Tag Archives: Vedas

Your Life Is Like a Fascinating Novel… to God

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog
Created April 24, 2026

A lot to unpack here. First, what do I mean by “God”? What is God in my worldview?

God is what each of us experiences as our consciousness, and everything we perceive through that consciousness, summed across all of existence as One Consciousness.

That view of what God is, is fully embodied in perhaps 1% of the human race. It is stated in less precise Western scientific terms, more metaphorically and perhaps more relatably, in the belief systems of Kashmir Shaivism, Advaita Vedanta, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Sufism, Kabballah, and in the modern forms of American Transcendentalism known variously as “Manifesting”, The Secret, Silva Mind Control, et al. It is inherent in most other New Age thought and is widely held within MAGA, so that, in its less scientifically precise forms, its footprint could be in the ~25% range across the Earth’s human species.

Whereas there has been a gradual decline in the belief systems of the major world religions, this concept of God has been on the rise for the past Century, and it might be the fastest-growing cosmological system among the general public at this time.

The 1% who see it in its most scientific form tend to be kind, peaceful, and calm, because in their comprehension, we are all One and so, strife is inappropriate.

The ~25% who see it from a more metaphorical point of view can also exhibit those same collaborative tendencies, or can intellectualize the idea in a way that rationalizes xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, racism, Us Versus Them thinking and behavior.

From the standpoint of social good or social utility, it would therefore be better for the idea to be comprehended from a scientific framework, rather than partially understood in a woo-woo framework.

Fortunately, there is a slow growth in the percentage of scientists who are willing to consider that consciousness might be more fundamental to reality than matter is, or that both consciousness and matter are manifestations of an underlying reality such as “information”. Physicalism is the term that has emerged as the main label for the scientific presumption that all that exists is physical matter and energy, which can convert from one to the other (E=MC²).

The slow growth of the group of scientists who are not willing to presume physicalism has caused new labels to appear to cover this group, specifically, the terms used are panpsychism and cosmopsychism. The fact that new names are being assigned is, in my view being a cosmopsychist, a good sign.

It is an indication of strong bias (which scientists are supposed to avoid like the plague) that scientists change the subject or make funny remarks about drug use when it is pointed out that the pioneers of quantum physics. Max Planck, Erwin Schrodinger, Werner Heisenberg, and Wolfgang Pauli; not to mention other great physicists Albert Einstein, John Wheeler, and Stephen Hawking, all stated that the physical universe is, as Dr. Richard Silberstein puts it in his new book coming out in October, “responsive to consciousness” (the observer). That mind over matter is real. It is not real to the physicalists, and the ground they stand on is shrinking under their feet each year.

The physical universe is… “responsive to consciousness” (the observer). That mind over matter is real.

How can this be visualized by the average person? This is God’s form of Virtual Reality. God, being the One Consciousness from which the multiverses sprang, inhabits all of creation in the form of little pieces of consciousness, which is the One Game Player that really exists, looking out from each set of eyes, pretending to be separate entities.

In one sense, each little piece of consciousness IS the One Consciousness. In another sense, it is a diminished form of the One Consciousness because in this temporary role, it sees only from its limited viewpoint, and in the case of virtually all Earth humans, has no conscious memory of being God.

This is part of the game.

It is a more than three-dimensional movie. We watch movies and videos and often lose ourselves in the protagonist, as if we are that person. God is doing the same thing with us, at a far higher level of technology.

It’s in that sense that each one of us is living a life that is fascinating to God.

The tiny percentage of human beings who have overcome their egos and risen to higher levels of consciousness and have seen this reality and reported it back to the rest of us, have had their observations written up in scriptures throughout the ages. One of the clear messages in these scriptures is that God loves a happy ending. That’s why God helps us with synchronicities and other forms of hinting and even blatant Deus ex machina intervention, which physicalists categorize as coincidences.

Centuries past our mythos was that the world is a mysterious, glamorous, magical place, our lives have meaning and purpose, and God looks after us. In our scientific ascent, there was an unnecessary sharp turn away from all that as “magical thinking”. Arthur C. Clarke famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic.” The world is a magical place, meaning that the technology the One Consciousness has created so that we can all play this game together is of the highest unimaginable technology. The word “magic,” however, connotes a numinous feeling of awe and wonder, which are good feelings to have, certainly better than the average feelings around here in 2026.

