Once I realized that materialism, evolution, and religions were false concepts, it seemed there was nowhere to turn. Even though it was exhilarating to discover what was not true, the comfort of having everything all figured out was hard to leave behind.
 
Once we reach that point of unknowing, we are left where we should have begun in the first place. Namely, the reality we can know, experience directly, and reason upon, rather than beliefs pushed on us by others.
 
The Smallest Thing
 
At first glance, it would seem that if we are just matter, we must go the way of matter—from dust we come to dust we return. However, if way down underneath we are actually something other than matter, then we would have a different destiny.
 
Let's probe our smallest parts.
 
Atom is a word invented by the Greeks to describe the smallest thing. But now we know atoms are comprised of smaller parts called protons, neutrons, and electrons. But reason tells us that even those parts have to be composed of parts, those parts composed of parts, and on and on. Taken infinitely downward, matter must boil down to nothing—in the physical particle sense.
 
That's where just doing a thought experiment takes us.

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Then we can consider the implication of Einstein's famous equation, M=E/C², where E is energy, M is mass (matter), and C is the velocity of light. Using simple algebra, the equation can be rearranged like this: M=E/C². Since both things on the right side of the equation, the speed of light and energy, are nothing in the touchy-feely material sense, and they equal matter, then matter must be nothing as well.
 
That jibes with modern quantum physics. Beneath the billiard ball atom models with nuclei, electrons, protons, and neutrons that look like tiny solar systems, are subatomic particles known as quanta. Quanta is a growing family with names such as quarks, leptons, bosons, baryons, mesons, fermions, gravitons, and superstrings. Over 200 quanta are now known to reside within the nucleus.

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These subatomic particles are not just clustered together like a bunch of grapes. They're traveling about in the nucleus at 40,000 miles per second. Physicists can't get matter to stand still long enough to have a good look at it. Even if they did, they wouldn't see anything any more than they could see a thought.
 
A superstring, believed to perhaps be the smallest unit, is 100 billion, billion times smaller than a proton. It's not actually a particle, but more like a vibration. Physicists arrived at this idea by exploring the results from supercollider machines that explode atoms into pieces, and with mathematical calculations that give me a headache just to look at them.

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As superstrings vibrate, they create the harmony that manifests as the subatomic particles, nuclei, electrons, atoms, and molecular matter that makes up you and the goulash you are having for dinner tonight. Superstrings mean that the various forms of matter are—way down underneath—not matter, but more like different tunes. In other words, we're back to nothingness in the material sense again.
 
Matter Is Mostly Space
 
Even before we dismantle matter into the nothingness of vibrations by using our thought experiment and quantum physics, the basic structure of an atom is already primarily the nothingness of space.

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Take one atom and expand the nucleus to the size of a pea and place it on the 50-yard line of a football stadium. The outer walls of the stadium and parking lot would be where the electrons are. Everything in between is space and forces. If the nucleus were the size of a soccer ball, the electrons would be ten miles away. If all the space within the atoms that make up your body were removed, and all the atomic parts compressed to the density found in an atomic nucleus, you would fit on the head of a pin.
 
The point being, atoms that comprise us and the physical world we perceive as solid, are essentially all empty space. The atomic and quantum parts are also immaterial. Matter is, in effect, an illusion, a perception created by material brains that have the ability to perceive something from nothing.

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All Is One
 
In classical physics, beginning in the seventeenth century and still embraced by most everyone to this day, things are thought to exist only if they can be perceived in a materialistic sense. It's all about weights, measures, levers, pulleys, speed, distance, timing and so on. This serves us well in the material world. But human-centered physics is naïve in that it is constrained by matter, our four dimensions, and the senses.
 
In order to function day to day in our material world, with beginnings and ends, and under the constraints of time, we require material bodies, brains, senses, and material things to sustain us. However, the true underlying quantum reality is timeless, connected, and nonmaterial.
 
This is very difficult to comprehend since we tend to think in terms of parts and pieces, beginnings and ends. We also think our four dimensions are all-inclusive. But in the quantum understanding, our dimensions are but an infinitesimal blip on a spectrum of reality that's not only connected but limitless.
 
Consider light. The visible portion of it is just a minuscule part of an electromagnetic spectrum that apparently extends both ways endlessly. Just because we can only perceive the narrow visible light part of the spectrum, does not deny the existence of other realities that exist in different parts of the spectrum.

