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We live in a scientific culture that believes, mostly without question, that the physical world of matter is the primary reality …

• The belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science.  Albert Einstein
• It seems that men are carried by a natural instinct or prepossession to repose faith in their senses, and that without any reasoning, or even almost before the use of reason, we always suppose an external universe which depends not on our perception but would exist though we and every creature were absent or annihilated. David Hume
• Since the nineteenth century, a belief in materialism has indeed been propagated with remarkable success: millions of people have been converted to this ‘scientific’ view, even though they know very little about science itself.  Rupert Sheldrake
• Our materialistic model of the world assumes that matter is inanimate and living beings are nothing more than complex collections of particles.  Steve Taylor
• We believe that objects exist independently of their being perceived, that Consciousness is personal and limited, that it is a by-product of the mind and that the mind is a by-product of the body. These and many other such beliefs are considered to be so obviously true that they are beyond the need of questioning. They amount to a religion of materialism to which the vast majority of humanity subscribes.  Rupert Spira
• The influences of the senses has in most men overpowered the mind to the degree that the walls of space and time have come to look solid, real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits in the world is the sign of insanity.  Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Objective reality is that which exists even when no one observes. Donald Hoffman
• Physics should adhere to “the requirement” for the independent existence of the physical reality present in different parts of space. Albert Einstein
• Science is based on the assumption that there is a single “real” reality that we each see through different lenses. Rajesh Kasturirangan
• The insistence that the physical reality is required as the foundation for our mental reality, is based on the notion that a physical reality plus a mental reality is somehow easier to explain than just a mental reality. And that, in turn, is related to our obsession with a mechanical universe: everything must be reducible to mechanics, so consciousness must also be the result of a physical machine. It’s taboo for any self-respecting scientist to publicly consider that it could be the other way around. Many if not most of today’s scientists believe consciousness is an illusion of a machine, which seems to me to be infinitely more complicated than saying it is the machine that is the illusion of our consciousness. Scott Owen
• We are tempted to look at the world in causal terms, employing a concept of one-way time that is independent of consciousness.  Amit Goswami
• We believe, a real 3D world that exists even when no one looks, and it contains real objects such as red apples and misty waterfalls. Donald Hoffman
• Your body is also experienced as qualia. The body is a bundle of qualia. Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos

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… that consciousness is a by-product of matter …

• The fundamental proposition of materialism is that matter is the only reality. Therefore, consciousness is nothing but brain activity. It is either like a shadow, an ‘epiphenomenon’, that does nothing, or it is just another way of talking about brain activity.  Rupert Sheldrake
• Contemporary science is based on the claim that all reality is material or physical. There is no reality but material reality. Consciousness is a by-product of the physical activity of the brain. Matter is unconscious. Evolution is purposeless. God exists only as an idea in human minds, and hence in human heads.  Rupert Sheldrake
• Materialists tend to be ‘epiphenomenalists’: they accept rather than deny the existence of consciousness but see it as a functionless by-product of the activity of the brain, an ‘epiphenomenon’, like a shadow.  Rupert Sheldrake
• Materialism assumes that consciousness emerges from, or is dependent upon, the physical world of space, time, and matter. In one way or another, they are attempting to accommodate the anomaly of consciousness within a worldview that is intrinsically materialist. As happened with the medieval astronomers who kept adding more and more epicycles to explain the anomalous motions of the planets, the underlying assumptions are seldom, if ever, questioned.  Peter Russell
• Materialism ends up denying the existence of any irreducible subjective qualitative states of sentience or awareness.  John Searle

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… and that consciousness shares the limits of the physical body

• They have convinced us that there is a world that exists separate from and independent of Consciousness. They have persuaded us to believe that ‘I’, the Consciousness that is seeing these words, is an entity that resides inside the body, that it was born and will die, and that it is the subject of experience whilst everything else, the world, the ‘other’, is the object.  Rupert Spira

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This worldview is universally accepted by our culture despite the negative effect it has had on our psyche

• I feel we urgently need an alternative to the soul-destroying understanding of science that has become dominant in our culture over the last few decades … I call this philosophy ‘scientific objectivism’, because it regards only the objective world as real for scientific objectivists the world of my imagination, from which these words are pouring right now, is just a by-product of a piece of meat called the ‘brain’, because only the world that can be measured and mapped really exists.  Tim Freke
• Mechanistic science in itself gives no reason to suppose that there is any point in life, or purpose in humanity, or that progress is inevitable. Instead it asserts that the universe is ultimately purposeless, and so is human life. Rupert Sheldrake

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This worldview has become a scientific meta-paradigm – the paradigm behind all other paradigms

• All our scientific paradigms are based on the assumption that the physical world is the real world, and that space, time, matter and energy are the fundamental components of reality. When we fully understand the functioning of the physical world, we will, it is believed, be able to explain everything in the cosmos. This is the belief upon which all our various scientific paradigms are based. It is, therefore, more than just another paradigm; it is a metaparadigm–the paradigm behind the paradigms.   So successful has this metaparadigm been at explaining just about every phenomenon we encounter in the material world, it is seldom, if ever questioned. It is only when we turn to the nonmaterial world of the mind that this worldview begins to exhibit weaknesses.  Peter Russell

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We never experience a world made of matter.  Our experience of the world is always made entirely of perception

• We never find matter. We only ever find the contents of our minds.  Rupert Spira
• The only things we can ever perceive are our perceptions. George Berkeley
• We know only our perceptions.  Robert Lanza
• There is nothing outside of perception. Robert Lanza
• When the mind, body and world appear, they appear simply as the current thought, sensation and perception. Rupert Spira
• The only way I can know about the world is through my subjective theater of experience. Gregg Henriques
• Nothing is perceived except perceptions themselves, and nothing exists outside of consciousness.  Robert Lanza
• All that I perceive—everything I see, hear, taste, touch, and smell—has been reconstructed from sensory data. I think I am perceiving the world around me, but all that I am directly aware of are the colours, shapes, sounds, and smells that appear in the mind.  Peter Russell
• Properly speaking, the world is not composed of “things” . . . but of colours, tones, pressures, spaces, times, in short what we ordinarily call individual sensations.  Ernst Mach
• Every man’s world picture is and always remains a construct of his mind and cannot be proved to have any other existence.   Erwin Schrodinger
• I think I am perceiving the world around me, but all that I am directly aware of are the colors, shapes, sounds and smells that appear in my awareness.  Peter Russell
• We never directly experience the world around us. All we ever know are the contents of consciousness, the thoughts, feelings, perceptions and sensations that appear in the mind.  Peter Russell
• We do not perceive a world outside Consciousness. The world is our perception of the world. There is no evidence that there is a world outside the perception of it, outside Consciousness.   Rupert Spira
• Sense-perceptions can only be indirect knowledge, and not direct knowledge. Only one’s own awareness is direct knowledge.  Ramana Maharshi
• Kant held that there is an underlying reality, but we never know it directly. All we can ever know is how it appears in our minds.  Peter Russell
• The idea that we never experience the physical world directly has intrigued many philosophers. Most notable was the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who drew a clear distinction between the forms that appear in the mind—what he called the phenomenon (a Greek word meaning “that which appears to be”) —and the world that gives rise to this perception, which he called the noumenon (meaning “that which is apprehended”). All we know, Kant insisted, is the phenomenon. The noumenon, the “thing-in-itself,” remains forever beyond our knowing.  Peter Russell
• The mind doesn’t experience the world, just sensory reports of it. David R. Hawkins
• We suffer a delusion when we believe the images in our minds are the external world. We deceive ourselves when we think that the tree we see is the tree itself.  Peter Russell
• Our objective experience consists of thoughts and images, which we call the mind; sensations, which we call the body; and sense perceptions, which we call the world. In fact, we do not experience a mind, a body or a world.  We experience thinking, sensing and perceiving. All that we perceive are our perceptions. We have no evidence that a world exists outside our perception of it. We do not perceive a world ‘out there’. We perceive our perception of the world, and all perception takes place in Consciousness.  Rupert Spira
• We do not describe the world we see, we see the world we can describe. Descartes
• What is the proof of an object? You say you see an object. But you actually see only form. Form is nothing but seeing. So you see only seeing. But did you really see even seeing? No. Because seeing can never exist distinct and separate from you. So you did not see at all. Therefore no object exists. The fact that you see can alone be admitted. But what did you see? Nothing. Neither form nor anything else. Still, the fact that you saw cannot be denied. Therefore, you are seeing the Reality itself and nothing else.  Sri Atmananda Krishna Menon
• Waking perceptions are on a par with dream perceptions.  Sri Satchidanandrenda
• All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions. Leonardo da Vinci
• All that is experienced of a mind, body and world is thinking, feeling, sensing, seeing, hearing, tasting, touching and smelling; and all these are made only of the knowing of them. Thus, all that is ever known is Knowing, and it is Knowing that knows Knowing. Rupert Spira
• All we can say reliably is that experience occurs in awareness, is known in awareness, and is made out of awareness. Awareness is the creator and recipient of experience, forming a feedback loop that never escapes the field of awareness. Deepak Chopra
• Each moment is a tapestry of ever-changing, seamless experiencing. Everywhere you look, hear, feel, sense, touch, taste, and smell, perception is happening immediately and inseparably to awareness. Scott Kiloby
• Even though traditional science divides objective facts “out there” from subjective activity “in here,” this is only a matter of convenience. Everything comes down to experience. A dream at night is an experience, and so is the sight of billions of galaxies. Deepak Chopra
• Every bit of our body is experienced — sensed — by our mind in the same way we sense everything outside our skin, namely entirely a perception in our mind. Scott Owen
• Everything we experience is an experience. Deepak Chopra
• Everything we perceive is a mental creation. Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos
• Is there anything that is real “out there” independent of us? Deepak Chopra
• Is there even a picture out there? All we know for sure is that there is some sort of a picture in our brains, a truly theoretical image.  In any event of perception it is this theoretical, very private image that we actually see.  Amit Goswami
• Minds and bodies alike are nothing but bundles of perceptions. Joseph Selbie
• Naïve realism is the assumption that the human brain delivers a picture of reality, when in fact it doesn’t. It delivers a convincing three-dimensional image of the world that is nothing more than a perception. Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos
• Our only knowledge of the world is a series of perceptions arising in consciousness. Rupert Spira
• Q: If the shape of things is mere appearance, what are they in reality? M: In reality there is only perception. The perceiver and the perceived are conceptual, the fact of perceiving is actual. Nisargadatta Maharaja
• Sense-perceptions can only be indirect knowledge, and not direct knowledge. Only one’s own awareness is direct knowledge. Ramana Maharshi
• The entire universe – for one thing – only exists in your perceptions. That’s all you’re gonna see of it. To all practical intents and purposes this is purely some kind of lightshow that’s being put on in the kind of neurons in our brain. The whole of reality. Alan Moore
• The entire universe is a matter of transformation whereby something is available to be turned into perception.  Deepak Chopra
• The experience of the body is a qualia experience. The experience of mental activity is a qualia experience. The experience of the world—and any other worlds—is a qualia experience. Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos
• The mind is like a canvas on which the various objects of the universe appear to be painted. Tipura Rahasya
• The only reality we can ever truly know is that of our perceptions, our own consciousness… Alan Moore
• We must remember that we do not observe nature as it actually exists, but nature exposed to our methods of perception. The theories determine what we can or cannot observe…Reality is an illusion, albeit a persistent one. Albert Einstein
• We never directly perceive material objects, but rather infer material objects from what we directly perceive. John M. E. McTaggart

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All our outer experiences are actually inner experiences arising within consciousness

