In the previous chapter, I started with a few mental mechanisms and showed how elementary physical phenomena can arise from these.
In this chapter, I turn the picture on its head. What does it look like if we instead start with what science tells us about the physical world – and then try to give an idealistic, i.e. mental/abstract, explanation?
In a way, I have already done this in the previous chapter, but there I did not go into the details and left out several things. For example, one assumes a long series of phases at the start of The Big Bang. What happened in these phases, and can we explain them with our idealistic worldview?
In my eyes, this also succeeds surprisingly well. This, too, came to me in the university canteen, where I sat in my corner and indulged in the flow of insights.
Where the previous two or three chapters were philosophically demanding, this chapter is demanding in a scientific sense. I will present you with physics that you most likely need the prerequisites to enter.
This chapter is also heavy, heavy, heavy. So heavy that many will now put the book down. Please do not do it! I am writing to the physicists. This is where the battle stands on whether idealism can actually be the final answer to what the world is. It's not a trifle! Of course, it is highly demanding to comprehend.
So, if you are in the target group – read on!
If not, read on anyway to get an idea of what it's all about, but don't get frustrated – skim through these pages. When you come out on the other side, big, exciting topics are waiting – for you (a little hint, there).
Let us now see what science tells us and how idealistic emergence and physicalism correspond.
But first, some words of comfort plus a warning.
The following 10-30 pages are not for most people. What you have just been through in the previous chapter was hardly easy to understand either. If you've never heard of cosmic inflation, for example, you should perhaps pause for a moment.
Most people don't read about the beginning of the universe for breakfast. But a few do, so what comes now is for them. After all, I claim that the theory of idealistic emergence is valid for absolutely everything. Then I have to show it, which you will have to suffer – probably – on the following pages.
The book contains an almost insoluble problem, namely that it deals with «everything», while the readers are unlikely to be interested in or able to take in ... everything. And by that, I really mean EVERYTHING.
Let me try again to explain the ambitious project you are now struggling to plough through – to offer some comfort.
The philosophical starting point is «idealism», meaning that consciousness is the only thing that exists.
How do you study something like that?
How do you connect consciousness, matter and everything else? Spirit and physics? Mathematics and emotions? How does one research consciousness when we ourselves are and have consciousness, i.e. are «inside» consciousness?
Well, by considering «everything», our own consciousness included, from a broader or different perspective than ourselves.
And how do you do that?
It can be done in several ways.
The first is to look inward, i.e. meditate, quiet one's thoughts, abandon notions and take in what simply is, the eternal moment without any content, before the content, before the experience of the self.
Meditation is the Eastern way to insight.
The other primary way to «discover» our consciousness is through «delusions», meaning that for shorter or longer moments, we experience reality and ourselves differently than daily. Deviating perceptions can be induced with hallucinogens, through psychological disorders, trauma, suggestion, hypnosis, trance, near-death experiences, etc.
I have a mental condition called complex post-traumatic stress disorder, CPTSD. As a not self-conscious toddler, I experienced something that gave me a permanent, external perspective on myself, which is not very common, it seems.
I thus see the world a little differently from most others, and this has led me to discover, among other things, the mechanisms I am now presenting.
When the world is to be explained, you and I must be included in the explanation; otherwise, it would not be complete. Therefore, the book starts with a subjective narrative about how this same subject, i.e. me, has come to the insight.
Then there is physics and the more scientific, analytical angle.
In fact, I believe very few people can understand both the first and second parts of the book entirely. The reason is not that either is particularly difficult, but that they speak to two incompatible sides in us.
Part 1, and also the last of part 2, is about intuition and direct access to knowledge experienced as indisputable, clear, immediate, true and complete.
The beginning of part 2, which you are reading now, provides a logical, analytical, rational description of the mental mechanisms that create and run the world – material and physical phenomena, but also the subjective and abstract.
- Part 1, plus a little 2, therefore, goes inwards into the intuitive and spiritual.
- Part 2, in the beginning, is directed outwards and explain things analytically.
The two ways of taking in the world are incompatible, complementary, contradictory. We all know intuition and analytical thinking, but few are completely open to both in all situations. Not many people also have concrete, in-depth factual knowledge about the two «halves» of the world.
If we walk around and are mainly concerned with feeling and sensing the beautiful, painful, joyful, comforting, happy, deep etc., then we may not be as interested in hardcore physics, logic, mechanisms and systems.
Conversely, a mathematically trained physicist will not see the relevance of «subjective or intuitive feeling» to studying complex, measurable processes.
This book requires that one be open to all aspects and perspectives. And even openness is not enough because when it comes to intuition and subjective experiences, only the experience counts.
It is impossible to fully convey intuitive knowledge through analytical language.
If you do not have experiences of the kind I describe in the first part of the book, you may get little out of it. Read, of course, but don't be disappointed if you can't see the relevance.
If, on the other hand, you have your own intuitive and spiritual experiences, you will see the point and benefit from my story. But then, when you start reading the analytical explanations in part two, everything is just dry and technical physics and mechanisms, so you lose interest. Of course, that's perfectly fine; you can't be interested in everything.
But, that said, if you want to understand it all, you also have to read it all. For millennia people have tried to unite the spiritual and the material. One has sought a common understanding of the intuitive and directly experienced – and the analytical, cognitive, logical, thought.
«East and West shall never meet», British author Rudyard Kipling said, roughly quoted.
Nonsense, I reply.
We cannot look inward into the subjective and outward to the physical simultaneously, but we all deal with both continuously – just not at the exact moment. And we don't see the connection between these two perspectives – because the connection is you.
The key lies in the subjective, which I'll come back to in depth.
Kipling's problem is apparently insoluble, but that is only something we believe – precisely because all we do is believe, most of all in a material world.
Some of us still have the ability to burst out of this «impossibility». We have an active, awake relationship with intuition, our personal consciousness within the universal consciousness, spirit, awareness – and at the same time with the patterns, physics, mechanisms and dynamics of all the endless relationships in the outer world. And we have found ourselves.
We are few, it seems.
The book has to deal with this whole crazy landscape. Nothing is material; it is experienced materially. The chapter you are about to read tries to show how mental, subjective mechanisms can explain the earliest and most inconceivable phase of the physical, measurable, apparently objective universe.
It really should be impossible, but I dare give it a try. If you do not understand, then it is not you who is the problem, but I who failed. If so, skim over the following few pages and continue with full attention again as soon as you see that your understanding brightens a little.
This physics part is a necessary intermediate station mostly to annoy the physicists and devaluate myself. Much significant and interesting awaits on the other side of these slightly technical pages.
