In a world that seems upside down, improving things requires going deep. Understanding how we participate in creating reality may be the key to transforming our inner and outer worlds. Imagine for a moment that someone asks you the question, “How do you know the world is real?” There are only two kinds of answers: You can either tell a familiar story or refer to your own experience.
The story begins, “Of course the world is real,” which isn’t really an answer—it’s an assumption you received second hand. The most primal stories used to be collective myths about how God or the gods created the world. But any story, including the most advanced scientific models, depends on belief.
If you believe in the Book of Genesis, you will see reality very differently from someone who believes in the Big Bang. To sort out which story is actually true, the second kind of answer arose, defining reality according to our experience. A rock is hard because two people who kick it agree from their experience that it is, in fact, hard.
There are rock-eating bacteria deep in the earth, and to them a rock is food, so hardness doesn’t enter their experience—for all we know, granite is to a bacterium what a lettuce leaf is to us. Neutrinos are particles that travel through the Earth by the trillions, being impeded no more by a planet than if it were a puff of air, or nothing at all.
No matter how insistent you are about scientific fact, all facts enter our minds as either sensations, images, feelings, or thoughts, which can be shortened to SIFT. SIFT is necessary in order for anything to be real to a human being. Since stories are also based on SIFT, especially on thoughts, it turns out that reality is much more malleable than anyone thinks. Amazingly, a sizable number of physicists hold that nothing can be proven to exist, including the entire universe, without an observer.
This notion is counter-intuitive to anyone who accepts that the physical world “out there” is fixed, solid, and reliable. There’s a confusing double lens among physicists: In the everyday world, they accept how things ordinarily work, while in the quantum world, they accept such seemingly bizarre notions as reverse causation, creation from nothingness, and 11-dimensional string theory, which reduces all matter and energy to invisible vibrations in a domain that has no time, space, matter, or energy.
These two lenses don’t fit together, and in some way, it seems obvious to everyone that a divided reality cannot be the whole story. If a new, improved reality is ever to exist, it could include many unusual features, but one aspect is certain: It would be whole.
If you concede that it takes an observer to create reality as we know it, then the new and improved reality depends on each of us, acting as an observer. Observation would no longer be passive or neutral. It would be creative. Thanks to SIFT, everything you know and accept as real depends on mental activity. At any given second, you are either sensing, feeling, imagining, or thinking in order for anything—an atom, coffee cup, cloud, or Marvel comic—to exist.
Let’s say that you can accept the possibility that you are a creative force; then it follows that reality is personal. Facts and experiences are entangled. Their specific entanglement is what creates the individual person. All your likes, dislikes, choices, memories, conditioning, habits, and beliefs are key ingredients in your version of reality. These versions are as different as two people, one of whom skydives while the other has acrophobia, a dreadful fear of heights.
If you can entertain the possibility that you co-create reality with every other person who possesses a human nervous system, how would this change your life? Here is a list of possibilities:
You would become curious about your creative powers.
You would want to test these powers out.
You would stop believing in second-hand stories about creation, preferring to either create your own model or no model at all.
There are many layers and angles to the observer effect, from the minimal position that it only applies at the quantum level to the maximal position held by the Vedic rishis, or seers, of ancient India, who held that the world’s existence depends on consciousness. If you get rid of all stories and models, you find that you have been a co-creator all your life. “But I’m not doing anything,” you might protest. You don’t have to. Being conscious is enough for reality to emerge through you.
So the bottom line is whether you are conscious or not. Consider yourself to be a conduit, like a water pipeline leading from a reservoir. If you had perfect clarity of awareness, you would experience the flow of reality in exactly that way, the reservoir being the field of pure consciousness that is the source, according to Vedanta, of everything in the physical world. If you are unconscious, none of this is apparent. Like a clogged conduit, your mind blocks the flow.
All such blockages—old memories, habits, beliefs, assumptions, conditioning, and second-hand stories—come from the past. We sacrifice our role as co-creators by letting the past rule us. Work your way through these mind-made obstacles, and you will find yourself experiencing reality in the now, unburdened by the past. Only the present moment is free of stories, and only in the present moment is reality fresh and ever renewed—this is why it is sometimes referred to as the eternal now.
Long before the current talk about living in the present, a long tradition of awakening from the past existed. Thoreau wrote, “You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave.” The medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart declared, “There exists only the present instant... a Now which always and without end is itself new.”
As you can see, a lot is at stake in any new, improved reality. Releasing the past is the chief hurdle. It is also the key to the exotic states described for centuries as enlightenment, waking up, Nirvana, Moksha, and liberation. By any name, a new, improved reality has many enticements, which can only be realized through a personal journey in self-awareness. A curt Zen proverb is very much to the point, either today or a millennium ago: “Let go or be dragged.” I hope I’ve motivated you to find the willingness to let go—nothing else can lead to your creative power.
Namaste,
Deepak