• Matter as we know it exists only in the mind. Peter Russell
• There is no outside of you. It’s all an inside game. Adyashanti
• Nothing is perceived except the perceptions themselves, and nothing exists outside of consciousness.  The “outside world” is, therefore, located within the brain or mind.  Robert Lanza
• That this whole rich and brilliant universe comes from a quarter-inch opening of the pupil, and the faint bit of light that gains entry thereby? How does it turn some electrochemical impulses into an order, a sequence, and a unity? How can we cognize this page, or a face, or anything that appears so real that very few ever stop to question how it occurs? Obviously, it is outside traditional physics to discover that these perpetual images that surround us so vividly are a construction, a finished product hovering inside the head.  Robert Lanza
• Awareness is inseparable from (not independent of) the objects appearing in it. Can you really tell where awareness ends and objects begin?  All that you experience (perceive) “out there” is not out there but in your head. All is an interpretation of the brain in your head that puts it all together.  Out there might as well not even be there. Scott Kiloby
• All experience subsides with the mind. Without the mind, there can be no experiencer nor experience.  Nisargadatta Maharaj
• All experience is in the mind.  Nisargadatta Maharaj          
• Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be separated.  Tony Lanza
• You realize beyond all trace of doubt that the world is in you, and not you in the world.  Nisargadatta Maharaj
• In the language of biology, the brain turns electrochemical impulses from our five senses into an order, a sequence, into a face, into this page, into a room, into an environment—into a unified three-dimensional whole. It transforms a stream of sensory input into something so real that few people ever ask how it happens. Our minds are so good at creating a three-dimensional universe that we rarely question whether the universe is anything other than we imagine it.  Robert Lanza
• Our image of reality is more than physical reality in that it contains many qualities not present in physical reality.  The green we see is a quality created in consciousness. It exists only as a subjective experience in the mind.  There is no sound in the physical reality, simply pressure waves in the air. Sound exists only as an experience in the mind of a perceiver.  Peter Russell
• The experiencer imparts reality to the experience.  Nisargadatta Maharaj
• I think I have inner experiences (thoughts and emotions) and outer experiences (the world of the senses) but actually they are all inner experiences.  Anthony Lambert
• It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world colour and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I can “experience” is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus, there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind, translated, filtered, allegorized, twisted, even falsified by it. We are enveloped in a cloud of changing and endlessly shifting images. Carl Jung
• Even the experiencer is secondary. Primary is the infinite expanse of consciousness, the eternal possibility, the immeasurable potential of all that was, is, and will be. When you look at anything, it is the ultimate you see, but you imagine that you see a cloud or a tree. Learn to look without imagination, to listen without distortion: that is all. Stop attributing names and shapes to the essentially nameless and formless, realize that every mode of perception is subjective, that what is seen or heard, touched or smelt, felt or thought, expected or imagined, is in the mind and not in reality, and you will experience peace and freedom from fear.   Nisargadatta Maharaj
• The universe is in you and cannot be without you.  Nisargadatta Maharaj
• The world is not outside you.  Ramana Maharshi
• Sensations and perceptions are made out of mind – that is, they are made out of sensing and perceiving.  There is no other substance to them than sensing and perceiving.  Rupert Spira
• The mind, the body and the world are located inside Consciousness and are made only out of Consciousness. That is our experience.  Rupert Spira
• The human form is a microcosm of the universe. All that supposedly exists outside us in reality exists in us. The world is in you and can become known in you, as you. Jean Klein
• If you pay attention to what is happening right now you will see that you experience the world as a series of sensations: visual images, tactile feelings, background sounds, ambient aromas. And sensations exist within awareness, don’t they? Everything you are aware of exists within awareness, otherwise you wouldn’t be aware of it! So what is awareness? Awareness isn’t something within your experience. It is an emptiness that contains all you are experiencing. Try it out and see how it feels. Be the spacious emptiness of awareness within which everything you are experiencing exists. All you see and hear and touch and imagine exists within awareness. Your body exists within awareness. The world exists within awareness. You may appear to be a body in the world, but essentially you are awareness and the world exists in you – just like when you are dreaming. Tim Freke
• The Universe produced phenomenally in me, is pervaded by me. . .. From me the world is born, in me it exists, in me it dissolves. the Ashtavakra Gita
• Let man then learn the revelation of all nature and all thought to his heart; this, namely; that the Highest dwells with him; that the sources of nature are in his own mind.  Ralph Waldo Emerson
• When we say that we perceive an object, we mean that that object appears in Consciousness. It is a perception appearing in Consciousness.  Rupert Spira
• It is your memory that makes you think the world continues. Myself, I don’t live by memory. I see the world as it is, a momentary appearance in consciousness.  Nisargadatta Maharaj
• For each life, or if one prefers, the one life, there is a universe that involves “spheres of reality.” Shape and form are generated inside one’s head using all the sensory data collected through ears, eyes, nose, mouth, and skin. Our planet is composed of billions of spheres of reality, an internal/external confluence, a mélange whose scope is breath-taking.  Robert Lanza
• All experiences arise in consciousness.  Consciousness manifests experience.  Peter Russell
• The sages know as a direct personal experience, not just as a theoretical idea, that their entire world is a manifestation within the mind.  Peter Russell
• We think the world we see around us is composed of matter. As far as the actual physical reality is concerned, this may be so—uncertain though we may be as to the ultimate nature of this matter. But the world we perceive around us is not the physical world. The world we actually know is the world that takes form in our minds; this world is not made of matter, but of mind stuff.  Everything we know, perceive, and imagine, every colour, sound, sensation, thought, and feeling, is a form that consciousness has taken on. As far as this world is concerned, everything is structured in consciousness.  Peter Russell
• You are the entire universe. You are in all, and all is in you. Sun, moon, and stars revolve within you.  Swami Muktananda
• Knowledge is structured in consciousness. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
• The mind’s capacity is limitless, and its manifestations are inexhaustible. Seeing forms with your eyes, hearing sounds with your ears, smelling odors with your nose, tasting flavors with your tongue, every movement or state is all your mind. Bodhidharma
• All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you. Joseph Campbell
• Every experience occurs as qualia—in other words, qualities like color, taste, and sound. Since qualia occur in consciousness, they aren’t limited by physical dimensions. Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos
• Everything I see, hear and touch is a sensation arising within awareness. Tim Freke
• Everything we experience and perceive always takes place within our mind and therefore it is illogical to say that there is something external to us because we know of nothing else but that which takes place within us – within our mind. Martin E Moore
• Everything you are aware of exists within awareness, otherwise you wouldn’t be aware of it! Tim Freke
• No one ever saw a picture in an art gallery. You always see the picture in your head. Amit Goswami
• Our whole experience is a construction in the mind, a form appearing in consciousness. These mental forms are composed not of physical substance but of”mindstuff”. We imagine that the world out there is like the forms that appear in consciousness, but it turns out, that in nearly every aspect, the external is not at all like the images created in the mind. What appear to us as fundamental dimensions and attributes of the physical world—space, time, matter and energy—are but the fundamental dimensions and attributes of the forms appearing in consciousness. Peter Russell
• The French philosopher Descartes came to the conclusion that there can be nothing external to us because everything we experience always takes place within us (within our mind). Martin E Moore
• We are accustomed to referring to sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch as “senses”. But in reality we don’t sense what is ‘out there’, we quite literally make sense of it. We create qualities in our mind which are not actually ‘out there’ — outside our mind. We are so accustomed to our perceptions that it can be very difficult at first to separate them from the reality of what we are perceiving. For most people, it is simply taken for granted that our perceptions of colour, brightness, tone, volume, taste, smell and touch are actual attributes of the things themselves, when in fact they are all mental overlays. Scott Owen
• We are all navigating an external world — but only through the prism of our own minds, our own subjective experience… The majesty of the universe is only ever conjured up in the mind. Janna Levin
• We are never conscious of any experience separated or detached from the mind.… You yourself enter as a constituent into every mental fact of which you are conscious. William Walker Atkinson

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Consciousness and our experience of the world within it are more indisputably real than the “real” world of physical matter

• That you hear is a fact. What you hear — is not.  Nisargadatta Maharaj
• What is the true nature of the world I experience?  My experience of the world seemingly “out there” made of physical matter is a actually an “inner experience” arising within my awareness.  In other words, the only world that I know exists for sure is made of perception; not matter. The world of matter out there, existing independently of awareness, is far from indisputably real. In fact, the world of matter is nothing but a belief that our culture holds onto with an almost religious kind of fervour.  Unlike the world of matter, my awareness and my experiences arising within it are indisputably real.   The world I experience in reality is nothing but perceptions arising within consciousness, made by consciousness, made of consciousness, known by consciousness.  Anthony Lambert
• Some people claim that our subjective reality is an illusion, but that is misleading. It may all be a creation of the mind, but it is nonetheless real—the only reality we ever know. The illusion comes when we confuse the reality we experience with the physical reality, the thing-in-itself. The Vedantic philosophers of ancient India spoke of this confusion as maya.  Peter Russell
• How do we know that anything really exists, that anything is really the way it seems to us through our senses? Descartes
• How can reality depend on experience, when it is the very ground of experience? Reality is in the very fact of experience, not in its nature. Experience is, after all, a state of mind, while being is definitely not a state of mind.  Nisargadatta Maharaj
• Every one of the five senses can be twisted to deliver a completely different picture of the world. If by picture, we mean sight, sound, smell, taste and texture of things, a troubling conclusion looms. Apart from the very unreliable picture running inside the brain, we have no proof that reality is anything like what we see. Deepak Chopra
• Things which we see are not by themselves what we see … It remains completely unknown to us what the objects may be by themselves and apart from the receptivity of our senses. We know nothing but our manner of perceiving them.  Immanuel Kant
• All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.  H.P. Lovecraft
• All humanity could share a common insanity and be immersed in a common illusion while living in a common chaos. That can’t be disproved, but we have no choice but to follow our senses. Isaac Asimov
• The world or an object is the experience of it. We have no evidence of a world that exists outside our experience of it. Nor is it ever possible to have such an experience, because experience itself is the touchstone of evidence.  Rupert Spira
• Nothing exists outside our experience of it, as far as we know.  Rupert Spiral
• We take that which is unreal to be real and that which is real to be unreal.  Rupert Spira
• All our thoughts, sensations and perceptions are private. We think we all view the same world but in fact all we view is our own private perception. The world that is considered to exist independent of perception and of which each of our perceptions is considered to be a single, partial view, has never been experienced. There is no evidence for its existence. Rupert Spira
• All our interior world is reality, and that, perhaps, more so than our apparent world. Marc Chagall
• Consciousness Is Your Only Experience, it Is the Reality in Which you exist. Adi Da Samraj
• Far from being a material world, this is a psychic world, which allows us to make only indirect and hypothetical inferences about the real nature of matter. The psychic, alone has immediate reality…  Carl Jung
• It is necessary to keep reminding ourselves that all knowledge of our environment from which the world of physics is constructed, has entered in the form of messages transmitted along the nerves to the seat of consciousness. . . . It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character. But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference.  Sir Arthur Eddington
• The only thing we each know for certain, the only thing for which each of us has irrefutable proof, is one’s own consciousness. Proving physical reality exists is impossible, whereas proving mental reality exists is trivially self-evident: I know I am conscious because I know I am conscious. Scott Owen
• The only thing we know to be indisputably real is our inner experience of the outer world and our existence as an experiencer. The primary fabric of that reality is consciousness / awareness.  Anthony Lambert
• We assume that the objects we see around us are empirical objects of a common reality—quite objective and public, quite subject to empirical scrutiny. Yet, in fact, our knowledge about them is always gathered by subjective and private means.  Amit Goswami

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Even if we are experiencing some kind of virtual world with no physical reality to it, the experience of it is undeniably real

• The world may not be real but the experiencing of it is.  Anthony Lambert
• All illusions have a reality to them, and if we are experiencing an illusion we are, by definition, experiencing its reality.  Rupert Spira
• In this moment there is something that is being experienced. We may not know what that something is –for instance, it may be a dream or a hallucination –but we know that there is something.  Rupert Spira
• There is a Reality to every perception, although the perception itself is fleeting and insubstantial, vanishing at every moment, and this Reality endures from one appearance to another. This Reality is the support or ground of the appearance. The appearance may be an illusion, but the illusion itself is real. There is an illusion. It has Reality.  Rupert Spira
• Even if the world out there is an illusion, that illusion is still known. It is experienced.  Rupert Spira
• We know that Consciousness is present now, and we know that whatever it is that is being experienced in this moment exists. It has Existence.  Rupert Spira
• The reality of being an experiencer is more clearly real than the experience itself. The experience may be a kind of dream, but the fact that I am an experiencer, experiencing something cannot be denied.   Anthony Lambert
• Consciousness is that which experiences. We do not know what this Consciousness is but we know that it is. We know it is present, that there is something that is registering, witnessing, knowing the current situation.   Nor do we know exactly what the perceived object is, but we know that it exists, that is has Reality.  Rupert Spira
• The fact that there is experience tells us two things. First. it tells us that there is Consciousness, that whatever it is that is conscious is present and aware, that it is witnessing or experiencing whatever it is that is being experienced. We refer to this Consciousness as ‘I’, as ‘me’. It is the subjective element in every experience. We do not know what that Consciousness is, but we know that it is. Secondly, it tells us that there is something that is being experienced, that something is present. This something is the objective element in every experience.  We may not know what this ‘something’ is, yet there is no doubt that something is being experienced. It may be an illusion, a dream or a hallucination, and yet still it is something. It has Existence. It has Being. It has Reality.  Rupert Spira
• The reality of external objects does not admit of strict proof. On the contrary, however, the reality of the object of our internal sense (of myself and state) is clear immediately through consciousness. Immanuel Kant

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On the other hand, the existence of a world of matter existing independent of consciousness is nothing more than a belief.  We cannot prove it actually exists.

