We each have our own story. We are the sum of our experiences;
They shape us, mould us, give rise to our thoughts, our decisions, our actions.

Your Story

Like the driver of a machine, you learn how to move your body early on. You start with the rhythm of the heart beat, in the womb. You grow like the embryos of many vertebrates, starting with the heart, the brain and spinal column. Later you grow limbs and start moving them, familiarising yourself with your body. You hear your mother's voice and start developing connections in the brain as your cells divide and multiply.

At birth you start the rhythm of the breath, start development of the voice that starts as a scream, your only method of communication. Your eyes take in your surroundings as an unsorted jumble of information and your brain works to process and make sense of it.

You experience hunger and thirst as one and all the discomforts of the new environment and your body. You sleep in rhythm with your basic needs in no set routine. You develop with all the new stimulus, the brain builds connections and associations. Breasts with sustenance, mother with comfort.

The pace of time speeds up as we speed through our lives. At three years old, a year is a third of your whole life time. As an adult, each year seems to move faster than the last. We are always looking back, to what was, what might have been, or worrying about what could be round the corner.

But to ‘be’, in the present moment is often overlooked.

As children this is usually the most prominent state of mind. Young children have little concept of ‘tomorrow’ or ‘later’ and will have difficulty remembering what happened last week. Adults are rarely present in the here and now, our society is often full of distractions, not designed for quiet contemplation of existence. We ask many questions as children but by adults, most of us forget the wonder, sink into easy apathy or are too busy to think about the nature of life, let alone appreciate it.

Take a moment to be present. You’re breathing, your heart is beating, these rhythms of life hold you to this existence. It can be difficult to let the wonder surpass the fear of the unknown and think about what it means to be you.

The Body

You, reading this, are a collection of individual cells, cooperating as organs to sustain the the whole, processinging sensory data and translating it into understanding.

Light entering the eyes, hit light-sensitive cells at the back of the eye and are translated into nerve impulses. The impulses are interpreted in the brain, an organ of around 100 billion neurons with 100’s of trillions of branching connections developed since birth. The majority of the organs in the body work to maintain the brain and supporting body with nourishment.

The Mind

The brain is the physical place where the mind resides.

As the language sections of the brain light up, your experiences give meaning to each of the words, and via those trillions of connections, relates it to other related experiences and associated feelings to give context and meaning to the subject as a whole.

Left image simulation of brain cells, Right image, simulation of galaxies

You might visualise computer cable connections or tree-like branches or remember seeing pictures of brain scans or remember bits of an article you read or an interesting conversation you had. The mind conjures thoughts, perception, emotion.

The Observer

The mind is often defined as the activity of the brain itself, but is the mind ‘you’? If you think about it, you can be conscious of yourself and your own understanding of the subject as an observer. The mind is like another sensory input, encountering a problem you compare what you experience in the now with your past memory of similar situations, your logic and reasoning.

Are you just these connections, a quantum decision-making machine? A computer with a body and sensory inputs, simply logging experiences and making mechanical choices?

You have an awareness, both of the external sensory stimuli and the internal stimuli. You have an awareness of yourself, whatever that belief might be. You look in the mirror and identify the image as the vessel in which you control.

Isn’t it incredible that a collection cells, a collection of atoms or wavelengths can contemplate its own existence and the universe as a whole?

You think, therefore you exist.

Our Experience

No two minds are the same, as no two people have had exactly the same experiences. Identical twins come close, but even they are seeing the world from two different perspectives. Nobody can be blamed for what they believe in, for our belief is just our understanding and perspective. We have formed our beliefs from experiences, what we have observed ourselves and what has been communicated to us.

From birth we are taught definitions, distinctions and measurements, this is a dog, that is a cat, four is a bigger number that comes after three. Every new experience is weighed up against our past experiences and judged by the mind. So if you heard someone count one, two, three, five, you instantly recognise the inconsistency with your past understanding and you might decide to correct the speaker or form an opinion about them.

Where there is ignorance or lack of understanding, it is easier to be misled as there are fewer prior beliefs to weigh up against the new information. The more we experience in the world, the better we are able to interpret it, each new connection adding to an overall picture of understanding.

The Field

In recent times we have seen a merging. Of what is outside and observable with what’s inside and barely touched by mainstream science. With quantum theory arises the subject of consciousness.

“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, theoretical physicist who originated quantum theory, which won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918

Nearly 100 years later, we are still just scratching the surface of what Planck was talking about.

Quantum physics tells us that at the subatomic scale everything in the universe has a wave-like nature. We can visualise this as a field of fluctuating energy where probability determines the outcome of any individual event. Particles are actually waveforms themselves, there is nothing in this universe that can't be described as a field of energy or frequencies.

“It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.”

– Eugene Wigner, theoretical physicist and mathematician. He received a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963

We are all just frequencies and vibrations interacting with other frequencies and vibrations. The universe we see around us is but a projection inside the infinite universal subconscious.

Our existence is like a shared dream, only an infinite one. The Universe can be seen as different layers of the same consciousness, different layers of frequency in an infinite field. While we may not have access to it all yet, we are beginning to get a glimpse of the bigger picture.

With quantum field, the many worlds interpretation, biocentrism, and fractal-holographic universe theories we are exploring the natures of our existence in ways that unite the great divide in our understanding of the cosmos. We are beginning to investigate the observer and not just the observed.

The Universe creates duality (the illusion of separateness) so that it can look back upon itself and to learn from itself. Conscious beings are not just some fluke appearance, but the natural result of a conscious universe continuously striving to better its understanding of itself. We humans are waking up and our worldview is expanding. We are all just the universe, learning to know itself.

The conflicts we see in the world are a result of differing beliefs, different understandings and different perspectives on the world. They are also a reflection of the imbalance within ourselves. Emotions and mind provide constant conflicts but it is when we still the mind, we find the solutions arise out of nowhere. When we can look both inside ourselves and outside the box of our own existence, we can connect with the universal field within us all.

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

– Albert Einstein

With the internet, we now have the means to explore and communicate together on a large scale, combining our minds, our ideas, our philosophies to find the answers we seek.

We are more united than we can imagine.

I only wish to ask the questions and contribute to the ongoing discussion, believing there is, and will always be, a lot more to discover.

Thanks for reading!

Let's all learn together and advance.

Image sources 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8