The World as Modulations of Consciousness
Consider your immediate experience. When you see a tree, hear a bird, or feel the sun, what are you truly experiencing? You are experiencing seeing, hearing, and touching, or, colors, sounds, and sensations. Naturally, we infer that these are perceptions of independent, physical objects existing externally, outside consciousness, but our direct experience is only of the perception itself, within consciousness.
In fact, our entire experience of the world comes solely through our senses. Since we have no direct access to a physical world presumed to exist independently of sensory engagement, we can only legitimately claim that there is seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling. We cannot definitively claim that these senses are perceiving a material, external world separate from consciousness. Nevertheless, our mind will take these raw sensory experiences and, through a process of conceptualization and labeling, conveniently organize them into “things,” a tree, a bird, a sun.
And yet, when science drills down into the fundamental nature of what we call matter, it finds not solid, independent “things,” but fields of energy, probabilities, and quantum information. No scientific evidence has ever definitively corroborated the existence of material things as fundamentally separate, inert, or self-existent, apart from consciousness. The closer we look, the more matter dissolves into patterns and relationships of information and potentiality, challenging the notion of a purely objective, mind-independent, material realm.
A question may then arise: If the experience of the world is not of an external material realm but instead a modulation within consciousness, why does it appear largely the same from billions of different points of view? Why do we see the same tree, hear the same bird, and agree on the basic structure of reality?
We do so because individual minds arise from a unified source, which is consciousness. What appears as billions of separate minds are localized expressions or modulations within an awareness that has no borders or limits. Just as different waves arise on the same body of water, each appearing distinct from another, individual minds are specific points of view within a singular perceiving consciousness.
The similar perceptions we experience are not evidence of a shared external world, but evidence of a shared consciousness. The patterns, structures, and laws of the universe are consistent across individual perceptions because they are all unfolding within the same underlying reality. The light of consciousness shines universally, and through its various localized expressions (our minds) it presents a coherent and consistent experience of the world to itself, which the mind (largely unaware of its source) then represents to itself through conceptual thinking.
Ultimately, the presence of awareness is not just in our perceptions, it is our perceptions. It is the very light that illuminates every experience. Recognizing this fundamental truth—that the world is a modulation of awareness and that individual minds are expressions of one universal consciousness—transforms our relationship with reality from that of a detached observer to that of the conscious presence that is both the witness and the world.