Is Awareness Interactive?
John Archibald Wheeler, the American theoretical physicist, famously declared, "No phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon," implying that the universe is fundamentally participatory.* This finding from quantum physics challenges the notion of a purely objective, mind-independent reality by suggesting that the act of observation is intimately linked to the appearance of reality itself. However, from a nondual perspective, the interpretation that awareness is interactive can be a subtle form of dualism.
To say that awareness interacts with phenomena presupposes two distinct entities: awareness, and the phenomena with which it interacts. The implication is that there is a subject and an object, a perceiver and a thing perceived, that are fundamentally separate. Yet, the core of nondual understanding is that in reality there is no fundamental separation. There is not an independent observer standing apart from and peering into a world that exists outside of it. There is only one unified consciousness expressing itself in a multiplicity of apparent forms.
Awareness is not a separate agent that does things to the world or interacts with its contents. Instead, awareness is the fundamental reality, the seamless whole upon which all experiences of thoughts, feelings, perceptions, the body, the entire cosmos, appear. What we conventionally describe as interaction is, from this vantage point, simply awareness knowing itself, or appearing as various forms within its own being. The apparently physical world, just like a dream world, is not outside awareness; it appears within awareness and is made of awareness. And, just like in a dream, there is the appearance of interaction.
The apparent collapse of the wave function in quantum mechanics, where infinite possibilities become a definite reality, is not an action performed by a separate awareness upon inert matter. Rather, it is infinite awareness perceiving itself in a continuous act of self-creation. In other words, the activity of the mind is not a distinct entity influencing an external world, but awareness experiencing its potentiality from a particular point of view.
Therefore, the experience of the world, from the grandest cosmic event to the most subtle sensation, is a dynamic modulation of awareness alone. The entire display of existence is a self-knowing wholeness, an unbroken process expressing and recognizing itself as all that is. The scientific discovery that observation influences reality, then, becomes a pointer towards the nondual truth that all known phenomena in the universe appears in a unified awareness.