When we conventionally ask the question “Is it real?”, we usually mean “Does it exist in physical reality?” In other words, “Is it real or is it just in the mind?”

Our culture places far more emphasis on the reality of the physical world than our internal states of consciousness (thoughts, feelings, imagination, intuition etc.)

However, the truth of the matter is that we never actually experience matter.  All our experiences of the “outer world” are actually inner experiences arising in consciousness.  The world we know arises in consciousness and is made out of consciousness.  This is the only world we know for sure.  The existence of a physical world independent of consciousness is simply a belief.

Our belief in an independently existing world out there, separate from our consciousness, is the central paradigm of our culture despite the greatly dampening effect it has on our collective psyche. We’ve bought into its implications that consciousness is a by-product of matter that shares the limits and life-span of the body and also the implication that the universe and human life is ultimately devoid of purpose and meaning, no matter how hard we try to convince ourselves otherwise.

Science has only relatively recently started to study the existence of consciousness, but it remains a bewildering scientific mystery. How can consciousness possibly derive itself from dead, inert matter?  Why do we have vibrantly real inner experiences in the first place when everything could just as easily happen in the dark?  Why is there no physical sign of consciousness in the brain or anywhere else?

Some scientist are starting to entertain a possibility that spiritual finders and philosophers have been asserting for hundreds if not thousands of years.  What if consciousness is the primary reality?  What if matter cannot actually exist independently of consciousness?  What if the world, including the very fabric of time and space, is nothing but an appearance in consciousness?  

Apart from answering the mystery of consciousness, this would answer several other bewildering and inexplicable aspects of the physical universe such as quantum entanglement, the relative nature of time and space, the fact that matter seems to be made almost entirely of nothing (and the rest is a mystery) and the extraordinary fact that the physical universe seems to have been impossibly fine-tuned for life to exist in the universe.

The implications of a new paradigm that recognises consciousness as the primary reality has many profound and practical implications:

• Consciousness, not matter, is the very fabric of reality.
• Experiencing is, at least in part, the very purpose of existence.
• Consciousness exists outside time and space and probably does not share the life-span of the body.  
• The entire world is made of consciousness and known by consciousness.
• Consciousness is one experiencer, experiencing many worlds.
• Not only is everything connected but also, in the deepest sense, all is one.
• Our inner states of consciousness really do have a substantial effect on the outer world including our physical health.
• If the world of experience is the one indisputably reality, then direct inner experience is the litmus test for truth.
• The world we know is a virtual world, maybe no more real than a dream, but the experience of it is indisputably real.
• Phenomena previously denied by the materialist paradigm, such as telepathy, near death experiences, out of body experiences, psychic phenomena, de ja vu, synchronicity, miracle healing, the law of attraction, spiritual visions, awakened states of consciousness and expanded perception are real.

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