Your Yellow is My Green
Do Nothing for the Planet: Part Five
“Reality continues to ruin my life.” Bill Watterson
When the Buddha was born, his father the King was given a prediction that his son would be a great ruler. It was unclear whether he would be a great emperor or a great healer. Either way the child was named Siddartha, which means “he whose life has been attained.” He grew up sheltered inside the palace walls, married, had a child, and developed a quiet unease about the meaning of it all. After much pleading, his father let him leave the palace, and despite the King’s efforts to clean the streets first, Siddartha saw suffering: a man ill with disease, an elderly woman, and death. What he saw haunted him, and in the middle of the night he left.
He realised that everything was change, transient, that life itself was nothing but decline and death. He studied yoga and meditation with the best teachers he could find and realised they didn’t have his answers either. He went into the forest for six years and tried fasting to achieve realisation, became emaciated, gained disciples, and realised that wasn’t the way. When he lost his faith his disciples abandoned him, and he was alone again. Desperate, he finally sat down and cried out: “come what may, let my body rot, let my bones be reduced to ashes, I will not get up from here until I have found the way beyond decay and death.” Under the first full moon in spring he went into meditation, was tempted and haunted by Mara, placed his hand on the Earth, and slipped into Nirvana. When people gathered around asking what he was, he replied: “I am Awake.”
It is often said that the Buddha was the world’s first psychologist, and the most compelling part of his story is that he was a normal person who became one of the greatest spiritual teachers in history through practice. He documented his experience of consciousness like a scientist. Neil Armstrong could tell us what it was like to stand on the Moon; the Buddha could tell us what it was like to achieve complete consciousness.
He explored the Self in a rather unusual way, claiming that the Self was an illusion of attachments, that our identity is linked to our desires, motives and possessions. Centuries later, the Nobel laureates Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga severed the corpus callosum in patients with intractable epilepsy and found that the right and left hemispheres could act without the other being aware of it. The idea of a singular, unified brain could no longer be defended, despite the fact the Buddha had suggested this centuries earlier. Trippy.
When the science caught up
Religion and science famously fell out over the story of evolution, and for a long time science had the upper hand because it dealt in the objective and the measurable. Then quantum physics arrived and things got strange.
Max Planck, the German physicist who coined the term quantum mechanics, said this in an interview in 1931: “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” That is a remarkable thing for the father of quantum theory to say, and it marked a shift: the scientific community started to become concerned with the larger questions of existence.
At the beginning of the twentieth century scientists discovered that atoms were not the solid little objects they’d assumed, but their own worlds of dynamic activity and mostly empty space. Small particles moved within a vast array of emptiness, and when observed, these particles were sometimes particles and sometimes waves. Niels Bohr described this as the Complementarity Principle: everything was formed through the interaction of the observer and the observed. Heisenberg built on it with his principle of indetermination, which states that it is impossible to view the world without modifying it in some way. What an exciting time to be alive.
Apply that to the old chestnut, “if a tree falls in the woods.” According to these principles there would be no tree in the first place if nobody was there to witness it. And if there was someone there, they could influence whether the tree fell, and whether it made a noise, based on their observation. Which is a very long way of saying that the powerful Sanskrit mantra SoHam, “I am That,” might be more accurate than anyone bargained for.¹
The ancient traditions, it turned out, had documented all of this a long time ago. The Vedas stated that the universe was made of three components, the Gunas: tamas, which is matter; rajas, which is energy; and sattva, which is consciousness. Prakriti is the potentiality that interweaves all things, a changeable force in everything and in nothing. We had, in the words of the philosophers, thrown the baby out with the bathwater: because we weren’t sure how to measure something, we labelled everything we couldn’t measure as crap.
Maybe this world is another planet’s hell
Aldous Huxley popularised the term Perennial Philosophy: the idea that all the religious and wisdom traditions are underpinned by one metaphysical truth. Huxley claimed that the world and all its creatures are expressions of the divine reality, and that with the right training a human can come to know this reality and recognise their unity with it. Central to it is the Great Chain of Being, the idea that man’s true nature is consciousness itself, referred to in the ancient texts as Tao, Brahman and God. The Buddhists and Brahmans reached this conclusion experientially, the scientists reached it experimentally, and the end result is the same.
Here is where reality gets personal, because it is heavily based on perspective. Everyone has a different view of the world which, to them, is correct. And this is the mind-blowing part: if that were true for one person, it would be true for all people, which is obviously impossible, because we all hate different people and have a different idea of how the world should be.
Protagoras, a Greek philosopher who lived roughly five hundred years before Christ, would hand you a piece of tinfoil. One person says it’s useful for cooking food; another makes a hat out of it and waits, poised, for an extraterrestrial attack. Both, I think you’ll agree, are great uses, but which one is right? The answer, my friends, lies in your beliefs. Protagoras suggested the matter contains all of the qualities, but individually we can only experience certain ones, depending on our state. That’s right: one man’s baking soda is another man’s deodorant, baby.
Galileo, if he’d been alive in 1903 to witness the invention of tinfoil, would have said it was neither a hat, a cooking implement nor a tanning apparatus. It was just itself, and it only has qualities because we say so.
The idea that perception shapes our reality is laughable to most people. No one wants to think that the reason their life is a miserable mess is because they perceive their life to be a miserable mess. But I’m afraid, my friend, it is. Take time, that crazy idea we all take for granted. Einstein put it best: “put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.” Anyone who has ever held a side-plank understands that no matter how slow something appears, it doesn’t actually affect time itself.
Then Einstein went further and told us space is not 3D and time is not linear; they’re bound together and interchangeable in a 4D reality called spacetime. When these theories emerged they excited the scientific community like a bunch of techies at a new iPhone release, because they gave us our first real glimpse of interconnectedness, showing that separateness is an illusion and there is no clean distinction between thought and action in the universal field of forces. Knowing this, Einstein said our reality is just an optical delusion of our consciousness.
In fact, you do not exist
Further investigation uncovered the Observer Effect: that the consciousness of an observer affects the behaviour of matter. Science had, in other words, proved that our boys Protagoras, Galileo, the Buddha and the authors of the Vedas were correct. The reality we observe, and live in, is determined by our consciousness, both individually and as a whole. These tiny particles are so changeable that it’s impossible to say they’re anywhere at all, or that they even exist. What can be said is that this energy has an essence, and it is no one fixed thing but everything all at once. As the Hindu saying goes, and as the mathematicians reluctantly agree: “in fact you do not exist.” Scary, for all of us staunch egotists out there.
At this point the writings of the Vedantic traditions were becoming genuinely popular, because the science had basically stumbled onto prana: the undifferentiated energy that is the unique force underlying everything. Which is where the story goes next, because once you accept that reality is made by consciousness, the obvious question is who, exactly, is doing the observing. That’s the subject of the next part: the people, from William James to Jung to a cat in a box, who spent their lives trying to answer it.
Notes
A caution on “quantum consciousness.” I love this material, and I want to be honest about its limits, because the leap from quantum physics to “consciousness creates reality” is where a lot of well-meaning spirituality overreaches. In physics, the “observer” in the observer effect and the measurement problem does not mean a conscious human mind; it usually means any physical interaction or measuring apparatus, and most physicists do not think consciousness collapses the wave function. The Planck quote is real and fascinating, but he was a complicated figure and it doesn’t amount to proof of anything mystical. What I’m drawing here is an analogy and a provocation, a genuinely striking rhyme between what the ancient texts said and what modern physics found, not a claim that the Vedas were doing peer-reviewed quantum mechanics. Hold the rhyme; don’t oversell the equation.