• If all that we ever know are the sensory images that appear in our minds, how can we be sure there is a physical reality behind our perceptions? Is it not just an assumption?  Peter Russell
• We conceptualise a mind, a body and a world that exist outside, separate from and independent of experience, that are considered to exist when they are not being experienced. However, such a mind, body and world have never been experienced.  Rupert Spira
• Be that as it may, there is fixed in my mind a certain opinion of long standing, namely that there exists a God who is able to do anything and by whom I, such as I am, have been created. How do I know that he did not bring it about that there is no earth at all, no heavens, no extended thing, no shape, no size, no place, and yet bringing it about that all these things appear to me to exist precisely as they do now? Descartes
• Listen; this world is the lunatic’s sphere, Don’t always agree it’s real, even with my feet upon it and the postman knowing my door. My address is somewhere else. Hafez
• As to the ultimate things we can know nothing, and only when we admit this do we return to equilibrium. Carl Jung
• Every man’s world picture is and always remains a construct of his mind and cannot be proved to have any other existence. Erwin Schrodinger
• The stream of human knowledge is impartially heading towards a non-mechanical reality. The universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter – not, of course, our individual minds, but the mind in which the atoms out of which our individual minds have grown exist as thoughts. Sir James Jean
• When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking ourselves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept — the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation. John Updike
• Have you ever experienced something in the absence of awareness? What makes you think anything exists in the absence of awareness?  Isn’t direct experience the scientific proof?  To think there is matter is a belief.  Rupert Spira
• To the ordinary man, the only evidence available regarding the existence of the world is the evidence offered by the five sense organs. It is ‘evidence’ that is taken up here, and examined to show that it does not prove the world at all. But it proves only sense perceptions, or the senses themselves. In other words, the evidence proves nothing but the evidence. Therefore, it is no evidence at all, as far as the fact to be proved is concerned.  Sri Atmananda Krishna Menon
• If you assert that the world exists, it is your burden to prove that it does. The opponent has only to deny it, until the existence is proved beyond doubt. Ultimately, even if you give up all argument and say ‘I know the world and so it must exist’, that also cannot hold good, because you cannot know any object except through one of the sense organs. When this is so, it proves again that it is that sense perception or sense alone that is known, and not the object nor the world.   Sri Atmananda Krishna Menon
• All perceived qualities — i.e. all those things by which we supposedly know what a physical reality is like — exist solely in the mind. Put another way: without consciousness, there exists no colour, no brightness, no sound, no taste, no smell… no hot nor cold, no smooth nor rough. So what is physical reality without consciousness? What is it, without a mind to perceive it? Since a physical universe doesn’t actually have any of the properties we perceive, and all those properties exist only in our mind, what sense does it even make to say the physical universe existed and evolved before there was any mind? Scott Owen
• All scientific evidence is entirely based directly or indirectly on our senses — colour, temperature, touch, sound, etc. which are mental perceptions which exist only in the mind and contain no attributes intrinsic to physical reality. So, if all the evidence is known not to be physical let alone objective, how can one say there is scientific evidence for a physical reality? Indeed, there is no objective scientific evidence for physical reality. That’s not necessarily to say that nothing ‘out there’ physically exists, but if it does then the best we can say is that it’s ‘something’ that your mind paints with its own colours and shades, tastes and smells and sounds, perhaps a soup of radiation and forces swirling about in silent darkness, figuratively and literally illuminated by our consciousness. If there is a physical reality, we have no way of knowing anything of its true nature – at least not by direct or indirect use of our senses. Scott Owen
• Everything we know of reality is in fact a mental overlay, and a physical reality is unknowable Scott Owen
• If something is real beyond our experience, we’ll never know it. Deepak Chopra
• If we can’t test the claim that a peach does not exist when no one looks, then we can’t test the opposite and widely held claim that it does exist. Both claims posit what happens when no one observes. Donald Hoffman
• If you can’t prove that anything exists outside you own mind, is it all right to go on believing in the external world anyway? Thomas Nagel
• If you first assume that you are a consciousness with the ability to imagine and create images, sound and other perceptions, why would you then theorise that there is some physical reality outside your consciousness, the true nature of which which you cannot know? If you theorise the existence of something you know you cannot know, then you also know it can never be scientifically tested. Scott Owen
• It is almost an absurd prejudice to suppose that existence can only be physical. As a matter of fact, the only form of existence of which we have immediate knowledge is psychic. We might as well say, on the contrary, that physical existence is a mere inference, since we know of matter only in so far as we perceive psychic images mediated by the senses.  Carl Jung
• We have no direct knowledge of objects in the world. Donald Hoffman
• If you can’t prove that anything exists outside you own mind, is it all right to go on believing in the external world anyway? Thomas Nagel
• The belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science. Since, however, sense perception only gives information of this external world or of “physical reality” indirectly, we can only grasp the latter by speculative means. It follows from this that our notions of physical reality can never be final. We must always be ready to change these notions – that is to say, the axiomatic basis of physics – in order to do justice to perceived facts in the most perfect way. Albert Einstein
• The delicate and complicated instruments of modern experimental physics penetrate deep into the submicroscopic world, into realms of nature far removed from our macroscopic environment, and make this world accessible to our senses. However, they can do so only through a chain of processes ending, for example, in the audible click of a Geiger counter, or in a dark spot on a photographic plate. What we see, or hear, are never the investigated phenomena themselves but always their consequences. The atomic and subatomic world itself lies beyond our sensory perception.  Frifjof Capra
• Thus arises the old philosophical puzzle about which is real: the theoretical image that we actually see but only privately, or the empirical object that we do not seem to see directly but about which we form a consensus?  Amit Goswami

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Some argue that the existence of a world appearing in consciousness does not mean that there isn’t also a physical reality behind our perceptions

• If all that we ever know are the images that appear in our minds, how can we be sure there is a physical reality behind our perceptions? Is it not just an assumption? My answer is: Yes, it is an assumption; nevertheless, it seems a most plausible one.  For a start, there are definite constraints on my experience. I cannot, for example, walk through walls. If I try to, there are predictable consequences. Nor can I, when awake, float through the air or walk upon water. Moreover, my experience generally follows well-defined laws and principles. Balls thrown through the air follow precisely defined paths. Cups of coffee cool at similar rates. The sun rises on time. Finally, this predictability is not peculiar to my experience of reality. You report similar patterns in your own experience. The simplest way, by far, of accounting for these constraints and for their consistency is to assume that there is indeed a physical reality. We may not know it directly, but it is there.  Peter Russell

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Some scientists are starting to consider the real possibility that the world of matter does not and cannot exist independently of consciousness …

• Without perception, there can be no reality.  Robert Lanza
• What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space. Particles are just schaumkommen (appearances). The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.  Erwin Schrödinger
• As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as the result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together…. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.  Max Planck
• If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody is there, does it make a sound?  An observer, an ear, and a brain are every bit as necessary for the experience of sound as are the air pulses.  Robert Lanza
• In truth, there can be no break between the observer and the observed. If the two are split, the reality is gone.  Robert Lanza
• Once one fully understands that there is no independent external universe outside of biological existence, the rest more or less falls into place. Robert Lanza
• The behaviour of subatomic particles—indeed all particles and objects—is inextricably linked to the presence of an observer. Without the presence of a conscious observer, they at best exist in an undetermined state of probability waves.  Robert Lanza
• The universe and the observer exist as a pair. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of the universe that ignores consciousness. I do not know any sense in which I could claim that the universe is here in the absence of observers.  Andrei Linde
• Ultimately there is no inner, nor outer; the light of consciousness is both the creator and the creature, the experiencer and the experience, the body and the embodied. Take care of the power that projects all this and your problems will come to an end. Nisargadatta Maharaj          
• We do not belong to this material world that science constructs for us. We are not in it; we are outside. We are only spectators. The reason why we believe that we are in it, that we belong to the picture, is that our bodies are in the picture.’  Erwin Schröedinger
• Without any organism, what if anything is really there?  Existence must begin with life and perception.  Indeed, what could existence mean, absent consciousness of any kind?  Robert Lanza
• Albert Einstein once said “I like to believe that the moon is there even if I am not looking at it.” But according to the double-slit experiments, the moon isn’t there unless one is looking at it. Joseph Selbie
• Quantum Mechanics seems to favor idealism over realism to such an extent that physicists with strong physics backgrounds are promoting idealism (among these are John Wheeler, Frijtof Capra, and Fred Alan Wolf). Martin E Moore
• Quantum physicists such as Bernard d’Espagnat talk about a ‘veiled reality’ that we can hardly even imagine, which appears as solid physical objects only when observed. Keith Ward
• Quantum physics long ago undermined the very notion of physical objects—at its foundation, the universe isn’t solid, tangible, or fixed. Therefore, the old science of an external physical universe has been mortally wounded by the new science of quantum physics. Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos
• Suppose we define consciousness as the agency that affects quantum objects to make their behavior sensible.  Amit Goswami
• The anomalous nature of the intelligent-observer effect has a similarly profound effect on scientific materialism. Its paradigm-changing implications, too, cannot be overstated. The intelligent-observer paradox turns scientific materialism on its head. The oft-demonstrated fact that the matter-wave will not behave as matter unless observed by an intelligent observer has led many eminent physicists to the conclusion that matter does not create consciousness—consciousness creates matter.  Joseph Selbie
• The Awareness Principle transcends ‘science’ as we know it today, because it recognises that the most basic scientific ‘fact’ or ‘reality’ of all is not the ‘objective’ existence of a universe of matter and energy but a subjective awareness of such a universe, as shaped by different organising field-patterns or species of awareness. Peter Wilberg
• The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment. Bernard d’Espagnat
• The external world of physics has thus become a world of shadows. In removing our illusions we have removed the substance, for indeed we have seen that substance is one of the greatest of our illusions. Arthur Eddington
• The stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter, we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter. Get over it, and accept the inarguable conclusion. The universe is immaterial-mental and spiritual.  Sir James Jeans
• The universe and the observer exist as a pair.  Andrei Linde
• This is a participatory universe.  John Archibald Wheeler
• We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Werner Heisenberg
• We must restart science on an entirely different footing, beginning with the brute fact that our minds exist, and determining, from there. Donald Hoffman
• When the “observer effect” was first noticed by the early pioneers of quantum theory, they were deeply troubled. It seemed to undermine the basic assumption behind all science: that there is an objective world out there, irrespective of us. If the way the world behaves depends on how – or if – we look at it, what can “reality” really mean? Philip Ball

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… an assertion that philosophers and spiritual finders have been making for hundreds, if not thousands of years