We have trivialized life itself.

We have trivialized ourselves.

God, however, finds us fascinating.

Why all the suffering then? Free will. We make mistakes. Their benefit is learning. It’s the game. In the end, no one is extinguished; consciousness, like matter and energy, can neither be created nor destroyed.

Every movie and every novel that is aimed at drama requires an antagonist. That’s why there is antagonism in the world. Without it, there would be no drama.

The game is whether, in our imperfect semi-evolved form, can we overcome our mistakes and antagonisms, and how exactly will we do that?

Perhaps the One Consciousness is able to predict everything perfectly and so, there is no surprise, except down here at our levels where God, in an incarnation in which memory has been suppressed of ever having lived before or of being God, surprise is the key joy that God is able to experience through the design of the game, and perhaps (given omniscience) only by living through diminished versions of Herhimself.

Interestingly, when one observes the goal-seeking behavior of single-celled creatures, they appear to exhibit – besides the drives to survive predators and other environmental dangers (security), find food, and socialize – curiosity, which might also be called the urge to explore, to experience novelty, to be surprised. Every animal exhibits this motivation.

God might have set up the whole game just for the surprises.

More likely, the training SheHe is putting us through indicates that we are beloved companions desired to be kept around forever, who therefore need a certain amount of toilet training for the maximum enjoyment of our company in Eternity.

One way or another, we need to stop selling ourselves short. We have a glorious, glamorous destiny, and we are wasting time by dwarfing ourselves and playing smaller games when we could be playing The Big Game.

Here’s a short 3+ minute video on the One Consciousness from my Power of You podcasts.

Love to all,

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Step Away from Business as Usual

What is Consciousness made out of?

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Originally posted August 4, 2011

This may seem like an academic question yet it leads directly to the meaning of life. Who among us has not pondered the meaning of life at one time or another?

We know consciousness is real, we know it exists. As René Descartes said, “Je pense, donc je suis” — I think, therefore I exist — meaning that you dear reader know something exists because you are experiencing something right now. Rene might have said “something is being experienced, that is what can be stated with certainty”.

In fact nothing can actually be stated with such great certainty except that consciousness — that which experiences — exists.

So what is this stuff that exists? You and I both experience It.

It is the weirdest stuff around. Everything else is easier for our minds (consciousness itself) to grasp. That too is weird — consciousness finds itself weirder than everything else that it experiences, at least among the scientists who have dodged this question while ironically basing everything else in their cosmology upon the observer — which is the same “Self”/”Consciousness” that science has avoided investigating more deeply.

Matter, energy, time and space seem perfectly normal and reasonable to us. Those are names that we put on aspects of what we experience. Names seem normal and reasonable too. Just not consciousness — it is so ineffable, so hard to grasp, to even think about.

Scientists either avoid the subject entirely or else try to reduce consciousness to events in the brain. The late great physicist Evan Harris Walker in his book The Physics of Consciousness brilliantly posited that consciousness emerges from quantum effects at the synapses of the brain. This however has nothing to do with the experience of consciousness. It is the experience itself that we are interested in, not in how we might explain away these experiences by relating them to physical events. The latter explanations beg the question of which came first — i.e. consciousness could have created the brain rather than vice versa — and although we are culturally biased to consider that sequence absurd, there is no scientific evidence either way. It would be the definition of unscientific to take any position under those circumstances.

Those locked into cultural first assumptions are by definition unable to see past those assumptions or to even see that those assumptions exist.

Try this if you will: focus your mind on the experience of consciousness for a moment. What is it?

To ask what consciousness is made of is itself evidence of our predisposition to assume that substance — matter or energy — is the substrate of the universe, so that everything in the universe must be made out of either matter or energy. This is just a bias.

But let’s play along with that bias for awhile. Is consciousness an energy? Okay, if so, then what is energy? Simply saying that energy is a force or a force field is just replacing one name with another — it does not tell us anything, it adds no new information — we are just playing with words.

