Everything is Inside Your “Head”

The type of spirituality I have mostly followed over the last 8 years is called “nonduality”, from the Hindu word advaita, which translates to “not two”.

As you may have guessed by the name, this philosophy suggests that there is no such thing as separation – there are not “two things”. Everything, this philosophy suggests, is fundamentally the same. Made out of the same stuff. That stuff could be called consciousness. Pure awareness.

A lot of people struggle with these ideas. The world around them seems so real and physical. It seems like there really is separation between things. But there’s a very simple way of showing that – even if the materialist paradigm of the universe is correct (which it isn’t 😉 ) – our direct experience can only ever be of pure consciousness and no separation.

That is because, like the title of this post, everything you experience is actually inside your “head”. Now, even this isn’t true. Saying everything appears inside your head is making a concession to the materialist paradigm, where heads are real physical things themselves. And that’s not true. Your head, just like everything else, is just an appearance in and of consciousness.

But for the sake of this post, I’ll make a concession to the materialist paradigm, in order to show that even if it is true, everything we experience is only, and can only ever be consciousness itself, without any separation.

This is because of the way our brains work. A lot of people have an unconscious assumption that their eyes are portals that look out at the world. But this isn’t the way it works. Our eyes are receptors, which take in information, and transmit that information to our brain where images are produced. This is true for all our senses.

But if this is true, this means that everything you have ever experienced has been “inside your head”. There’s no room for the world to fit inside your head, so all you have ever experienced is your conscious representation of the world, never the actual physical world itself (which… there isn’t one 😉 ). There’s no room for space inside your head, therefore there’s no room for separation. Your brain just creates the perception of space and separation, but that isn’t your actual experience.

Go outside at night and look up at the stars. Those stars are appearing inside your head. If the materialist paradigm is correct, your skull should be on the other side of those stars. Your whole world in fact, is surrounded by bone. Again, that is assuming the materialist paradigm is correct, which I maintain it isn’t, but it is still a useful example to show how the world we actually experience can only ever be pure consciousness without any separation.

The American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote: “We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects.”

What the materialist paradigm suggests isn’t that the world you experience is real and physical, because we know it can’t be – it suggests that there is the world you experience, plus the real world beyond what we experience. An outside, external world in addition to the one we experience.

You’re sitting there reading this on your phone or computer. That phone or computer is “inside your head”. The materialist paradigm suggests there is *another* real phone or computer that exists beyond the one in your direct experience. There has never been any direct evidence for this real external world, because how could there be? It is just an assumption we have made because things really seem physical and separate. But it’s just not the case.

We are still living in an outdated physicalist paradigm though. We have taken the world at face value without really questioning its nature. A little bit of investigation reveals that the world is very different to how we thought it was.

Some people might find these ideas challenging, and they are. Waking up to reality is challenging. It dismantles all our beliefs, and that can be destabilising. As Jesus said: “Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed. When they are disturbed, they will be astounded, and will reign over all.”

It takes a little courage to wake up from the dream of mind.

And remember, even your “head” is just in your head. 😉

Much love,

Will.

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