• It is known as Omnipotence, because whatever appears depends solely on Consciousness for its existence. Whatever appears emerges out of, is sustained by and is dissolved into Consciousness. Consciousness creates everything out of its own Being.  Rupert Spira
• Nothing exists to you without your being there to experience its existence.  Nisargadatta Maharaj
• The world has no substance and has no existence independent of Consciousness.  Bentinho Massaro
• Outside you there is no eternal sky, no changeless star and no reality. A Course in Miracles
• There is no proof of a world independent of perception. Yet me assume it is there.  Rupert Spira
• There is no world apart from the mind.  What appears as the world is only the mind.  Ribhu Gita
• With our thoughts we make the world.  Gautama Buddha
• We only know that we are here observing the world. What happens when nobody observes it is a mystery.  Deepak Chopra
• What you perceive through the five senses isn’t the same as reality. Go beyond the shadow play of appearances, and reality will greet you.  Deepak Chopra    
• When that witness itself, which is ‘I am’, subsides, what remains?  With the witness gone, all other things have disappeared too.  Nisargadatta Maharaj
• Will anything be apparent to you, if there be no consciousness? Even to say that nothing is apparent to you (as in sleep) requires the light of consciousness.  Tripura Rahasya
• Without an experiencer, the experience is not real. It is the experiencer that imparts reality to experience. An experience which you cannot have, of what value is it to you?  Nisargadatta Maharaj
• All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream. Edgar Allen Poe
• I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness.  Dada Gunamuktananda
• It is only in the consciousness of the observer that objects exist at all in space and time.  Robert Lanza
• Nothing you perceive around you—not this page, not this room, not this house—has any reality except through you. Deepak Chopra
• Q: Ultimately all is experience. Whatever we think, feel, do, is experience. Behind it is the experiencer. So, all we know consists of these two, the experiencer and the experience. But the two are really one — the experiencer alone is the experience. Still, the experiencer takes the experience to be outside. In the same way, the spirit and the body are one; they only appear as two.  Nisargadatta Maharaj
• The presence of the mind, the body and the world, however peaceful or agitated, is only possible because of this witnessing presence of Consciousness.  Rupert Spira
• Without consciousness there would be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and considered by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being.  C.J. Jung
• Matter is derived from mind, and not mind from matter. The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation
• If I remove the thinking subject, the whole material world must at once vanish because it is nothing but a phenomenal appearance in the sensibility of ourselves as a subject, and a manner or species of representation. Immanuel Kant
• If there were no intelligent observers in the physical universe, the physical universe would cease to exist.  Joseph Selbie
• It’s not that consciousness is in all ; consciousness is all things. Scott Owen
• All descriptions of matter are descriptions of modes of human perception within consciousness. Deepak Chopra
• John von Neumann (1903–1957), who is considered to be one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century and who was also a scientist on the Manhattan Project, asserts that consciousness doesn’t merely affect reality; consciousness creates reality.  Joseph Selbie
• Matter exists only as a cluster of visual, auditory, taste and tactile perceptions arising in awareness. Anthony Lambert
• No object has its own independent existence. All objects borrow their apparent existence from the reality of consciousness. Rupert Spira
• Nothing and nobody exists in this world whose very being does not presuppose a spectator. Hannah Arendt
• Nothing could appear, the word “appearance” would make no sense, if recipients of appearances did not exist — living creatures able to acknowledge, recognize, and react to — in flight or desire, approval or disapproval, blame or praise — what is not merely there but appears to them and is meant for their perception. In this world which we enter, appearing from a nowhere, and from which we disappear into a nowhere, Being and Appearing coincide… Nothing and nobody exists in this world whose very being does not presuppose a spectator. In other words, nothing that is, insofar as it appears, exists in the singular; everything that is is meant to be perceived by somebody… Plurality is the law of the earth. Hannah Arendt
• Reality is not made up of material substances that endure through time, but serially-ordered events, which are experiential in nature. Philip A. Pecorino
• The existence of what we call physical reality is dependent upon consciousness. Scott Owen
• The inner being of the whole of nature must be somehow psychical. Timothy Sprigge
• The universe does not seem to exist without a perceiver of that universe. Amit Goswami
• There is no reality above and beyond that created by the integration of all consciousnesses, and the holographic universe can  potentially be sculpted in virtually limitless ways by the mind.  Michael Talbot
• There is no such thing as material substance in the world. George Berkeley
• We started with the concept that the world contains the body, which in turn contains the mind, which in turn contains a little invisible spark of Consciousness, which at best is considered to be a by-product of the world and at worst is overlooked altogether. We end with the understanding that Consciousness is the ever-present Reality of all things and that everything appears within it and as an expression of it. Rupert Spira
• Without awareness of being, or consciousness, there is nothing. Are there objects? Who knows? If no one is aware of the objects, their existence or nonexistence becomes completely irrelevant. Michael A. Singer
• Without awareness of reality, how can reality exist? Ramana Maharshi

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All physicists today acknowledge the fact that matter needs to be observed by consciousness before it collapses into any kind of tangible existence

• When the quantum physicists looked deeply into the nature of matter, they discovered something astonishing. The quantum possibilities only come into a definite form when observed by consciousness. They concluded that consciousness ‘collapses’ the quantum possibilities into a seemingly solid universe. So, without the conscious observer the world as we know it doesn’t exist. Tim Freke
• No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.  John Wheeler (Nobel physicist)
• Without consciousness, “matter” dwells in an undetermined state of probability. Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state.  Robert Lanza
• A physical particle or bit of light only exists in a blurry state of possibility until its wave-function collapses at the time of observation, and only then actually assumes a definite existence. Robert Lanza
• A wave of probability isn’t an event or a phenomenon, it is a description of the likelihood of an event or phenomenon occurring. Nothing happens until the event is actually observed.  Robert Lanza  
• Before it is observed, a subatomic particle doesn’t really exist in a definite place or have an actual motion. Instead, it dwells in a strange nether realm without actually being anywhere in particular.  Robert Lanza
• In the quantum world, the observer always interacts, changing the behaviour of particles through the acts of observation and measurement.  Steve Taylor
• Sights, tactile experiences, odours—all these sensations are experienced inside the mind alone. None are “out there” except by the convention of language. Everything we observe is the direct interaction of energy and mind. Anything that we do not observe directly exists only as potential—or more mathematically speaking—as a haze of probability. “Nothing,” said Wheeler, “exists until it is observed.”  Robert Lanza
• Until you measure it, a particle is never in a specific place or a specific state.  Steve Taylor
• With small discrete particles, however, if they are not being observed, they cannot be thought of as having any real existence—either duration or a position in space.  It cannot be thought of as being either here or there.  Robert Lanza
• Observation isn’t passive. It causes waves to collapse into particles. Something that is invisible, all-pervasive, and subject to the laws of probability turns into something else that is local, physical, and certain.  Deepak Chopra
• According to the ‘uncertainty principle’ of quantum physics, on an elementary level the physical universe is a collection of possibilities. Scientists have discovered that there has to be a conscious observer to ‘collapse’ the quantum possibilities, which stops particles being in two places at once and creates a world we can examine and measure. Tim Freke
• All objects remain in an indeterminate wave state until they are measured by an intelligent observer.  Joseph Selbie
• Countless acts of observation give substance and reality to what would otherwise be ghosts of existence.  Deepak Chopra
• To be is to be perceived. George Berkeley
• We are participators in bringing into being not only the near and here but the far away and long ago.  John Wheeler
• Werner Heisenberg , a titan of early 20th-century physics, suggested that underlying all matter is an indivisible and unseen realm, for which he coined the term Potentia, and from which objects spring into existence when observed by an intelligent observer.  Joseph Selbie

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In other words, as spiritual finders have also been saying for millennia, it is consciousness that confers reality onto matter

• Before matter can peep forth—as a pebble, a snowflake, or even a subatomic particle—it has to be observed by a living creature. Robert Lanza
• The content of the mind is the ultimate reality, and only an act of observation can confer shape and form to reality—from a dandelion in a meadow to sun, wind, and rain.  Robert Lanza
• You, Consciousness, are prior to experience. You, Consciousness, are not the result of an experience. All experience is a result of You.  Rupert Spira
• Wherever the life is, the world bursts into appearance around it.  Ralph Waldo Emerson
• To be, everything must be witnessed.  Nisargadatta Maharaj
• The universe bursts into existence from life, not the other way around. Or, perhaps more graspably, there dwells an eternal correlativity of nature and consciousness.  Robert Lanza
• The i’s and the t’s of physical reality are not dotted and crossed until you actually look up into the sky. The Moon has a definite existence only after it has been pulled out of the realm of mathematical probability and into the observer’s web of consciousness.  Robert Lanza
• All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth – in a word, all those bodies which compose the frame of the world – have not any subsistence without a mind. George Berkeley

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If you think the idea of a consciousness only model of the world is hard to believe, remember that consciousness already manifests very convincing worlds every time we dream  

• Dreams and schizophrenia (consider the movie A Beautiful Mind) prove the capacity of the mind to construct a spatio-temporal reality as real as the one you are experiencing now.  Robert Lanza
• When we dream we can immerse ourselves in realistic worlds just as real as the ones we experience when we are awake. Martin E Moore
• Our perception of the world has the very convincing appearance of being “out there” around us, but it is no more “out there” than are our nightly dreams. In our dreams we are aware of sights, sounds and sensations happening around us. We are aware of our bodies. We think and reason. We feel fear, anger, pleasure and love. We experience other people as separate individuals, speaking and interacting with us. The dream appears to be happening “out there” in the world around us. Only when we awaken do we realize that it was all just a dream–a creation in the mind.  When we say “it was all just a dream” we are referring to the fact that the experience was not based on physical reality. It was created from memories, hopes, fears, and other factors. In the waking state, our image of the world is based on sensory information drawn from our physical surroundings. This gives our waking experience a consistency and sense of reality not found in dreams. But the truth is, it is as much a creation of our minds as are our dreams.  Peter Russell
• Most of us would not consider ourselves capable of writing a screen-play, creating characters and complex dialogues, designing sets and costumes – certainly not without extensive training -, let alone doing it all and simultaneously playing it out in real-time. And yet that is exactly what most of us appear to do when we dream at night. More time appears to pass in a dream than passes in real-time, so it’s massive creativity at a speed faster than real-time. Robert Lanza
• Because the holographic mechanisms the brain uses to construct everyday reality are the same ones it uses to construct our dreams and the realities we experience during altered states of consciousness, I believe all three types of reality are fundamentally the same. Gordon Globus
• How do we have this phenomenal creative ability, which we apparently don’t have when awake? Perhaps our sleep-time dreams have the same source as the illusion of physical reality we experience when awake. Scott Owen
• How would you describe everything in one of your dreams? It’s not that everything in the dream is conscious but, rather, consciousness is everything in the dream. And so if reality is a thought, then it is not that the universe is conscious, but consciousness is the universe. Consciousness is ubiquitous. Scott Owen
• In dreams there are in reality no chariots; no horses, not even the course on which the chariot may run; and yet all these are mentally created in a moment. There are in reality no joys; no pleasures; no delights; and yet all are mentally seen and felt at the instant. There are in reality no ponds, no lakes, no rivers; and yet all are there at the merest thought. This power of evolving any number of forms from Itself is the Creative Power of the One. Brahadaranyakopanishad
• There is no objective scientific evidence for the existence of a physical reality. Yet we each have self-evident proof of consciousness. Our dreams are evidence that our consciousness is capable of creating an illusion of physical reality. Rather than assume a physical reality for which we have no objective evidence exists, and believe that consciousness (for which we have proof) is emergent from physical reality, it is more logical and reasonable to assume that consciousness is primary, and that physical reality is an illusion of consciousness. It’s not that the physical universe exists only when some consciousness is there to perceive it — the moon springing into existence only when someone looks at it, so to say… it is that substance is purely a concept, and physical reality exists only in consciousness. Scott Owen

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One reason is the profound weirdness displayed by the physical world at the quantum level

• Materialism provided a seemingly simple, straightforward worldview in the late nineteenth century, but twenty-first-century science has left it behind. Rupert Sheldrake
• Not only is the universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think. Werner Heisenberg

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Science does not even begin to have adequate answers for the inexplicable weirdness displayed by the physical universe …

• Has anyone explained how dumb carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen molecules could have, by combining accidentally, become sentient—aware!—and then utilized this sentience to acquire a taste for hot dogs and the blues? How any possible natural random process could mix those molecules in a blender for a few billion years so that out would pop woodpeckers and George Clooney? Can anyone conceive of any edges to the cosmos? Infinity? Or how particles still spring out of nothingness? Or conceive of any of the many supposed extra dimensions that must exist everywhere in order for the cosmos to consist fundamentally of interlocking strings and loops? Or explain how ordinary elements can ever rearrange themselves so that they continue to acquire self-awareness and a loathing for macaroni salad? Or, again, how every one of dozens of forces and constants are precisely fine-tuned for the existence of life? Robert Lanza
• By reminding us of its great successes at figuring out interim processes and the mechanics of things, and fashioning marvellous new devices out of raw materials, science gets away with patently ridiculous “explanations” for the nature of the cosmos as a whole. If only it hadn’t given us HDTV and the George Foreman grill, it wouldn’t have held our attention and respect long enough to pull the old three-card Monte when it comes to these largest issues.  Robert Lanza
• Unless one awards points for familiarity and repetition, a consciousness-based universe scarcely seems far-fetched when compared with the alternatives.  Robert Lanza

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… including the fact that two particles on completely opposite sides of the universe can affect each other instantaneously …

• In the early 1980s, Alain Aspect, a French physicist, showed that when two particles are created with correlated quantum states (for example, both having the same spin) and are then separated by a long distance, their quantum states remain correlated. When Aspect measured the spin of one particle, causing its wave function to collapse into one particular state, he found that the wave function of the second particle collapsed into the same state, although there was no way the two particles could now affect each other.  Peter Russell
• When entangled particles are created, the pair share a wave-function. When one member’s wave-function collapses, so will the other’s—even if they are separated by the width of the universe.  This means that if one particle is observed to have an “up spin,” the other instantly goes from being a mere probability wave to an actual particle with the opposite spin. They are intimately linked, and in a way that acts as if there’s no space between them, and no time influencing their behavior.  Robert Lanza
• Connectedness between two objects so intimate that they behave as one, instantaneously and forever, even if they are separated by the width of galaxies.  Robert Lanza
• Distance (space) has no reality whatsoever for entangled particles, no matter how great their apparent separation.  Robert Lanza
• Even if the twins were across the universe from each other, when one was measured the other would instantly take on the opposite properties—apparently communicating information at a speed vastly greater than the speed of light.  Joseph Selbie