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For example, insects see a different world than we do since their eyes are tuned to less of the long wave infrared part of the spectrum, and more to the short wave invisible (to us) ultraviolet portion.
 
Similarly, the sound we can hear occupies only a narrow range in the sound spectrum. The high-frequency sound from a dog whistle does not exist to our ears but does to a dog's. The low-frequency sounds that are part of elephant language don't exist to our ears, but they use it to communicate over miles.
 
We are only privy to our one reality. Our brain just keeps dialing this four-dimensional material world and then our brain receiver concludes that's all there is.

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In our physical world, distance is thought to separate things. However, at the quantum level, all points in space and time are best understood as being the same. Future and history are both accessible.
 
Time is not the coming-here-gone linear phenomenon we think it to be. It's a perception of beginnings and ends created by our brains to cope with the dimensional world within which we're imprisoned. Einstein wrote of this, ". . . the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
 
A point in time is not gone; it is just elsewhere. Nothing begins and ends; everything just is—including us.
 
Quantum physics not only proves that touchy-feely matter is an illusion, but also that all things are interconnected and not even subject to time or distance. A butterfly cannot flap its wings in Hong Kong without a breeze occurring in Chicago. Quantum reality is like an infinite ocean where every single molecule is connected to every other one. Events we perceive are like waves—unique but inseparable manifestations of the same underlying ocean.
 
This interconnectedness is like a holographic film. Holograms are three-dimensional images in mid-air. If the film is broken into fragments and a laser beam directed at any one of the fragments, a complete holographic image will emerge. The image is stored everywhere on the film at the same time.

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The holographic phenomenon of the whole containing all the parts, and any part containing the entire whole, is what our universe is unveiling itself to be at its fundamental implicit level.
 
That is why a starfish broken in pieces will regenerate the whole starfish. If the tip of a human finger is cut off, it will regenerate the lost tip of the finger if bandaged. If the lens of the eye of a newt is lost, the iris will regenerate it.

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As early as 1935, physicists Einstein, Polosky, and Rosen proposed interconnectedness (nonlocality) which is the idea that at the quantum level things are not detached at all. For example, if two twin photons of light take off from the same point in opposite directions at 186,000 miles per second (the speed of light), what happens to one instantaneously affects the twin thousands of miles away. Though separate, they remain connected. Time and distance are not even relevant to them.

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As strange as these ideas may sound, they reflect our true underlying reality. Consider these quotes from noted scientists:
 
Max Planck—". . . each individual particle in the system, in a certain sense, at any one time, exists simultaneously in every part of the space occupied by the system . . . We see that nothing less is at stake here than the concept of the particle."
 
Henry Stapp—"Quantum theory indicates that there are no such things as separate parts in reality, but instead only intimately related phenomena so bound up with each other as to be inseparable . . ."
 
Werner Heisenberg—Reality is divided " . . . not into groups of objects, but into different groups of connections . . . An elementary particle is not an independently existing analyzable entity. It is, in essence, a set of relationships that reach outward to other things."
 
Alfred North Whitehead—"Nature is a theatre for the interrelations of activities . . . there is no possibility of a detached, self-contained existence."

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Albert Einstein—"Physical reality as represented by continuous fields, is not mechanically explicable . . . Physical reality must be described in terms of continuous functions in space. The material point, therefore, can hardly be conceived any more as the basic concept of the theory . . . This change in the conception of reality is the most profound and truthful one that has come to physics since Newton."
 
Niels Bohr—"At the quantum level there is no objective picture at all."
 
Mental Feats Prove Holographic Connection
 
Some mentally disabled people can do amazing feats. Without seeing or understanding the parts, they can see the whole.
 
The identical twins, George and Charles, can calculate in their heads the day of the week on which a date will fall 40,000 years forward or backward and give the answer in a few seconds. Neither of them can add simple numbers, nor do they know what a formula is, much less how to write one out. They can also describe the weather conditions of any day in their lives and repeat 300 digits in order from memory.
 
In 1920, Kenneth, a 38-year-old with the mental age of 11, and a day-to-day working vocabulary of 58 words could recall the population of every city in the United States over 5,000, identify any city by population alone, and quote the distances of each city from New York or Chicago. He knew all county seats; the names, number of rooms, and locations of 2,000 hotels, statistics on 3,000 mountains and rivers, and details on 2,000 inventions and discoveries.
 
Jedediah Buxton (1700s), with a mental age of 10 and inability to write his name, could make lightning-fast calculations. For example, he could give a 28-digit answer to the question: How many cubic 1/8ths of an inch are in a body with three sides of 23,145,789 X 5,642,732 X 54,965 yards?
 
