Monthly Archives: July 2011

Maximizing the Emotional Fullness of Life

Surprisingly no one has yet asked me why I am writing about this subject — The Theory of The Conscious Universe (TTOTCU). Presumably my friends in the media business are somewhat curious that I am not dinning on about that business as they have long since become accustomed. And if deviating to another subject, why this spiritual sounding one, which may seem out of tune with a mostly business audience?

To explain let me go back a few thousand years to the earliest philosophers — folks like Thales and Epictetus, Socrates and the many other earliest thinkers at the dawn of written language.

Philosophy itself means the love of knowing. “Knowing” itself was one of the first subjects of philosophy — philosophers asked “what is knowing?” and “how is it possible that knowing can exist?” This sub-field of philosophy is called epistemology, as you may know.

Significantly, the root of the word “knowing” is “to see” — you may recall that in an earlier post I pointed out that being primates whose dominant sense is sight, we humans put seeing on a higher pedestal than our other four physical senses.

To me the two most important words that explain why philosophy exists are “wonder” and “awe”. These primal feelings/intuitions are the driver of philosophy, and it was philosophy that gave rise to art and culture, science and technology, morality and religion. First we had those feelings, then intuitions arose to guide us in the right direction to realize unspoken questions and to figure out the best ways of trying to seek answers. Without those feelings where would we be today? Perhaps still in trees.

Growing up I was unwittingly recapitulating the race’s ontogeny — feeling those feelings and being led through the same kinds of intuitions the early philosophers had, even before I could read such works and discover that others had been there long before me.

Freud called these feelings “the oceanic experience” (highly recommended reading: Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents). He postulated that religion came from this sense of something larger than ourselves. Remarkably, there may be nothing larger than our Self, if TTOTCU is the right explanation of the meaning of life. Our Self may be the only thing that actually exists, and the cause of everything that we experience. In fact this idea is the core of TTOTCU: all that exists is a single Consciousness, capable of “entertaining” Itself by making virtual copies of Itself, each of which shares the experience of being a self, and may be denied full or partial memory of who it really is. The Original Observer sees through the eyes (or other sensory equipment) of the virtual copies and the copies may or may not be(come) aware of the looker above who is also seeing out their eyes.

So back to my reason for these writings, despite the fact that the daily interests of my dear readers may be focused totally elsewhere. The reason is this: TTOTCU bears the promise of an ability to restore the magic of life, without the need to take things on faith, engage in superstition, or follow rituals which to some may not feel natural. If it is true that Consciousness is the supreme nature of the Universe, and that each of us is a reflection and a particularization of the Absolute Consciousness in a sacred game making each of us a unique and important experiment in a celestial and divine process, and that this in no way steps away from the scientific method and the disciplines of scientific thinking — then how much emotional fullness might be restored into everyone’s daily lives by recognizing this heritage?

Who among us has not had the experience of lying on your back in the grass looking up at the stars and suddenly feeling elevated, understanding deep down the importance and the excitement of the journey we are all on, and the hugeness of it all and our inextricable connection to it all? But after childhood, how much of this living large feeling makes it into our daily lives? Are we not ground down into pettiness? Do we not still yearn to feel the greatness of our existence each second of every day?

Even before proving that TTOTCU is true, simply the fact that it could be true is enough to place all religion into a new light, as scientific possibility. In fact it would be unscientific to rule out the core truth of all religion, without having disproven it.

The unity and integrity of having all things inside oneself integrated into a wholeness of purpose, a meaningfulness, makes life emotionally full. In a highly rational culture such as ours has been since the Golden Age of Greece, we subconsciously are unable to get in touch with the greatest feelings we can have, unless we can square those feelings with the rational strictures in our minds. TTOTCU can do that, without appeal to faith, because it is a scientific explanation for “what is”, which lines up with what we know from Quantum Mechanics (QM) and Relativity, and can explain why it is that time and space exist in our subjective experience and yet are not really there according to these cutting edge sciences.

That’s why I share TTOTCU. It has restored the magic of life to me, and I wish to share that magical feeling with as many people as possible. Especially you people who have touched my life and to whom I am grateful for what you have taught and given me.