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… the fact that the entire universe and all its laws seem to have sprung from nothing in an instant …

• What orthodoxy teaches about time is that the universe sprang from utter nothingness in a single moment . . . It’s almost as if science said, “Give me one free miracle, and from there the entire thing will proceed with a seamless, causal explanation.”  Terence McKenna
• The Big Bang has made Idealists out of almost anybody who thinks. First there was absolutely nothing, then Bang! Something. This is beyond weird. Out of sheerest Emptiness, manifestation arises.  Ken Wilber
• Cosmologists, biologists, and evolutionists do not seem at all flabbergasted when they state that the universe—indeed the laws of nature themselves—just appeared for no reason one day.  Robert Lanza
• It is flat-out strange that something-that anything-is happening at all. There was nothing then a Big Bang, then here we all are. This is extremely weird.  Ken Wilber
• As Rupert Sheldrake said, modern science is based on the principal, “Give us one free miracle and and we’ll explain the rest.”  And the one free miracle is the appearance of all the matter and energy of the universe, and all the laws that govern it, from nothing, in a single instant. Dada Gunamuktananda
• For millennia mankind has believed that nothing can come out of nothing. Today we can argue that everything has come out of nothing. Nobody has to pay for the universe. It is the ultimate free lunch. Paul Davies
• It’s almost as if science said, “Give me one free miracle, and from there the entire thing will proceed with a seamless, causal explanation.”’ The one free miracle was the sudden appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe, with all the laws that govern it. Rupert Sheldrake
• My feeling is that scientific method has the power to account for and interlink all phenomena in the universe, including its origin, using the laws of nature. But that still leaves the laws unexplained. Paul Davies
• Now you may think I have written God entirely out of the picture. Who needs a God when the laws of physics can do such a splendid job? But we are bound to return to that burning question: Where do the laws of physics come from? And why those laws rather than some other set? Most especially: Why a set of laws that drives the searing, featureless gases coughed out of the big bang toward life and consciousness and intelligence and cultural activities such as religion, art, mathematics, and science? Paul Davies
• Science has no credible explanation of how nothing could suddenly become something. Alan H. Dawe
• The could not derive from nothing (nothing at all) unless there was some prior force or Consciousness that could conceptualise the something and decide to make it appear. Alan H. Dawe
• The only power that could possibly create something from nothing is Consciousness. Alan H. Dawe

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… the fact that time is relative and not a constant …

• At 98 percent of lightspeed, time travels at half its normal speed.  At 99 percent, it goes just one-seventh as fast.  Robert Lanza
• And at the speed of light—670 million miles per hour—a clock would stop completely.  Robert Lanza
• Someone zipping toward the galaxy’s center at 99.999999999 percent of lightspeed experiences a dilation effect of 22,360. While this person’s watch ticks off one year, simultaneously, 223 centuries elapse for everyone else.  Robert Lanza
• Time is incontrovertibly not a constant, and any such item that varies with changing circumstance cannot be fundamental or part of the bedrock reality of the cosmos in the way that lightspeed, consciousness, or even the gravitational constant appear to be.  Robert Lanza
• Travel in a rocket at 99 percent the speed of light and you’ll enjoy the consequential sevenfold time dilation:  from your perspective nothing has changed; you have aged a decade in ten years’ worth of travel. But upon returning to Earth you’d find that seventy years have passed and none of your old friends are still alive to greet you.  Robert Lanza
• Time intervals depend on the frame of reference. They become longer as the velocity relative to the observer increases. This means that clocks in motion run slower; time slows down. These clocks can be of varying types: mechanical clocks, atomic clocks, or even a human heartbeat. If one of two twins went on a fast round-trip into outer space, he would be younger than his brother when he came back home, because all his ‘clocks’-his heartbeat, bloodflow, brainwaves, etc.-would slow down during the journey, from the point of view of the man on the ground. The traveller himself, of course, would not notice anything unusual, but on his return he would suddenly realize that his twin brother was now much older. This ‘twin paradox’ is perhaps the most famous paradox of modern physics. Fritjof Capra
• Time is not an absolute reality but an aspect of our consciousness. Robert Lanza

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… the fact that space and distance is relative and not a constant …

• If we could move at 99.9999999 percent of lightspeed, which is perfectly allowable by the laws of physics, the living room would now be 1/22,361th its original size or just a hundredth of an inch across—barely larger than the period at the end of this sentence.  Robert Lanza
• Einstein showed that different observers, moving at different speeds, disagree in their measurements of time and distance. Donald Hoffman
• Dennis Proffitt and his collaborators found that people given a drink containing glucose make shorter estimates of distance than those given a drink containing no carbohydrates (and, instead, an artificial sweetener); people who are more aerobically fit make shorter estimates of distance than those who are less fit. This suggests that our perception of a distance depends not just on the energy cost, but rather on the ratio of the energy cost to our available energy. Donald Hoffman
• Einstein’s work also revealed that space and time are not absolutes. They vary according to the motion of the observer. If you are moving rapidly past me, and we both measure the distance and time between two events—a car traveling from one end of a street to another, say—then you will observe the car to have traveled less distance in less time than I observe. Conversely, from your point of view, I am moving rapidly past you, and in your frame of reference I will observe less space and time than you do. Weird? Yes. And almost impossible for us to conceive of. Yet numerous experiments have shown it to be true. It is our common sense notions of space and time that are wrong. Once again they are constructs in the mind, and do not perfectly model what is out there. Peter Russell

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… which only makes sense if you regard time and space as perceptions in consciousness and not existing independently of it

• Consciousness does not exist in time. Time exists as an idea in Consciousness.  Rupert Spira
• Does time actually exist when you don’t think of it?  Have you ever got some engrossed in an activity that time seems to disappear?  When you finish, you say “Where did the time go?”  Or have you been bored and time seemed to move painfully slowly. You kept noticing it.   Or have you experienced a moment when time seemed to stop?  Clearly in our experience, time can seem to speed up and slow down.  And sometimes it can seem to disappear; at other times to stop.  Time is clearly a perception, a subjective experience no more or less real than a thought or feeling or sensation.  But it exists within consciousness.  It does not have reality independent of consciousness.  Anthony Lambert
• From a biocentric point of view, time does not exist in the universe independent of life that notices it, space and time are not absolute realities but rather tools of the human and animal mind.  Robert Lanza
• Go beyond the ‘I-am-the-body’ idea and you will find that space and time are in you and not you in space and time.  Nisargadatta Maharaj
• If one removes space and time as actual entities rather than subjective, relative, and observer-created phenomena, it pulls the rug from under the notion that an external world exists within its own independent skeleton. Where is this external objective universe if it has neither time nor space?  Robert Lanza
• According to the simpler theory, the dimensions of space we perceive are in fact a thought, an imagining, like the very real but dimensionless space in our dreams. Scott Owen
• In ordinary consciousness we experience time in a linear way, as a river of moments which flow by and disappear into the past, never to return again.  Particularly with medium-to high-intensity experiences, time seems to expand massively and the distinctions between the past, present and future seem to fade away.  Psychedelic drugs like LSD and mescaline can ‘telescope aeons of blissful experience into one hour’.  Steve Taylor
• In reality time and space exist in you; you do not exist in them. They are modes of perception, but they are not the only ones. Time and space are like words written on paper; the paper is real, the words merely a convention.  Nisargadatta Maharaj
• It is not necessary to jettison Einstein in order to restore space and time to their place as means by which we animals and humans intuit ourselves. They belong to us, not to the physical world.  Robert Lanza
• Kant argued that this was even true of space and time. To us, the reality of space and time seems undeniable. They appear to be fundamental dimensions of the physical world, entirely independent of our consciousness. This, said Kant, is because we cannot see the world in any other way. The human mind is so constituted that it is forced to construct its experience within the framework of space and time. Space and time are not, however, fundamental dimensions of the underlying reality. They are fundamental dimensions of consciousness.  Peter Russell
• Space and time are forms of animal understanding—period. We carry them around with us like turtles with shells. Robert Lanza
• Space and time are not objects of perception, but qualities of awareness. Deepak Chopra
• Space and time are neither physical nor fundamentally real.  They are conceptual, which means that space and time are of a uniquely subjective nature. They are modes of interpretation and understanding.  Robert Lanza
• Space and time are not conditions in which we live, they are modes in which we think.  Albert Einstein
• Space is a tool of life, the form of outer sense that allows an organism to coordinate sensory information, and to make judgments regarding the quality and intensity of what is being perceived. Space is not a physical phenomenon per se—and should not be studied in the same way as chemicals and moving particles. We animal organisms use this form of perception to organize our sensations into outer experience.  Robert Lanza
• Space is simply what we can measure using the solid objects of our experience. Albert Einstein
• The further relevance of all this to biocentrism is that if one removes space and time as actual entities rather than subjective, relative, and observer-created phenomena, it pulls the rug from under the notion that an external world exists within its own independent skeleton. Where is this external objective universe if it has neither time nor space?  Robert Lanza
• Space and time coordinates are only the elements of a language that is used by an observer to describe his environment. Mendel Sachs
• The influence of the senses has in most men overpowered the mind to the degree that the walls of space and time have come to look solid, real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits in the world is the sign of insanity.  Ralph Waldo Emerson
• The mind creates time and space and takes its own creations for reality. Nisargadatta Maharaj
• Time and space appear within Consciousness. Consciousness does not appear within time and space.  Rupert Spira
• Time is the eternal now, seen through the narrow slit of the mind.  Rupert Spira
• Time is the first language of the mind. Space is the first language of the senses. Remove time and space from experience – that is, remove name and form – and we are left with the oneness of Consciousness/Existence. We are left with timeless, spaceless Presence, with Being.   Rupert Spira
• Time is the imagined distance between two events.  That, and the visual perception of a clock or watch.   It is nothing but a sense perception of the mind, arising in consciousness.  Anthony Lambert
• Time is the perpetual flow of ever-changing appearances that awareness witnesses. Time exists within awareness. Awareness is outside of time. You are timeless awareness dreaming itself to be a person in time.  Tim Freke
• Time’s nature is seen for what it is—a bio centric fabrication, a biologic creation that is solely a practical operating aid in the mental circuitry of some living organisms, to help with specific functioning activities.  The demotion of time from an actual reality to a mere subjective experience, a fiction, or even social convention, is central to biocentrism.  Robert Lanza
• Spacetime and objects are the perceptual interface used by Homo sapiens. They are our first-person experiences. Donald Hoffman
• We find that space means nothing apart from our perception of objects, and time means nothing apart from our experience of events. Space begins to appear merely as a fiction created by our own minds (our physical bodies are merely things in space, an illegitimate extension to Nature of a subjective concept which helps us to understand and describe the arrangement of objects as seen by us; while time appears as a second fiction (without the past and the future, time as generally conceived is but a myth, serving a similar purpose for the arrangement of events which happen to us.  Sir James Jeans
• Space, time, and physical objects are not objective reality. They are simply the virtual world delivered by our senses to help us play the game of life. Donald Hoffman
• We must rid ourselves of the notion that space and time are actual qualities in things in themselves . . . all bodies, together with the space in which they are, must be considered nothing but mere representations in us, and exist nowhere but in our thoughts.  Immanuel Kant
• Time is an abstraction at which we arrive through the changes of things.   Julian Barbour
• Be it clearly understood that space is nothing but a mode of particularisation and that it has no real existence of its own . . . Space exists only in relation to our particularising consciousness. Ashvaghosha
• If space and time exist only in our perceptions, then how can anything within space and time, such as neurons and their activity, create our consciousness? Donald Hoffman
• If we saw space for what it truly was, gone would be the questions of “How big?” and “Where?” Space would have no physical dimensions, and yet it would be infinite — as far as thought can go. Without physical dimensions, there is suddenly no problem with singularities nor paradox surrounding quantum entanglement at a distance: William of Ockham would be proud. Scott Owen
• Kant concluded that space and time are the dimensional framework in which the mind constructs its experience. They are built into the perceiving process, and we cannot but think in terms of space and time. But they are not aspects of the objective reality. Peter Russell
• Physics and evolution point to the same conclusion: spacetime and objects are not foundational. Something else is more fundamental, and spacetime emerges from it. Donald Hoffman
• Spacetime does not exist unperceived. My spacetime is the desktop of my interface. Your spacetime is your desktop. Spacetimes vary from observer to observer, and some properties of spacetime need not always agree across observers. Reality, whatever it might be, escapes the confines of spacetime. Donald Hoffman
• Spacetime is your virtual reality, a headset of your own making. The objects you see are your invention. You create them with a glance and destroy them with a blink. Donald Hoffman
• The past, the future, physical space, . . . and individuals are nothing but names, forms of thought, words of common usage, merely superficial realities. Madhyamika Karika Vrtti
• There is no object in space-time without a conscious subject looking at it.  Amit Goswami
• Time and space are modes by which we think, and not conditions in which we live. Donald Hoffman
• Space does not exist independently of consciousness.  Nor does time. Nor does matter.  Nor do we.  Anthony Lambert
• Time, space, and causality are only metaphors of knowledge, with which we explain things to ourselves. Friedrich Nietzsche
• Where did time come from? Answer: The same place that everything comes from, consciousness. Time is a qualia, like the sweetness of sugar or the colors in a rainbow. All are expressions of consciousness once the universe was hatched from the womb of creation. Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos
• Without physical dimensions, there is suddenly no problem with singularities nor paradox surrounding quantum entanglement at a distance. Scott Owen