Leslie Lemke is blind, mentally disabled, and has cerebral palsy. He cannot hold a utensil to eat with, but upon hearing Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 when a teen, he played it back flawlessly. He can playback any music regardless of its length, note for note, after hearing it only once.
 
Ellen is another musical savant who is blind and has an I.Q. of less than 50. She sang the entire Evita Broadway musical after hearing the album only once.
 
David, although mentally disabled, can tell you on what corner you are standing anywhere in Milwaukee, Wisconsin if you tell him the number of the bus pulling up in front of you and the time of day.
 
Alonzo has an I.Q. of 50 and a minimal vocabulary but can sculpt anything he sees with amazing speed and perfect accuracy.

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Tony was considered mentally disabled but had an almanac-like ability to detail historical events that occurred on any day of the year.
 
Macaulay, an English historian with an amazing eidetic (photographic) memory, on a bet memorized Paradise Lost in a single night.
 
Bhandanta Vicitasara could recite from memory 16,000 pages of Buddhist canonical texts.
 
In Japan, Akira Haraguchi recites pi from memory out to 83,431 decimal places, a feat that takes hours and hours to do. He has a tough time proving this ability since radio and television programs always close up shop while he is still reciting the answer.

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Such feats escape the smartest among us. That's because intelligence in the worldly sense is not at play, but rather the special ability of some to perceive aspects of reality holographically.
 
The Something of Nothing
 
Scientists tear apart the atom and probe deep space for answers to the Big Questions. They've searched high and low for a nice neat equation, force, or particle that is sufficient to explain all of existence. Instead, the underpinning of reality reflects mind, not matter. That's the same conclusion forced by the laws and design in nature

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Not only is the quantum world invisible and nonmaterial, but it is also unpredictable. These features are also characteristic of mind and free will.
 
With regard to unpredictability, if an electron is shot at a pane of glass, it might penetrate the glass and continue on, it might stop and reverse its course, it may vanish in front of the glass only to reappear on the other side and then continue, or may take route in any number of counterintuitive trajectories. Its behavior may also change based upon whether it is observed or not. Such behavior is characteristic of mind, not mere matter.
 
At the larger physical level, our reality is like a painting that can only be explained by the creative choices of the painter, not an analysis of its atoms. Or consider a beautiful flower. If it is burned, its mass and energy remain quantitatively the same. But what about the qualitative aspect of beauty? If we capture all the atoms and heat of combustion from the fire, the form and beauty of the original flower is not retained therein.
 
That's because beauty is information, nothing in the material sense but everything in the mind sense. Beauty simply uses the flower's atoms and energy for expression. Since the ashes and energy from the flower no longer possess beauty, that would mean that they were not responsible for it in the first place. The flower's beauty must have preexisted, expressed itself when the flower blossomed, and will continue to exist in a non-physical realm even if the flower is burned to random ashes.
 
All of the qualities of our world are similarly emergent; they are gestalts and not reducible to an examination of the parts and pieces as materialism demands. The choices of a creative mind are the only explanation for functional complexity and beauty.

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Humans once filled the heavens with gods to explain the world. Most gods were thrown out when atomism, Newtonian science, and Darwinism joined hands to form the beliefs of materialism and evolution. Mind became the product of matter, not matter the product of mind. Materialists, including most quantum physicists, stop short of crediting mind with the existence of our reality. They are either blinded by evolutionary bias or equate mind with humans and cannot understand why, if there is a Creator, he/she does not talk to them or remove all adversity from the world.
 
This brings to mind the musing of Woody Allen: "If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank." Clearly, an anthropomorphized god is not the same as the incomprehensible cause of our reality.
 
Materialism and evolution have not lived up to their promise of providing answers to the Big Questions. Matter, physical laws, functional complexity, free will, and beauty cannot explain themselves nor the indeterminate nature of the quantum world.
 
Advancing technology permits peering deeper and deeper into atoms, and further and further out into space. But all that is ever learned is what is there, not how it came to be or why it's there. The Big Bang no more answers the Big Questions than did the gigantic turtle once thought to balance the world on its back.

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​The invisible, timeless, interconnected, and unpredictable world underlying our four dimensions and the laws governing them, points to mind. This, in turn, points to humans not only being the product of mind, but fundamentally being invisible, timeless, interconnected, and unpredictable minds as well.