consciousness itself is a state of nature. It is not a condition of nature. it is not an artifact of nature. it is not something that emerges from nature. Consciousness IS nature. Consciousness is the thing that nature is made of. it is the primordial state that we ultimately label ‘nature’.

Consciousness is the substance of Existence. It is the state of existing. Consciousness is what Existence and existing is made of.

Whatever else exists can only come directly from consciousness. Consciousness is primary and fundamental. There exists nothing else besides consciousness. It is all there is; and it is all there can ever be.

Of course, now we’re asking what that means about the world and the universe and ourselves. If primordial consciousness is the one and only thing that can ever be real, what is all this stuff that seems so real to us?

It’s a fantastic question. Stuff is what primordial consciousness is keeping itself occupied with. We inhabit something which, for lack of a better term, can be considered a dream. Primordial consciousness has nothing to do except think, and this universe is what it is thinking.

Riiight. Okay, so how come it feels hard and real?
Because we’re made of the exact same stuff as the rest of the dream.

When you wake from a dream and it lingers in your mind, you remember the dream feeling real. There was a floor to walk on, probably walls to lean against, maybe even other people to interact with. Dreams feel real when we’re in them because everything there is made of the same substance. Since the entire thing is a cognitive construct, there’s no reason for the component parts to behave any differently than if they are real and the dream itself is actual. Everything within the dream interacts according to the rules of the dream.

If you’re not convinced, I can demonstrate this to you in a real-world way. It begins with an age old riddle: If god is all-powerful, can he create a rock so big even he can’t lift it?

Everything I know about god I learned by being one
As an author, I have a direct experience of being god. When I create my science fiction universes, I do so holistically. I invent worlds; universes; gods, demons and religions; civilizations; histories; lore, and individual characters. My characters are intrinsic to the universe they occupy. They do not and cannot exist outside that universe. They’re part of it—part of the dream of the universe that I’m writing about. The characters and the universe itself are one. Inseparable.

Moreover, that entire narrative exists on pages that I type. There’s no mechanism for me to extract my characters from the story and manifest them into my own reality. When I create a rock in my story, no matter how big or how heavy it is, that rock only exists in the words on the page. It isn’t a real rock. Not to me. No matter how real that rock is to my characters, there’s no way for me to lift it because it doesn’t exist in my reality—only in my head.

This is exactly the same for Primary Consciousness. Nothing it invents within the dream is real to it. There is no such thing as a rock. Any rock. It’s a figment of the dream.

Where theologians and philosophers go wrong is thinking physical reality is a concrete thing that exists of itself. Therefore, if god acts upon it, god is essentially doing something magical upon concrete reality.

This is the misunderstanding.

There’s no concrete reality and no magic. What we call ‘reality’ is just a dream that primary Consciousness is inventing. And if Consciousness alters the dream in some way, we will experience that as a supernatural event; but to Consciousness it’s just a modest tweak to the dream. For example, if Source wants to extend the human lifespan to a thousand years instead of around 80, it can do that with a thought. Our biology and physiology wouldn’t necessarily need to change; it would simply be an update to the dream. In fact, I suspect the dream could be retconned(1) so we would never remember it being any other way.

If I rewrite a passage in my story so the characters experience something different than before, that’s simply an edit for me. For them, though, it changes the entire course of their destiny.

This hits home the understanding that Consciousness doesn’t create anything outside itself, because it can’t. Just like I can’t bring my characters into my own reality, neither can Consciousness bring us out of the dream and into its own base reality. There’s no mechanism by which consciousness can invent a true, freestanding external physicality. It has no material substance from which to generate real, independent matter. All it can do is imagine matter. It can imagine a model of materiality, and that model is what we call our universe. We live inside that model. We are part of that model.

In this mental model, the Big Bang wasn’t a real thing produced mechanically; it was imagined by Consciousness. And that imagining continues to evolve as the dream continues.

We mistake this for an independent, self-generating material reality because we’re made of the same dream stuff that all the rest is made of. To us, it’s all real—the bodies we have, the chairs we sit in, the tables we eat on, the cars we drive, and so on. But to Consciousness itself, all of this is merely thought, no different from how I daydream my characters into a full-blown novel. Consciousness didn’t invent materiality outside of itself that it can look in on or insinuate itself into; it made materiality within itself as a thoughtscape.

And because Consciousness is the only thing that actually exists for real, the only experience of existing that Source can ever have is the kind that takes place within the activity of its thoughts.

Approaching the rock problem from this new angle reframes the entire situation. There is no rock, just as Neo learns in his visit to the Oracle that “there is no spoon.”(2)

What we know as Existence is a secondary level of reality. The base level is consciousness itself. We are only real within primary consciousness’s dream. There’s nothing outside the dream except thought. The unembodied dreamer.

This solves the riddle of infinite regression. There’s nothing earlier than or prior to primordial consciousness, because it’s the only real thing that exists. It’s not something that emerges from prior conditions. It is the entirety of what Existence is. It is the state of existing. The buck stops there.

Going forward, we’ll be looking into the downstream implications of this newsflash...what it means for religion, for god, and for belief in general.