Today scientists relate to energy in terms of waves radiating from a source. That itself is an ancient metaphor to waves on the ocean. Scientists assumed for a long time (some still do today) that waves must be waves in something. In Newton’s time the term aether (“ether”) was the stuff the waves were waving. By Einstein’s time and our own the concept of an aether has become passé. Today we are more comfortable thinking that things reduce ultimately to wavicles — things that have both a wave and a particle aspect depending on the choice of instruments and experimental conditions the observer chooses to set up.

Do you begin to see The Great Circular Argument going on here? Really the modeling of “what is” falls back on the way we as humans perceive the world and the ultimate categories we place as contexts around everything else — the way we perceive time and space — the apparent hardness of matter — which we now know is actually the mutual repulsion going on in electromagnetic and nuclear energies at subatomic levels. There is no hardness, it is a subjective readout our brains feed to our consciousness. We are trapped in Plato’s cave, making up possible stories about what is really out there. But what is in here?

The Theory of the Conscious Universe* postulates that everything in the universe reduces to neither matter nor energy, but to INFORMATION. But then what is information?

The clue comes from deconstructing the word into its parts: IN…FORMATION — information is a pattern — a formation. Any pattern is information — even randomness. Since information exists in the form rather than requiring a substance — form and substance being an ancient division of aspects of things going back at least as far as the Vedas — information can exist even in something that is substance-less.

In fact we see this every day in our computers — which contain and send and receive and process information — but that information does not have a concrete substance — it exists when stored as energy/nothingness, as both charge and non-charge, representing zeroes and ones. The nothingness (the zeroes) are as much information as the 1’s (electric charges).

What then is consciousness? It is the Self — the capacity to experience — that which experiences — and the experiences are information received by the consciousness or Self. The information appears to us to be coming from something that has independent existence outside the Self. It appears that hard and/or wet and/or gaseous objects out there are encoded as electromagnetic signals that strike our visual sense organs which then encode them as electrical pulses in our brain — or that strike our apparent body where they are converted to electrical pulses we call touch — or as compactions and expansions of air that cause pressure against our auditory sense organs where again they are converted to electrical pulses in our brain — or as interactions with our taste and smell organs, also winding up as electrical pulses in our brain.

But all of this could actually be taking place in our Self. There might be nothing out there because there might not be an “out there”. Our experience would be the same.

One way or the other, we can definitively state now two things: the Self exists — the Experiencer — and information exists, for this is what gives variation to what we experience. Both the Self and information exist in consciousness — this much can be stated as fact. The rest is supposition.

But why am I capitalizing Self? The answer in our next posting — our response to the question, “What is the meaning of life?”

*The Theory of the Conscious Universe was the working title of my book, “You Are the Universe: Imagine That”, released in 2014.

All the best,

Bill

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The Theory of the Conscious Universe: The Roots

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Featuring: A Movie in Your Mind

Originally posted July 11,2011

The Theory of the Conscious Universe was the working title of my book, “You Are the Universe: Imagine That”, released in 2014 .

An area in which the Human Effectiveness Institute focuses is the interface between psychology and physics. The ultimate nature of reality is what all of us assume physics is studying, while the nature of mind is what psychology studies.

However, picture a future in which psychology reaches what we might call the complete circumnavigation of the mind. Everything about human psychology is understood, and animal psyk too. Psychoanalysts working with the new perfect model have the same success rate as today’s hip replacements, and in about the same turnaround time. People are pretty much always happy, except for short lapses so as not to forget what the other emotions feel like, or lose their functionality through disuse. Got that envisioned?

Okay, we are together living in that future world and we have all read the popularizations of the ultimate psychology. We get it, it makes our lives work better, we are proud that the human race has achieved such an accomplishment.

Then, in this sci-fi movie we are playing in our minds, a problem arises: physics arrives at the same place as psychology. Physics, too, explains everything in its field. We know how the Big Bang happened and why. We know why there is a universe at all. Our picture leaves nothing out, everything is solved. We finally solve the 400 BC conundrum of which came first, matter or mind.

The problem is this: the physics picture totally overturns the psychology picture.

Then what do we do?

Obviously, at that point the hero/ine gets to work and we see time cuts of the hard work it takes (movies are great at condensing that part) and – voila! The old theory is ingeniously twisted 90 degrees and it clicks perfectly with the new model, and now the population is not always just happy, the entire population rises to the level of genius, is always in flow state, art flourishes and enriches culture, each individual becomes fully realized in all good potentials inherent at birth, the awe and magic of life is restored and never again forgotten even for a moment, psychic and/or telepathic abilities bloom gradually in everyone, and – most important of all – each individual is in total fusion with God.