All the best,


* From now on, you can look forward to reading Bill’s latest blogpost on Thursday of each and every week. We hope this weekly schedule will help you keep up with Bill’s posts.  😀

Consciousness has been The Black Hole of Physics

Since Einstein’s famous mind experiments made it possible to think in ways we could never even imagine before, we have learned that Time is Relative to an Observer.

Einstein pictured the Observer riding on a photon of light, and imagined what the Observer would “see” if it were possible to see without the interaction of photons and the eye (which interactions could not occur if one’s eyes were smaller than photons). This mind stretching exercise of imagination led him to make predictions that Quantum Mechanics (QM) has now proven to be accurate many, many times. Time does indeed move more slowly as the Observer approaches the speed of light.

The Observer then began to appear more and more frequently on the stage of physics. However no one dared to focus on the Observer; the Observer functioned as a convenient construct within theory but physicists stayed away from trying to say what the Observer is.

Heisenberg used the Observer to prove that an Observer cannot measure both the vector and position of an electron, but can choose which one to measure and in the process the measurement itself will alter the other value.

The Observer, of course, is consciousness — the experiencer, that which experiences — what is at the core of each of us, our innermost Self.

The ‘black hole” reference in the title refers simply to the way that physics has used the Observer without trying to look inside it.

Bell’s Theorem and the many experiments generated to prove or disprove that theorem, have established that either some things can travel faster than light, or that distance/space itself is an illusion and the entire universe exists within a single point, where everything is connected to everything else.

That the universe exists within a singular point is consistent with the Theory of The Conscious Universe (TTOTCU) which posits that the Original Experiencer is all that exists, and that the rest of the Universe is a creation of that Experiencer, all existing within Consciousness, the substrate of the Universe. Consciousness does not occupy space nor require the existence of space. In TTOTCU, space is an illusion created within Consciousness.

The Original Experiencer, like a computer server, is able to create from Itself networked computers (each of us) with whom the Original Experiencer is in various forms of communication. We are like sensors feeding back our experiences, and the Original Experiencer with its infinite computing power is able to combine and simultaneously experience all of that at once.

An elite team of physicists has recently received a grant to study the differences between our collective subjective experience of reality and the findings of Quantum Mechanics and Relativity. The vision is to be able to combine new insights with QM to explain why we perceive the universe the way we do. The team refers to the Einstein term “block time” — time as a single block not as a running river — as one of the specific things they hope to explain: how is it that time is apparently an illusion (according to certain interpretations of QM and Relativity Theory) and yet we all experience it as reality? Perhaps the team will combine physics with new insights from neuroscience.

TTOTCU explains that, to the Original Observer*, everything is happening at once in a single instant of time, as a result of the processing power inherent in the Original Observer. To created fictional beings (us) our processing power is so much smaller that we must break down the allness into a sequence — over time — in order to take it all in.

To the Original Observer, it is still the first instant of Time — and will always be.

The creation of “cell selves” provides an infinite variety of experience and creativity to the Original Observer. Perpetual newness rather than sameness. Cell selves at our level have free will and no direct cognizance of sharing the Original Identity. This creates drama. What would you do if you were in the position of the Original Observer — just veg out for eternity?

In other words, it is simple and elegant (Occam’s Razor) to explain everything in the Universe if we take the substrate of Universe to be an Original Observer — our subjective experience, the findings of QM and Relativity, and a lot more. Einstein’s “block time” is just one example of how the picture falls into place — explaining why we subjectively experience time as a series of events while at the same time scientific experimentation tells us that these events do not objectively exist in this temporal relationship.

The principle of “parsimony” (explanations based on the fewest axioms) is a hallmark of science and is often used as a guidepost to identify theories that are more likely to be the actual explanations of reality. Perhaps this lends additional credence to TTOTCU and justifies its consideration and further investigation of the experimental pathways to proving or disproving our theory.

Questions we will tackle in upcoming postings:

“How does the Original Observer create the rest of the Universe?”

“Where did the Original Observer come from?”

“What is the relevancy to action decisions if TTOTCU is correct?”

And many more.

Best to all,


*”Original Observer” and “Original Experiencer” are used interchangeably here.