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Then there is the fact that physicists, as hard as they have tried, have never been able to actually find matter

• Matter is not made of matter. Hans-Peter Dürr
• Simply because we perceive the world as ‘real’ and ‘material’ doesn’t mean that it is so.  In fact, the findings of quantum physics may shed some doubt on the fact that the material universe is real. The more that scientists look for the “material” in the material world, the more they find that it doesn’t exist. Rizwan Virk
• We know subatomic particles must exist, but we still can’t come close to actually seeing them, and no one has the faintest idea how we might ever do that. Tony Deller
• We all recognize the fact that matter “exists” to our senses–we will fare badly if we do not. And yet, even our finite minds understand the scientific dictum that there is no such thing as Matter from a scientific point of view–that which we call Matter is held to be merely an aggregation of atoms, which atoms themselves are merely a grouping of units of force, called electrons or “ions,” vibrating and in constant circular motion. The Kybalion
• Moreover, that sensation of pressure is caused not by any contact with a solid, but by the fact that every atom has negatively charged electrons in its outer shells. As we all know, charges of the same type repel each other, so the bark’s electrons repel yours, and you feel this electrical repulsive force stopping your fingers from penetrating any further.  Robert Lanza
• With the development of quantum theory, physicists have found that even subatomic particles are far from solid. In fact, they are nothing like matter as we know it. They cannot be pinned down and measured precisely. Much of the time they seem more like waves than particles. They are like fuzzy clouds of potential existence, with no definite location. Whatever matter is, it has little, if any, substance.  Peter Russell
• Physicists are still looking for the nature and cause of this stuff called ‘matter’. They’ve been looking for it for two and a half thousand years; they’ve never found it it, and they never will. It’s not there. Rupert Spira
• Whatever matter is, it is not made of matter. Prof. Hans-Peter Dürr
• The scientifically indisputable truth is that matter is in reality a concentrate of energy. Paramahansa Yogananda

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Matter is almost entirely made of space…

• The physical world has been proved to be 99.999% space and the rest is a mystery.  Anthony Lambert
• 99.9999999999996 percent of the atom is literally empty space. The nucleus seems to be solid but is so infinitely small as to effectively not be there. The rest is essentially a physical void. It’s like looking at an invisible tornado-like vortex of energy with infinitely tiny particles seemingly popping into existence one moment and then out the next, with the whole thing being as insubstantial as a puff of smoke. Ziad Masri
• More than 99.9 percent of the matter in a body is confined to its infinitesimally small atomic nuclei, which if combined would be a speck too tiny to see. Robert Lanza
• For nearly one hundred years we have known that the material world is an illusion. Everything that seems solid –  a rock, a tree, your body – is actually 99.999% empty space.  Deepak Chopra
• All that we term physical is essentially 99.999999999999 percent no-thingness, and the rest is excitation patterns of energy and information. Jude Currivan and Ervin Laszlo
• If all the space between the nucleus of the atoms and their orbiting electrons were removed, our bodies would be reduced to less than the size of a pinhead. Our bodies consist nearly entirely of empty space—as in 99.9999 percent empty space.  Joseph Selbie
• If the size of the hydrogen atom’s one-proton nucleus really were as big as it is depicted on the page—say, one inch in diameter—to be in proper scale, the electron would have to be drawn several miles away.  Joseph Selbie
• Physicists have appreciated from the beginning of the 20th century that matter is not at all what it appears to be. Atoms are 99.9999 percent empty space. Further, the orbiting electrons that define the empty space of the atom and the tiny subatomic particles that make up the nucleus of the atom are, themselves, restless energy. Matter is not the fixed immutable substance that it appears to the senses. Matter is intelligently organized invisible energy moving in infinitesimally small patterns at the speed of light.  Joseph Selbie
• Our experience of the world is certainly one of solidness, so we assume that the “thing in itself” must be equally solid. For two thousand years it was believed that atoms were tiny solid balls—a model clearly drawn from everyday experience. Then, as physicists discovered that atoms were composed of more elementary, subatomic particles (electrons, protons, neutrons, and suchlike) the model shifted to one of a central nucleus surrounded by orbiting electrons—again, a model based on experience. An atom may be small, a mere billionth of an inch across, but subatomic particles are a hundred thousand times smaller still. Imagine the nucleus of an atom magnified to the size of a golf ball. The whole atom would then be the size of a football stadium, and the electrons would be like peas flying round the stands. As the early twentieth-century British physicist Sir Arthur Eddington put it, “Matter is mostly ghostly empty space.” To be more precise, it is 99.9999999% empty space. Peter Russell
• An atom may be small, a mere billionth of an inch across, but subatomic particles are a hundred thousand times smaller still. Imagine the nucleus of an atom magnified to the size of a grain of rice. The whole atom would then be the size of a football stadium, and the electrons would be other grains of rice flying round the stands. As the early twentieth-century British physicist Sir Arthur Eddington put it, “Matter is mostly ghostly empty space.”  Peter Russell
• It has been calculated that if you took the entire population of the Earth, all seven billion of us, and removed all the empty space from all of our combined atoms, the entire human race would fit into a single sugar cube. Ziad Masri
• If we could take away the empty space then all the subatomic particles in every one of the seven billion people on our planet would be about the size of a grain of rice. Tim Freke
• It is still a fairly astounding notion to consider that atoms are mostly empty space, and that the solidity we experience all around us is an illusion. Bill Bryson

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…and the rest is an ineffable mystery

• Now owing chiefly to two German physicists, Heisenburg and Schrodinger, the last vestiges of the old solid atom have melted away, matter has become as ghostly as anything in a spiritualist seance.  Bertrand Russell
• Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.  Niels Bohr
• The physical world we live in isn’t there. The solid objects we manipulate with our solid hands are mostly nothing. Seemingly concrete things are made up of infinitesimally small atoms swirling around in an immense void. And these atoms are made up of unimaginably small subatomic particles dancing in vast emptiness.  Time Freke
• Our concept of particles such as electrons, protons, neutrons, and quarks are literally models of what may occur at the subatomic level. Scientists’ observations and measurements have determined the best way of explaining how matter behaves is through the use of such a model, but one cannot say that is objective reality. Alan H. Dawe
• On scrutiny the physical is as elusive as anything to which a name can be given. The physical as we have come to know it frays away into dark matter, antimatter, and by implication on beyond them and beyond our present powers of inference. Marilynne Robinson
• We are no longer very sure of what ‘matter’ is. Is it quarks, or superstrings, or dark energy, or the result of quantum fluctuations in a vacuum? It is certainly not, as the ancient Greek materialist Democritus thought, lumps of hard solid stuff – indivisible atoms – bumping into one another and forming complicated conglomerations that we call people. Some physicists, such as John Gribbin and Paul Davies, in their book The Matter Myth argue that matter is a sort of illusion or appearance produced by some mysterious and unknown substratum in interaction with the human mind. Keith Ward
• Modern Science informs us that there is really no such thing as Matter–that what we call Matter is merely “interrupted energy or force,” that is, energy or force at a low rate of vibration. As a recent writer has said “Matter has melted into Mystery.” Even Material Science has abandoned the theory of Matter, and now rests on the basis of “Energy.” The Kybalion
• Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.  Albert Einstein
• Modern physics has definitely decided for Plato. For the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense of the word: they are forms, structures, or – in Plato’s sense – Ideas, which can be unambiguously spoken of only in the language of mathematics. Rupert Sheldrake
• When quantum physicists talk about ‘imaginary time’ as being more real than ‘real time’, about the cosmos being a ten- or eleven-dimensional curved space-time, or collection of space-times, and about electrons being probability-waves in Hilbert space, we may well wonder whether matter is a solid foundation for reality after all, or whether we really know what it is. There is something out there, and it appears to us as a world of fairly solid objects. But modern physics suggests that the nature of reality is very different from what we see, and that it is possibly unimaginable. Keith Ward
• We delude ourselves with the thought that we know much more about matter than about a “metaphysical” mind or spirit and so we overestimate material causation and believe that it alone affords us a true explanation of life. But matter is just as inscrutable as mind. As to the ultimate things we can know nothing, and only when we admit this do we return to a state of equilibrium. Carl Jung

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Another inexplicable fact about the physical universe is that it appears to have been impossibly fine-tuned to make experience possible in the first place

• Life is such an amazing show; how could we not want to be a part of it? It’s all so miraculous. Indeed, science has shown that if the fundamental nature of the universe were infinitesimally different, then life would have been impossible. Do you know what the chances are of a universe existing in which we could be here contemplating this question? The eminent mathematician and physicist Sir Roger Penrose has worked it out as 1 in 100, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000!  Tim Freke
• The Cosmological Anthropic Principle asserts that if the laws and constants of nature had been slightly different at the moment of the Big Bang, biological life could never have emerged, and hence we would not be here to think about it. So did a divine mind fine-tune the laws and constants in the beginning? To avoid a creator God emerging in a new guise, most leading cosmologists prefer to believe that our universe is one of a vast, and perhaps infinite, number of parallel universes, all with different laws and constants, as M-theory also suggests. We just happen to exist in the one that has the right conditions for us.  Rupert Sheldrake
• Why are the laws of physics exactly balanced for animal life to exist? For example, if the Big Bang had been one-part-in-a-million more powerful, it would have rushed out too fast for the galaxies and life to develop. If the strong nuclear force were decreased 2 percent, atomic nuclei wouldn’t hold together, and plain-vanilla hydrogen would be the only kind of atom in the universe. If the gravitational force were decreased by a hair, stars (including the Sun) would not ignite. These are just three of just more than two hundred physical parameters within the solar system and universe so exact that it strains credulity to propose that they are random—even if that is exactly what standard contemporary physics baldly suggests. These fundamental constants of the universe—constants that are not predicted by any theory—all seem to be carefully chosen, often with great precision, to allow for the existence of life and consciousness.  Robert Lanza
• Even more coincidentally, the universe’s four forces and all of its constants are just perfectly set up for atomic interactions, the existence of atoms and elements, planets, liquid water, and life. Tweak any of them and you never existed.  Robert Lanza
• If gravity was a hair stronger or the Big Bang a sliver weaker, and therefore the universe’s lifespan significantly shorter, we couldn’t be here to think about it.  Robert Lanza
• The notion of a random billiard-ball cosmos that could have had any forces that boast any range of values, but instead has the weirdly specific ones needed for life, looks impossible enough to seem downright silly.  Robert Lanza
• This multiverse theory is the ultimate violation of Occam’s Razor, the philosophical principle that ‘entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity’, or in other words, that we should make as few assumptions as possible.  Rupert Sheldrake
• There are, generally speaking, two different viewpoints regarding the existence of life (discounting those who don’t care either way). The first is that it has occurred by chance and we are extremely fortunate to be here. The other is that we were somehow destined to be here and that we were brought into being for a particular reason. The latter notion is summed up in the Anthropic Principle (a term introduced by the cosmologist Carter in 1974) and it suggests that the universe is organized and constructed in such a way that people – conscious observers – are an inevitable by-product. As science gains greater understanding they find that the universe seems to be finely tuned to allow life to exist, and as this evidence mounts up the idea that it could have all happened by chance has become highly unlikely. Martin E Moore

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The origins of life is also still an ineffable mystery to science

• The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale. Richard Dawkins
• The origin of life is one of the great outstanding mysteries of science. Paul Davies
• Many investigators feel uneasy stating in public that the origin of life is a mystery, even though behind closed doors they admit they are baffled. Paul Davies
• Once we see, however, that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly miniscule as to make it absurd, it becomes sensible to think that the favorable properties of physics on which life depends are in every respect deliberate. . . . It is therefore almost inevitable that our own measure of intelligence must reflect . . . higher intelligences . . . even to the limit of God . . . such a theory is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident. The reasons are psychological rather than scientific.  Fred Hoyle
• Scientists have no agreed theory of the origin of life – plenty of scenarios, conjectures and just-so stories, but nothing with solid experimental support. Paul Davies
• So how can we test the idea that the transition from nonlife to life is simple enough to happen repeatedly? The most obvious and straightforward way is to search for a second form of life on Earth. No planet is more Earth-like than Earth itself, so if the path to life is easy, then life should have started up many times over right here. Paul Davies
• The way life manages information involves a logical structure that differs fundamentally from mere complex chemistry. Therefore chemistry alone will not explain life’s origin, any more than a study of silicon, copper and plastic will explain how a computer can execute a program. Paul Davies

