 We'll switch gears again just for a few minutes to talk about what do we do with this kind of information given the way that we know about the structure of science and knowledge. In the modern world, this is now developed over about four or five hundred years, we call it materialism. This is where science has brought us. Materialism means that you start with space and time as a fundamental on the bottom and from that emerges energy light and energy dense. You would think of that as energy and matter. This is from Einstein. From that emerges other disciplines having to do with atoms and molecules and chemistry and biology and somewhere near the top of this thing is psychology and the mind. But there's an essential mystery in all of this. This by the way is reductionism. The arrow of causation always goes up here because everything emerges up, emerges up, emerges up. The mystery in this kind of a structure is, well, all these psychic phenomena suggest that the mind and space and time are linked in some meaningful way. Moreover, that the mind seems to be able to jump through space and time. Well, how can you do it? They're at opposite ends of this pyramid. Well, this same problem has been that how can the mind influence biology? Because the mind comes out of biology, according to the materialistic view. If you may remember, about 30 years ago, the idea that the mind and body are closely related was considered laughable in medicine. Over the past 30 years, a lot has changed, but now it's not considered so laughable. But how do you do that? Well, the discipline of psychoneuroimmunology is trying to figure out. How do you go backwards? How do you get downwards causation? The reason I put the textbooks here is because one of the fears that I hear expressed oftentimes is, this psychic stuff can't be true, because if it is true, we have to throw all our textbooks away, to which I respond, no. Those textbooks are really good because they're describing slices of the knowledge pyramid. And we're talking about something here which is an expansion of the knowledge pyramid. So we don't need to throw away what we know about physics or biology or anything else. We need to add on to it a little bit. And guess what? That's what science has been doing from the very beginning. What all science has done is expand and expand. So we don't have to throw anything away. And materialism has both good, bad, and ugly in it. The good part of materialism is that it works. We have real technologies that work. The bad, though, is that it leads to a nihilistic sense of purpose. There is no purpose. Everything is pointless. So these are atheists, and it says here, atheists shoving nothing in your face. And the ugly part is this, that it denies basic human experience. It denies psychic and mystical experience, which have been reported throughout history. They're real things. It also reinforces a sense that people and objects are separate. We know not only from quantum mechanics, but these kinds of phenomena suggest that some aspect of us are not separate. And that separateness is what gives rise to these kinds of abuses. As we, as Patch Adams said the other day, this is destroying the world. So a case can be made that our current scientific knowledge, which is driving a lot of the engine of the world today, has a mistake in it, and the mistake is destroying us. So how do we fix it? The way I'm working on fixing it, and from a theoretical perspective, is basically to look at the ancient wisdom, which says that everything actually is sitting on awareness. Using awareness rather than consciousness, because it's easier to talk about that. So what does that mean? Well, if everything was sitting on awareness, then out of awareness arises space and time. Out of space and time arises and rises and so on. This means that awareness permeates the entire knowledge structure, just like space and time does, just like Adams do and so on. But it's all sitting on awareness. If that is true, if the hypothesis is true, then there's just one mind. Every religious fundamental and most mystical tradition basically say this. There is one mind at bottom. In addition, awareness would then transcend space-time, prior to space-time. Awareness is primary over the physical world. These would be consequences if this is correct. But how do we get from awareness into space and time? Well, it turns out that what we're trying to do is be Alice in Wonderland and pull apart the curtain of space-time and look at the matrix underneath. That's essentially what the job is. How do you do it? So I'm going to read something here. How does the universe come into being out of nothingness? Out of nothingness does not mean out of the vacuum. The vacuum of physics is loaded with geometrical structure. Nothingness means neither structure nor law nor plan. For producing everything out of nothing, one principle is enough. Draw a line between the observer, participator, and the system under view. That demarcation is the clue to the central principle in constructing out of nothing everything. So this sounds like something a mystic might have said, but in fact, it's something that a very famous physicist said. And it's now a branch of physics called information physics. This was said by John Wheeler, a Princeton university physicist, who among other things was the mentor of Richard Feynman, the Nobel laureate, and a bunch of other well-owned physicists. So what Wheeler was talking about was what he called the participatory universe. It is as though the universe comes into being and manifests in the way that it actually does as a result of the universe looking at itself. It's looking at itself through our eyes, through our awareness. It also turns out that within mathematical logic, that you can build up the entire structure of mathematics at one event, which is simply making a distinction. You make the distinction, and I'm not going to go through this all, but the whole probability of calculus, the whole logical probabilities, it all falls out of that. So this idea that awareness, somehow looking at itself, can create the physical world has some merit to it. Digitalphilosophy.org, if you want to read much more about these kinds of ideas.