What is Real and What Isn’t

(And why meditation is not the answer to all our world’s problems)

Photo by Milad Fakurian on Unsplash

(If you’ve received this by email, please click on the heading, which will send you to the most up-to-date version of the article. I often edit and correct typos after the first upload to Substack)

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Yesterday I attended a talk by a theoretical physicist specialising in String Theory, about the relationship between consciousness and matter. He confirmed that quantum physicists already know that matter is created by consciousness, not the other way around.

Yes, you’ve heard right. Matter is a product of consciousness. Everything is conscious, every cell in your body, everything there is. Consciousness, not matter is the true essence of what we think of as ‘reality’. Physicists know that electrons for example, are not in fact particles, objects, ‘things’. They don’t even exist, except when you watch them... But in your everyday life, you are not likely to hear this.

The current paradigm we are all suffering under is called ‘materialism’. Like fish in a pond we live in it and breathe it, so we don’t know that it exists. According to materialism, matter is all there is. We are made out of atoms and molecules — inanimate particles, objects, ‘things’ — cobbled together to form our bodies and everything there is. We are born, we live, we die and decompose and that’s that. When we die, whatever we were is no more.

People don’t realise it but materialism, our dominant paradigm, is not backed by any scientific evidence, and it never has been. It is nothing more than a belief system that emerged as a reaction to religion and faith, and that is associated with the rise of ‘modern science’.

Materialist science, what we think is science, originally set out to prove that all faith or spiritual beliefs are nonsense — a delusion created by primitive minds, frightened by things they could not understand. It has set itself the task of explaining everything by seeking to understand matter. In other words, materialist science begins its investigation not with an open mind that is prepared to follow the evidence wherever it takes us, but with a predetermined assumption that only matter is real.

Everything materialist science does is limited to this framework. Only things that can be weighed, measured, quantified, are looked at. Things that cannot be measured or quantified, are disregarded. In other words, materialist science artificially limits the scope of what it is prepared to investigate. It is not committed to an open mind, to a real exploration, or to truth, but rather to proving that matter is all there is, or in other words, proving that its existing belief is right. (In family therapy language, science has not grown up. Like adolescents, it is still reactive). ‘Anomalies’, evidence of things that do not conform with the materialist paradigm are just ignored or dismissed. (It is harder to dismiss evidence from a field like biology. A recent study in biology shows that the mitochondria in our cells displays social behaviour. The implication is that our cells are not ‘dumb objects’, but are probably living beings).

According to materialism, what we perceive as our mind, or our consciousness, our subjective experience, our feelings, thoughts, hopes, sorrows, joys, yearnings, spirituality, are all just a product of the complexity of the human brain. The unproven belief is that if a brain is complex enough, it would naturally gives rise to what we call ‘consciousness’. In other words, what we see as our unique selves, our inner subjective world, is nothing more than an illusion created by biochemical reactions in the brain.

As evidence, neuroscience offers experiments that show, for example, that when you stimulate certain regions of the brain, you can induce a spiritual experience. These experiments in fact, do not prove that consciousness is created by the brain. All they show are the brain mechanisms that are involved in spiritual experience. But what spirituality is, and what it is that people connect with when they have a spiritual experience is not explained or proven by such experiments.

This is a classic case of confusing correlation with causality. Just because two factors appear at the same time (stimulation of a particular brain region and a spiritual experience), does not mean that one causes the other. An as yet unknown ‘third factor’ is likely to be causing both factors to appear at the same time.

Low levels of serotonin are associated with depression, but does low serotonin cause depression, or perhaps it just happens to accompany depression? From (awfully cruel) studies a few decades ago we know what causes depression. Depression is an accurate emotional representation of, or a response to a situation where a being is trapped in a bad situation and feels, or is made powerless to change it. Most animals trapped in a cage or an enclosure, even a larger, nicer one are depressed. If someone is depressed, you must look at what is going on in their lives, past, present or both, and make sure they are no longer powerless. Depression lifts almost immediately when the real cause is identified and acknowledged, and when people are offered power to change their situation. Confusing correlation with causality leads to a focus on treating symptoms rather than causes.

Avoiding the trap of confusing correlation with causality is one of the first lessons you learn in university level statistics and research methods courses. Perhaps the stimulation of certain brain regions (which can also be achieved with psychedelics) enables the brain to tap better into something outside itself, but it certainly does not prove that the brain produces consciousness.