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The fact that we are conscious is the one indisputable truth

• Even if I happen to be a brain in a vat at this moment—and all my memories are false, and all my perceptions are of a world that does not exist—the fact that I am having an experience is indisputable (to me, at least). Sam Harris
• Materialism’s biggest problem is that consciousness does exist. You are conscious now.  Rupert Sheldrake
• You cannot doubt the existence of your own consciousness. That’s the first feature of consciousness, it’s real and irreducible.  John Searle
• Nothing is more obvious and undeniable than the fact that you’re conscious.  In theory, everything else you think you know about the world could be an elaborate illusion cooked up to deceive you – at this point, present-day writers invariably invoke The Matrix – but your consciousness itself can’t be illusory.  Oliver Burkeman
• It is the reality of immediate experience, here and now, which cannot be denied. You can question the description and the meaning, but not the event itself.  Nisargadatta Maharaj
• The fact that you have conscious experience is the one undeniable certainty you have.  Christof Koch
• The faculty of consciousness is, as we have seen, the only absolute, unquestionable truth.  Peter Russell

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However, the reality of consciousness is a bewildering mystery to science

• Scientists are in the strange position of being confronted daily by the indisputable fact of their own consciousness, yet with no way of explaining it.  Christian de Quincey
• This most certain and familiar of phenomena obeys none of the usual rules of science. It doesn’t seem to be physical. It can’t be observed, except from within, by the conscious person. It can’t even really be described. Oliver Burkeman
• Science has had remarkable success in explaining the structure and functioning of the material world, but when it comes to the inner world of the mind—to our thoughts, feelings, sensations, intuitions, and dreams—science has very little to say. And when it comes to consciousness itself, science falls curiously silent. There is nothing in physics, chemistry, biology, or any other science that can account for our having an interior world. In a strange way, scientists would be much happier if there were no such thing as consciousness.  Peter Russell
• Throughout the West people are in search of something real. They turn to science, which tells them a lot about matter, a little about the mind and nothing about the nature and purpose of consciousness.  Nisargadatta Maharaj
• Physic-chemical reductionism,” he writes, cannot tell us how matter became animate on Earth more than three billion years ago; nor can it account for the emergence in our ancestors of consciousness, reason and morality. Thomas Nagel
• Science isn’t remotely close to turning the sugar in a sugar bowl into the music of Mozart or the plays of Shakespeare. Randomness will not give you any of that.  Deepak Chopra
• The most fundamental scientific ‘fact’ is not the existence of a universe of things in space and time but awareness of such a universe. Peter Wilberg
• No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye. Elizabeth Bowen
• In respects to the old chestnut of God of the gaps. it is not the gaps in our knowledge we should be focusing on, but rather the fact we are capable of having as comprehensive understanding of the universe as we do have. Alister McGrath

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The greatest mystery is how unconscious matter could ever have led to consciousness

• Has anyone explained how dumb carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen molecules could have, by combining accidentally, become sentient—aware! — and then utilized this sentience to acquire a taste for hot dogs and the blues?  Tony Lanza
• How does something as immaterial as consciousness arise from something as unconscious as matter.  David J Chalmers
• One thorny question remains unanswered: How can something as immaterial as consciousness ever arise from something as unconscious as matter?  Peter Russell
• Nothing in modern physics explains how a group of molecules in your brain create consciousness. The beauty of a sunset, the miracle of falling in love, the taste of a delicious meal—these are all mysteries to modern science. Nothing in science can explain how consciousness arose from matter.  Robert Lanza

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Scientists cannot even explain why we have inner experiences in the first place …

• The really hard problem is consciousness itself. Why should the complex processing of information in the brain lead to an inner experience? Why doesn’t it all go on in the dark, without any subjective aspect? Why do we have any inner life at all?  Peter Russell
• If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, it is this one.   Even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioural functions in the vicinity of experience—perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report—a further unanswered question may remain: why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?  Why doesn’t all of this information processing go on “in the dark,” free of any inner feel? Why is it that when electromagnetic waveforms impinge on a retina and are discriminated and categorized by a visual system, the discrimination and categorization are experienced as a sensation of vivid red? We know that conscious experience does arise when these functions are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery.   David Chalmers

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… or why there is no physical sign of consciousness in the brain or anywhere else

• Nothing about a brain, when surveyed as a physical system, suggests that it is a locus of experience. Were we not already brimming with consciousness ourselves, we would find no evidence for it in the universe—nor would we have any notion of the many experiential states that it gives rise to.  Sam Harris    
• The only proof that it is like something to be you at this moment is the fact (obvious only to you) that it is like something to be you.  Sam Harris      
• Scientists don’t know how a collection of electric brain signals creates subjective experiences. Yuval Noah Harari
• Consciousness cannot be observed in the way that material objects can. It cannot be weighed, measured, or otherwise pinned down. Peter Russell

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Some are asking how physics can ever discover its much sought after ‘theory of everything’ when it is so limited in its ability to explain the most profound and important mysteries of existence

• What would it mean if there were a theory that explained everything? And just what does “everything” actually mean, anyway? Would this new theory in physics explain, say the meaning of human poetry? Or how economics work? Or the stages of psychosexual development? Can this new physics explain the currents of ecosystems, or the dynamics of history, or why human wars are so terribly common?  Ken Wilber
• Physics is the most fundamental, and least significant, of the sciences.  Ken Wilber
• What is consciousness? Why does it exist? Leaving these unanswered is almost like building and launching a rocket to nowhere—full of noise and real accomplishment but exposing a vacuum right smack in its raison d’être.  Robert Lanza
• A genuine theory of everything should make sense of the extraordinary fact that the universe is waking up and becoming aware of itself. The theory should show that life, mind, morality and reason were not only possible but even inevitable, latent in the cosmos from its explosive inception. Thomas Nagel

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A consciousness paradigm of the world asserts that the world primarily exists in consciousness; not the other way around

• The current paradigm is awareness exists in the world.  The new paradigm is that the world exists in awareness.  Rupert Spira
• In much the same way as Copernicus’ insight turned our model of the cosmos inside out, the distinction between the physical world and our experience of the world turns the relationship of consciousness and the material world inside out. In the current metaparadigm, consciousness is assumed to emerge from the world of space, time and matter. In the new metaparadigm, everything we know, including space, time and matter, manifests from consciousness.  Peter Russell

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This paradigm sees consciousness as the very fabric of reality …

• We started with the concept that the world contains the body, which in turn contains the mind, which in turn contains a little invisible spark of Consciousness, which at best is considered to be a by-product of the world and at worst is overlooked altogether.  We end with the understanding that Consciousness is the ever-present Reality of all things and that everything appears within it and as an expression of it.  Rupert Spira
• I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness. Max Planck
• The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.  James Jeans
• All objects are simply sensing. What is sensing made of?  Consciousness.  Rupert Spira
• Objects exist within awareness, known by awareness and made of awareness. Rupert Spira
• ‘Physics is the study of the structure of consciousness. The “stuff” of the world is mindstuff.’ Sir Arthur Eddington
• I would suggest that there is some ground, deeper and more subtle than are either mind or matter, and that they both enfold from this ground, which is the beginning and ending of everything. David Bohm

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… which introduces the very real possibility that experiencing, at least in part, is the very purpose of existence 

• Consciousness—that in you which is aware of your experience in this moment.  Sam Harris    
• Consciousness is the capacity for inner experience.  Peter Russell
• Consciousness is the equivalent of subjectivity or personal experience.   To be conscious is to have your own inner experience of the world.  Susan Blackmore
• Consciousness underlies all experience.  Eckhart Tolle
• To be conscious is to have subjective experience.  Sam Harris
• Consciousness is the substance of any experience we can have or hope for, now or in the future.  Sam Harris
• Awareness is the common matrix of every experience.   Nisargadatta Maharaj
• Consciousness is our first-person view on the world.   Susan Blackmore
• The fact that there is experience tells us two things. First. it tells us that there is Consciousness, that whatever it is that is conscious is present and aware, that it is witnessing or experiencing whatever it is that is being experienced.  Rupert Spira
• Awareness is the light that illuminates all experience.  Rupert Spira
• All experience is a passing show in awareness.  Anthony Lambert
• Being aware is the very light of knowing with which all experience is known.  Rupert Spira

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The paradigm recognises that the physical universe cannot and has never existed apart from consciousness 

• There is no separate physical universe outside of life and consciousness. Nothing is real that is not perceived. There was never a time when an external, dumb, physical universe existed, or that life sprang randomly from it at a later date. Space and time exist only as constructs of the mind, as tools of perception. Experiments in which the observer influences the outcome are easily explainable by the interrelatedness of consciousness and the physical universe.  Robert Lanza
• Experience is real but to believe in a universe made of matter is an illusion. Rupert Spira
• What created the Big Bang? A: No “dead” universe ever existed outside of Mind. “Nothingness” is a meaningless concept.  Robert Lanza
• From consciousness’s perspective, there are no objects, just the knowing of them.  Rupert Spira
• Matter is consciousness seen through the finite mind.   Rupert Spira
• Only an object that is made out of matter could appear in space. Only an object that is made out of mind could appear in mind. And only an object that is made out of Consciousness can appear in Consciousness.  Rupert Spira
• We never perceive the world – we perceive perception. The world is apparent. No independent world comes into existence. Rupert Spira
• The universe is but a thought in Consciousness.  In Reality it is nothing. One who sees the true nature of existence and non-existence never ceases to exist.  Ashtavakra Gita

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The paradigm asserts that consciousness is neither a by-product of the brain nor does it exist in the brain.  The mind is an appearance in consciousness.

• You are not in the body, the body is in you! The mind is in you. They happen to you. Nisargadatta Maharaj
• We have the false sense of being an experiencer behind the eyes. This illusion is created by visual perceptions appearing to arise behind the eyes.  In reality, these visual perceptions arise in the awareness you are which is not located in space and time. Awareness is not in the head. It is dimensionless.  Anthony Lambert
• Our perceiving self is nowhere to be found within the world-picture, because it itself is the world-picture.  Erwin Schrodinger
• I, this Consciousness that is seeing these words and experiencing whatever it is that is being experienced in this moment, is not located inside a mind. The mind is not located inside a body, and the body is not located inside a world. The body is simply the sensation of the body, and the world is simply the perception of the world.  Rupert Spira
• The world is known by the senses. The senses are known by the mind. The mind is known by Consciousness and Consciousness is known by itself.  Rupert Spira
• Mind is a localisation in consciousness and matter appears in mind.  Rupert Spira

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The body too is recognised to be an appearance in consciousness

• When we speak of the ‘body’ we refer to an object, which in turn implies a subject. If we explore this object we discover that it is non-existent as such and is in fact only a ‘sensation’.  Rupert Spira
• I am not contain’d between my hat and boots.  Walt Whitman
• There is no body as such. There is a series of sensations and perceptions appearing in Consciousness.  Rupert Spira
• With this body, you have the experience of time, taste, smell, touch — the taste of otherness, of beauty. But I want you to come deeper in, beyond the field of phenomena.  Mooji
• We should not believe the story that the mind tells us about what and where the body is. We should rely only on the facts of our experience, and that means this current experience. That is the test of Reality of Truth.   Rupert Spira
• We never experience a body in a world, a mind in a body or Consciousness in a mind. It is not the world that contains the body, the mind and Consciousness. It is Consciousness that contains the mind, the body and the world, on an equal footing.  Rupert Spira
• The mind, the body and the world appear in Consciousness. That is our actual experience.  Rupert Spira
• The mind is simply the experience of the mind. The body is simply the experience of the body. The world is simply the experience of the world.  Rupert Spira
• It is not the body that is aware. It is awareness that is aware. Awareness is not a property of the body. Rupert Spira

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Most profoundly of all, the paradigm recognises that consciousness exists outside time and space and probably does not share the limits and life-span of the body