Yes I said the dread word that causes materialism-philosopher-scientists (MPS) to stop reading. You see scientists have always been philosophers too. We have always had a segment of MPS and another segment of idealism-philosopher-scientists (IPS). Daniel Goleman or David Brooks might well write a book about the relative contributions to science of MPS versus IPS scientists – it would make fascinating reading. Newton of course was IPS. Quite capable of debating fine points of IPS with Leibniz, another idealist philosopher of the time who was a mathematician rather than scientist (Newton was all of these things). Mathematicians and scientists have always produced greater science by working together, and probably greater mathematics too.

The word “God” has meaning to IPS but causes shutdown to MPS. My guess is that those MPS still reading to this point are only reading so as to refute whatever my point might be in all this.

Before I get to the point, let’s stop for a moment to make a fix that has been long in coming. Roughly 2500 years overdue. The term of art “Idealism” when used in juxtaposition with “Materialism” is a confusing misnomer since the word “Idealism” has other meanings used far more frequently. Time to change the term, so let’s first understand where it came from. It was Plato.

Plato of course had heard similar thoughts and was putting them together more concisely and less mystically so everyone could understand them. Qabala contains similar thoughts, for example, and everything thinkable exists somewhere in the tradition of India, captured in written language since the Vedas.

The Idea is that there are multiple levels of reality. In the Absolute Plane of Reality, Ideas exist. They are the perfect embodiment of themselves. The Ideal Chair is the most often used example in philosophy courses –that’s sure getting old. “Ideal” in the sense of “Idea” and also in the sense of “Perfect Embodiment” and “Archetype”.

At any rate, there are these Ideas floating around in the realest plane of reality, and down here on these lower planes (Qabala has four levels, some Indian texts also, but other interpretations have infinite levels – Qabala calls this Jacob’s Ladder) we have shadow imitations of those Ideal Ideas, imperfect replicas intermixing all the Ideas in sort of a stew.

Here on Earth we exist in the lowest of the planes in hard material reality, sometimes called the Visible World. To Plato we are as if in a cave watching shadows on a wall cast by something outside the cave we cannot see.

Without attaching to the history of the term, I’ve laid it out here to show the trail. This is how the great debate got to be called “Materialism versus Idealism”.

What instead should it be called? The debate is trying to solve the question of which came first, mind or matter — which of these is the actual basis of reality, the ultimate quantum plane from which the universe arises.

About 400 years ago, by the way, Hume and Berkeley, Leibniz and Spinoza and Kant and many others drove a period of philosophy where mind came first, before matter.

Today the view that is baked into the average person including scientists is that matter is the supreme substance of the universe. Ironically, the most far-out physicists are now heading back in the other direction toward mind or an intermixture, and gradually the culture is slowly following them. This is not discussed philosophically by the average person, who may nevertheless detect a drift back into what s/he would call a spiritual direction.

We would prefer that the debate be called “Materialism vs. Mindism” or “Materialism vs. Consciousness as Prime”. That’s what it always has been about. The “Mind Came First” position in this debate does not necessarily have to be locked into Plato’s multiple-levels theory, as there are many theories that could be built around the “Mind Came First” position.

“But how could that possibly be?” one thinks, still in the current culture that assumes materialism without even knowing that one is doing so.

After all, Carl Sagan told hundreds of millions of viewers that after the Big Bang occurred due to forces we do not yet comprehend, bits of matter started to assemble due to electromagnetic forces we do understand. At a certain point they formed the Replicator molecule – akin to viruses – robotical pseudo-life. And then just impelled by these random collisions of electromagnetic forces, this process continued to evolve and build itself up until consciousness emerged.

We all mostly bought it, didn’t we? I must confess I didn’t – it seemed like random waves on a beach could build beautiful sand castles if I just sat around for a googletillion years. I still can’t convince my gut of this.

So what is this Theory of the Conscious Universe I was supposed to talk about? Please excuse the tease, but I promised I would lay out the roots here. Now that I’ve established the roots, in the next postings I will get on to the theory.

Best to all,