What materialist scientists (most scientists) are doing, whether they realise it or not, is start out with the belief that consciousness is just an illusion produced by our complex brain. They already ‘know’ (without any proof) that nothing is real except matter. Any experimental results or observations are then framed within this paradigm. It’s not good science to determine the outcome before you do the experiment and collect the data. It is also very bad science to confuse correlation with causality.

Materialism is like a belief system that cannot be questioned. To question materialism is to risk ridicule in academia and even in popular culture. Fear of ridicule, careerism, a need for acceptance by peers, academic tenure, or for keeping one’s job have little to do with science. Because materialist science has been successful to some extent in helping us create technology that works, people don’t realise there is a problem with it. Where we see the problem more than anywhere else is in our deteriorating psychological, societal and physical health — which of course are all interlinked.

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Our technological successes come at a great cost to the planet and other life forms that depend on it. I have often wondered what kind of technology non-materialist science would produce. There is a good chance that it would look very different from what we have now and that it would be harmless. Any technology produced out of non-materialist science is likely to be gentler and more thoughtful, for the simple reason that we would at least take our time to look at the bigger picture before we make something new.

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Readers who are familiar with the Terminator film series (Remember Arnold Schwarzenegger’s heavily accented, “I’ll be back”?) have an opportunity to see how materialist thinking is expressed in fiction and in cinema. In the story, very smart humans create an Artificial Intelligence (AI) software along with sophisticated hardware. At some point, things get so complex that suddenly the software becomes ‘alive’. It develops consciousness, it becomes aware of itself and its existence, and of course it does not end well for humans.

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Earlier I used the phrase ‘suffering under’ (materialism). That’s because we can effectively blame all the ills of this world on materialism. We treat our bodies as objects to be beaten into shape in the hope that we can prolong our physical existence. (And why wouldn’t people be obsessed with physical existence, if they are told that all they have is this life and nothing else is real?)

All of Western medicine is based on materialism. It completely ignores the mind — all the while taking placebo into account in randomised control trials. But the placebo effect — the ability of our mind to heal our body — is not studied in mainstream science. When doctors don’t know how to help a patient, they say their symptoms are ‘psychosomatic’, or in other words are caused by the mind. But when people have an illness doctors think they can treat, they attack it with brutal and toxic treatments and subject people to dehumanising systems that prioritise the body and ignore their mind and spirit.

The medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry effectively admit that the mind can affect the body, for better or worse. It can heal people who believe they’ve got real medication, when all they took is a sugar pill. Or the mind can cause physical suffering in the body, when the mind suffers. The point is the mind is acknowledged, but isn’t… It is more than a little odd — not to mention dishonest and bit schizophrenic — when you think about it, for such an ‘enlightened and scientifically-advanced’ species as we would like to think we are.

Materialism is a cause of so much barbaric practice. It permits us to treat other living beings as objects that we can just use for our own physical benefit. It’s just ‘dog eat dog’ out there, according to materialism. We don’t need to feel empathy toward the millions of sentient beings we torture in the name of our materialist science, because well, empathy isn’t real either… It is just an illusion created by the brain. We don’t have to care about the planet at all, because it is also an object that we can exploit as we please. Materialist ecologists or environmental scientists want us to fix the Earth not because we have a connection with all things, but to try to safeguard our physical survival. After all, physicalism is it…

The study of cults shows that when a cult’s belief system is challenged, the cult would either ignore it, or attack the challenger. Cults tend to demonise those who don’t think like the cult. When evidence threatens to prove a cult wrong, the cult uses mechanisms such as discrediting the source of the evidence, ignoring the evidence, or punishing any cult member who dares to consider the new evidence and think a bit differently. This is what is happening in materialist science, which has all the hallmarks of cult psychology. It is ironic (but not surprising if you know Murray Bowen’s family therapy theory) that in its reaction to religion, materialist science ended up creating a new religion... In the Scientific & Medical Network’s Galileo Commisssion Report, this is referred to as ‘scientism’…

If you haven’t guessed already, I am a post-materialist, or non-materialist, meaning I do not follow the religion of ‘scientism’. I do, however, love science very much. If science were true to its own principles and methodology, it could change everything. But this does not mean that I am following a new ‘religion’ of post-materialism. I do, in fact, have problems with some of the suggestions on how to fix the world, that come from post-materialist circles.