• Why are you here now, perched seemingly by chance on the cutting edge of all infinity? The answer is simple—the door is never closed! The mathematical possibility of your consciousness ending is zero.  Robert Lanza
• Eternity is a fascinating concept, one that doesn’t indicate a perpetual existence in time without end. Eternity doesn’t mean a limitless temporal sequence. Rather, it resides outside of time altogether.  Robert Lanza
• According to the consciousness only model, the body is nothing but sensations arising in consciousness. Time and space are perceptions in consciousness and consciousness must therefore exist outside time and space, in a timeless and dimensionless dimension. The experience of birth never arises in consciousness and nor does death. If one regards deep sleep as a state so immersive for consciousness, returning to its timeless source, that time disappears, then it is true to say that consciousness never actually experiences its own disappearance.  There is no reason to believe that consciousness disappears when the body dies.  Anthony Lambert
• Nothing that exists ever came into being.  Bagavita
• The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the human body, but there is some part of it which remains eternal.   Benedict de Spinoza
• The mind’s awareness is the ultimate reality, paramount and limitless. Does it die, then, with the body?  The [consciousness only paradigm] of the timeless, spaceless cosmos of consciousness allows for no true death in any real sense.  Robert Lanza
• Now comes the biggie, the oldest question of all. Who am I? If I am only my body, then I must die. If I am my consciousness, the sense of experience and sensations, then I cannot die for the simple reason that consciousness may be expressed in manifold fashion sequentially, but it is ultimately unconfined.  Robert Lanza
• If time is an illusion, if reality is created by our own consciousness, can this consciousness ever truly be extinguished?  Robert Lanza

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The paradigm recognises that there is not one world with many experiences of it.  There is one experiencer, experiencing many worlds

• We know that there is not one space and one time only, but that there are as many spaces and times as there are subjects.  Jacob von Uexkull
• In a matter only model of the world, there are billions of consciousnesses experiencing one world.  In the consciousness model, there is one consciousness experiencing billions of worlds.  Anthony Lambert

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The paradigm recognises that the entire world is made of consciousness and known by consciousness

• Until the seventeenth century, university scholars and Christian theologians taught that the universe was alive, pervaded by the Spirit of God, the divine breath of life. All plants, animals and people had souls. The stars, the planets and the earth were living beings, guided by angelic intelligences. Mechanistic science rejected these doctrines and expelled all souls from nature. The material world became literally inanimate, a soulless machine. Matter was purposeless and unconscious; the planets and stars were dead.  Rupert Sheldrake
• Consciousness is not simply the witness but also the substance of every object that appears within it. Every object is made out of Consciousness. It is an expression of Consciousness.  Rupert Spira
• As everything ultimately appears in Consciousness, everything is, in the ultimate analysis, made out of Consciousness.  Rupert Spira
• There is only consciousness here; this universe is nothing but consciousness; you are consciousness; I am consciousness; the words are consciousness. That is the conclusion.  Yoga Vasishta Sara
• The Saints see the world as filled with divinity, with Consciousness. In today’s culture, we see the opposite.  We try to look for Consciousness, whereas the saints see everything as Consciousness, just as it is.  Swami Nityananda
• Our amazing experiences of life do not come from something dead and inert but something very much alive.  Rupert Spira

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The paradigm recognises that not only is everything connected; in the deepest sense, all is one

• A single consciousness pervades everything, and that appearances of individuality are real only on a relative level but are not true fundamentally.
• “All Is One” peek from cracks in every discipline—the universal applicability of numerous constants and physical laws, the insistence of many people in all cultures and throughout history of having had a “revelatory experience” that carried “no doubt” that All is One.  Robert Lanza
• One issue that can arise with consciousness only model is solipsism—the notion that all is one, that a single consciousness pervades everything, and that appearances of individuality are real only on a relative level but are not true fundamentally.  Robert Lanza
• All things are one.  Heraclitus, On the Universe (540-480 BC)
• If one accepts that the external world occurs only in Mind, in consciousness, and that it’s the interior of one’s brain that’s cognized “out there” at this moment, then of course everything is connected with everything else.  Robert Lanza

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The paradigm recognises that our inner states of consciousness really do have a substantial effect on the outer world

• In this interconnected universe, every improvement we make in our private world improves the world at large for everyone. We all float on the collective level of consciousness of mankind, so that any increment we add comes back to us. We all add to our common buoyancy by our efforts to benefit life. It is a scientific fact that what is good for you is good for me.  David R. Hawkins
• Remember, we are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we’re so deeply interconnected with one another. Working on our own consciousness is the most important thing that we are doing at any moment, and being love is the supreme creative act. Ram Dass
• You and I are the force for transformation in the world. We are the consciousness that will define the nature of the reality we are moving into.  Ram Dass
• Changing mass consciousness is an individual responsibility.  Dennis Weaver
• Whenever someone awakens fully, it affects human consciousness at a collective level. It is like dropping a stone into a dark murky pond.  Ripples of light!  Not one word need be spoken.  Leonard Jacobsen
• The world we live in is a co-creation, a manifestation of individual consciousness woven into a collective dream. How we are with each other as individuals, as groups, as nations and tribes, is what shapes that dream.   Oriah Mountain Dreamer   
• The world is a projection of our collective consciousness. If our collective consciousness reaches that place of peace, harmony, laughter and love, it will be a different world.  Deepak Chopra
• If a human being is filled with happiness and positivity, this is what they radiate out into the world. We each affect our environment and that collective consciousness. The more people who are diving within and transcending and are getting that happiness and positivity, the better the world will be.  David Lynch
• The world that we perceive is a reflection of our own states of mind and reveals our own level of consciousness. The world is little more than a Rorschach blot in which we see our own desire systems projected. We see what we want to see. Prem Prakash

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The paradigm recognises the power of prayer, meditation and intention to affect the outer world

• Consciousness is but energy in its finest and most dynamic form. This helps explain why events are affected by what we imagine, visualise, desire, want or fear, and why and how an image held in the mind can be made real. John Kehoe
• The secret of making something work in your lives is first of all, the deep desire to make it work; then the faith and belief that it can work; then to hold that clear definite vision in your consciousness and see it working out step by step, without one thought of doubt or disbelief.  Eileen Caddy
• An intention is a quality of consciousness that you bring to an action. Gary Zukav
• Prayer is the most powerful form of energy one can generate. The influence of prayer on the human mind and body is as demonstrable as that of the secreting glands.  Prayer is a force as real as terrestrial gravity.  It supplies us with a flow of sustaining power in our daily lives. Alexis Carrel
• Prayer may just be the most powerful tool mankind has. Ted Dekker
• Prayer enables us to transform the world, because it transforms us.  Marianne Williamson
• If we allow ourselves to consider a less-rigid reality, and reality is more fluid than we assume, then perhaps prayer and miracles become possible… if we allow them to: the placebo-effect might provide evidence in this regard. Scott Owen

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The paradigm recognises the distinct possibility of telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and healing

• To question the “matter is primary” meta-paradigm is to question something really big. Little wonder then that any evidence for telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, healing, prayer, or any other phenomenon that suggests consciousness is not so dependent on matter, is either ignored or ridiculed by the establishment. Within the accepted worldview, it simply cannot be true. Peter Russell

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The paradigm recognises the effects of our inner states of consciousness on the well-being of our physical body

• Conscious awareness is the source of our healing…Only when you say the truth can the truth set you free. This is not a negative process, but at times it is a difficult process. Marianne Williamson
• Finding your highest levels of consciousness releases healing energy throughout the body system.  J.J. Goldwag
• Life is like a tree and its root is consciousness. Therefore, once we tend the root, the tree as a whole will be healthy. Deepak Chopra
• The more consciousness you bring into the body, the stronger the immune system becomes. It is as if every cell awakens and rejoices.  It is also a potent form of self- healing. Eckhart Tolle
• Health and disease don’t just happen to us. They are active processes issuing from inner harmony or disharmony, profoundly affected by our states of consciousness, our ability or inability to flow with experience. This recognition carries with it implicit responsibility and opportunity. Marilyn Ferguson

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The paradigm recognises the effects of our inner states of consciousness on our material well-being

• Conscious awareness is the source of our healing…Only when you say the truth can the truth set you free. This is not a negative process, but at times it is a difficult process. Marianne Williamson
• Finding your highest levels of consciousness releases healing energy throughout the body system.  J.J. Goldwag
• Life is like a tree and its root is consciousness. Therefore, once we tend the root, the tree as a whole will be healthy. Deepak Chopra
• The more consciousness you bring into the body, the stronger the immune system becomes. It is as if every cell awakens and rejoices.  It is also a potent form of self- healing. Eckhart Tolle
• Health and disease don’t just happen to us. They are active processes issuing from inner harmony or disharmony, profoundly affected by our states of consciousness, our ability or inability to flow with experience. This recognition carries with it implicit responsibility and opportunity. Marilyn Ferguson

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A consciousness paradigm of the world can readily explain phenomena, currently denied by our materialist paradigm, such as…

• Telepathy
• Near death experiences
• Out of body experiences
• Psychic phenomena
• Re-incarnation stories
• De ja vu
• Awakened states of consciousness and expanded perception
• Hallucinations
• Synchronicity
• Miracle healing
• The power of prayer, meditation, intention, belief, thought.
• Experiences in the non-physical realm are as valid.  Dreams, hallucinations, visions.

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If the world of experience is the one indisputably reality, then direct inner experience is the litmus test for truth

• The only field available for enquiry is experience itself.  Rupert Spira
• If we are to make an honest investigation into the nature of Reality, we have to discard any presumptions that are not derived from direct experience.  Rupert Spira
• In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.  Ansel Adams
• The one unalterable reality is being. Until you realize that state of pure being you should pursue the enquiry. If once you are established in it there will be no further worry. Ramana Maharshi
• A borrowed truth is the greatest lie in the world. Truth can only be true when it is based on your own experience, utterly your own experience.  Osho
• We should not believe the story that the mind tells us about what and where the body is. We should rely only on the facts of our experience, and that means this current experience. That is the test of Reality, of Truth.  Rupert Spira
• Truth is what stands the test of experience.   Albert Einstein
• Truth does not need argument, agreement, theories or beliefs. There is only one test for it and that is to ask yourself ‘Is the statement true or false in my experience?  Barry Long
• Experience is the oracle of truth; and where its responses are unequivocal, they ought to be conclusive and sacred.  James Madison
• The only source of knowledge is experience.  Albert Einstein
• Experience is the only prophecy of wise men   Alphonse de Lamartine
• To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.  William James

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Which paradigm is true?  Only you can truly tell.

• What would truly convince us that we are on the right tract? Obviously the realisation of the one thing we most value in life would be such a confirmation….and what is that? Happiness, peace and love! That is how the universe responds to being treated as it truly is and that is the confirmation that our ideas, feelings, perceptions, activities and relationships are in line with reality. Rupert Spira
• The fact that the world we experience is made of consciousness is indisputable.  However, this does not prove that there isn’t also a physical reality beyond our perception. The physical world of matter beyond consciousness can never be proved, but it cannot currently be disproved either.  However, it is very true to say we, as a culture, have lived according to the “matter is primary” paradigm now for hundreds of years and where has it got us?  A world where people believe they share the limits of their body and are terrified of death. A world where people believe they are separate and disconnected from everyone and everything else.  A world where both the universe and human life feels purposeless and meaningless.  We believe in a materialist paradigm – a belief in a world made of dead matter that has somehow, by random chance, sprouted consciousness – despite the fact that is indeed only that; a belief based on faith.  The world of matter is a belief while the world made of consciousness is a fact.  With this in mind, there is now an invitation to try living according to a “consciousness is primary” paradigm of the world. Experiment with it.  If you adopt this view, how would it change the way you live and interact with the world?  And how would the world respond to you if you live as if it were true? If your direct experience of the world, in so doing, becomes one of greater happiness, peace and love, then surely that is all the proof you need.   Anthony Lambert

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Does a consciousness paradigm negate the reality of a physical world?

• Seeing consciousness as the true ground of reality does not negate the fact that our experience of a physical world is very real.  By studying the nature of the “stuff” we call matter, we have been able to achieve miraculous feats in medicine and technology. Manipulating “matter” for our benefit is an integral and wonderful part of human consciousness.  The consciousness model also does not negate the wonders of the physical universe.  The vast universe of suns, planets and moons out there exists as an infinite realm of pure potentiality that will spring into tangible existence as we develop ever more powerful technologies to explore it further and further afield.  Thus, the consciousness model embraces the benefits that the materialism paradigm has brought. But it also greatly expands possibility by recognising the power of inner consciousness to massively effect the outer world. And it fills the huge vacuum of meaning and purpose that materialism has created.  Anthony Lambert
• Just because reality might ‘only’ be consciousness with no physical reality, doesn’t mean reality is any less genuine. We have a tendency to think it would be less real only because we have always assumed it is physical, and it’s very hard to change ancient habits. If we are conscious and this is ‘just’ a conscious reality, then everything we experience is most certainly entirely real and genuine, just as it is: it really does exist. Reality does exist, but its physicality is an illusion. Scott Owen

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