In the talk yesterday, there was a message that all the ills of the world could be fixed if we could just get everyone to meditate. It is the same message that comes from religion, that if everyone prays, everything will be fixed. Prayer or meditation — if it was possible for everyone to do it, don’t you think we would have done it already? There were long periods in human history when everyone was religious in some way. Everyone prayed or meditated, and yet here we are… So why did this not work?

First, the idea that everyone should meditate ignores the harsh realities of the world we live in. Maybe wealthy people who have time on their hands, or monks or nuns dedicated to spiritual work, can do this. But to ask people who are struggling to keep their family going, single parents who work long days trying to earn a living in a job that takes everything out of them to spend time meditating, is a bit out of touch with reality. Second, I know as a psychotherapist and a recoverer from childhood trauma that when you are traumatised, meditation or mindfulness practices are almost impossible.

Yes, there are studies that show that veterans with post traumatic stress had good outcomes when they meditated. I am not surprised. But even a cursory critique of such studies can easily argue that the participants in the study were able to meditate. In other words, the participants in the study do not represent the entire body of traumatised people. They only represent those among the traumatised who are able to meditate. You cannot generalise from studies like these. I know that people with trauma, not only find it difficult if not impossible to meditate, they would even find it difficult to do simple breathing exercises without panicking. (I explain this in a bit more detail in my chapter on mindfulness and meditation in Therapy Without A Therapist).

If meditation is the solution to everything, then we are in serious trouble, and this is where I diverge from my non, or post-materialist colleagues. The speaker yesterday acknowledged that brain structure is behind our behaviour and how we are, but like many others he assumes that meditation is the answer. (He even suggested we should scrap psychotherapy altogether and just get everyone to meditate).

Not only is meditation not possible for a large proportion of people, there is no evidence that it leads to permanent changes in the brain. Yes, studies show that when we meditate, we get good access to the prefrontal cortex and that our limbic brain calms down a bit. Meditation practice can improve clarity and lead to better performance in different areas of life. But this does not last. All it takes is a trigger that causes people’s limbic brain to feel threatened, and these effects are gone. That’s because under threat the limbic brain shuts down the prefrontal cortex, leaving most people feeling small, lost, confused, alone and frightened. This is what happens when people experience ‘brain fog’.

Where mediation is possible, it would produce short-lived outcomes. The person would then have to continue to meditate just to try to control how they feel. It’s better than a toxic pill, sure, but it’s still a ‘pill’ in principle. I regularly see clients who are expert meditators. Eventually, like any pill, the treatment — the meditation — becomes ineffective. If meditation is treated as a strategy to manage symptoms, it misses the point completely.

So my points are first, that meditation is not possible for most people, and second, that even when people succeed in meditating, it does not produce permanent changes to their brain architecture. It is only when our limbic system is better integrated with our prefrontal cortex, that everything changes. Integration is what we need to concentrate on individually, and as communities and societies. And it isn’t as difficult as you might imagine. Integration should be the goal of all parenting, education, and psychotherapy work, because it is the path to full humanhood.

When you are better integrated, you live in a mediative state naturally and effortlessly, because you have better and more reliable access to your prefrontal cortex. Your limbic brain will not be able to shut it down, even when you feel threatened. As a result you’re more likely to just be ‘present’ and consistent across all situations. You will not lose that sense of presence, even when you are feeling strong feelings, or are triggered into a feeling of threat. So rather than pursue the elusive goal of meditating, we should pursue integration first. A constant state of meditation will be the natural outcome. We have a history of chasing the wrong goal, and putting the cart before the horses...

I want to change the world too. I want us to be liberated from the awful, soul-destroying materialist cult we are immersed in. But the answer is not in mediation, at least not for most people. It is in changing the architecture of our brain. When we achieve better integration, we become more peaceful and spiritual naturally. But this is because among other things, our brain is far better tuned to its connection with universal consciousness, or what is called in physics the ‘unified field’.  It is this unified field, that infinite oneness, that is responsible for what we perceive as our physical existence. When we connect with it, we lose our fear of dying and can live a more connected, purposeful and fulfilling life, before we move on to whatever comes next.