What Is Reality Actually Made Of?

Knock on a wooden table. It feels solid, heavy and still. For most of history that settled the question. The world is made of stuff, and you can touch it.

Look closer and the answer starts to change. Ask a physicist what the table is made of and you'll hear about atoms, and then about fields. Ask a mystic and you might hear that it's made of mind. A few thinkers in between say it's something stranger than either.

This essay takes one ordinary thing, the workbench in Griff's workshop, and zooms in a layer at a time. At each layer we hear from the people who went looking. Then we look at where they agree, where they part ways, and what any of it changes on an ordinary Tuesday.

The common-sense answer

The answer most of us grew up with is that the world is made of matter: little pieces of stuff, bumping into each other and following fixed rules.

The physicist Amit Goswami calls this view material realism, and he boils it down to a few beliefs. Things are there whether or not anyone is looking. Nothing can reach across space and affect something far away. Every event follows from the one before it. And the mind is a side effect of the brain.

It's been a hugely successful view. It gave us bridges, vaccines and the phone in your pocket, and it's still how most of us picture the world when we aren't thinking about it.

Griff makes chairs in a little workshop at the edge of town. One night, with the last order finished, he sits on the step outside and looks up at a sky full of stars, and they make him feel very small. If the world is only matter, then he's a speck of it: a brief arrangement of atoms on a small planet in a very big and very quiet universe.

Some people find that picture bleak. Plenty of scientists find it beautiful. Either way, it rests on one assumption: look closely enough and you'll find solid little things at the bottom. So let's look.

Mostly empty

The next morning Griff takes a hand lens to his workbench. Up close, the smooth wood becomes a landscape of grain. Closer still, the grain is made of tiny cells packed like a honeycomb. The cells are made of molecules, and the molecules are made of atoms. This is where the solid stuff should be.

But an atom is almost entirely space. Blow one up to the size of a football stadium and its nucleus would be about the size of a pea on the centre spot. That pea holds nearly all the atom's weight. A few electrons sit out past the stands, and in between is what we'd call nothing.

So why does the bench feel solid? When Griff presses his hand on it, the electrons in his hand and the electrons in the wood push each other away. That push is what he feels as touch. What we call solid is mostly the feeling of that force.

Even "empty" isn't quite the right word. Physics no longer pictures the electron as a tiny ball whizzing round a nucleus. It's closer to a haze spread through all that space, and the haze belongs to something much bigger.

An ocean, not a void

In modern physics the basic ingredients of the world aren't tiny balls at all. They're fields. A field fills all of space, a little like the surface of an endless ocean. An electron is a small ripple in the electron field, and a particle of light is a ripple in another one. What we call a thing is a place where a field is stirred up, for a while.

The physicist David Bohm took this picture further than most. In Wholeness and the Implicate Order he wrote that space "is full rather than empty." He called it a plenum, "the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves." Matter, in his words, is "rather like a tiny ripple on a vast sea."

An old book got there first, at least in spirit. In 1908 The Kybalion put it in six words: "Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates." Matter, energy and mind, it said, differ only in their rate of vibration. In the 1970s the inventor Itzhak Bentov went further in Stalking the Wild Pendulum, describing all matter as oscillation too fast for us ever to see.

The Kybalion was describing spirit, though, and Bentov his own theory. Neither was doing physics the way Bohm was. But all three point the same way: the bench is movement that happens to hold a shape. Bohm put it plainly. The flow comes first, and things "form and dissolve in this flow."

That left him with a question he spent his life on. If everything is one moving ocean, why do we see separate things?

Folded into everything

Bohm's answer started with a small laboratory device. Picture two glass cylinders, one inside the other, with thick glycerine between them. A drop of ink goes into the glycerine and the outer cylinder is turned slowly. The drop is drawn out into a fine thread, finer and finer, until it disappears. Turn the cylinder back, and the thread gathers into the same drop.

While it was spread out, the drop was never lost. Its order was folded into the whole. Bohm called this the implicate order, from a word meaning "to fold inward." The world we see, full of separate things, he called the explicate order, the unfolded one. In his picture every object is like that drop, folded into the whole and unfolded for a while where we can see it.

He also pointed to the hologram. Cut a piece of holographic film in half and each half still holds the whole image. Cut it again and again, and the whole image is still there. Each part, he wrote, "contains information about the whole object."

The writer Michael Talbot, in The Holographic Universe, passed on a simpler picture of Bohm's. Think of a fountain. Bohm thought it was as meaningless to see the universe as separate parts "as it is to view the different geysers in a fountain as separate from the water." Even an electron, he said, "is just a name given to a certain aspect of the holomovement."

Griff puts down his lens and looks at his own hand. If the bench is a ripple, so is he. The bench, his hand and last night's stars are all one moving sea. It should feel wonderful, but it makes him a little dizzy. If nothing is really solid and nothing is really separate, is any of this real? We'll come back to that. First there's one more layer, and it's the boldest.

Made of mind

For some thinkers even the ocean isn't the bottom layer.

Amit Goswami, the physicist who summed up material realism, spent his career arguing against it. In The Self-Aware Universe he wrote that consciousness, not matter, is the ground of all being. Matter, in his view, exists inside consciousness as a set of possibilities, and consciousness is what turns those possibilities into the one thing you actually see.

The Kybalion said something close to this nearly a century earlier: "The All is Mind; the Universe is Mental." In its telling, the whole universe is like a thought held in one infinite mind.

The Indian teacher Nisargadatta Maharaj came at it from the inside. He asked people to notice the one thing they could never doubt, the plain sense that I am. "The only true statement is 'I am'," he said. "All else is mere inference." The body, the room and the whole world all appear in that awareness.

The philosopher Alan Watts put it more playfully. The earth peoples, he wrote, the way an apple tree apples. You aren't a visitor here. You're something the whole world is doing.

So a physicist, an old book, a teacher who kept a small shop in Bombay and a philosopher in California say the same bold thing. Mind doesn't happen inside the world. The world happens inside mind. That's a big claim, so it's worth asking how well it holds up.

Where they meet

Put the answers side by side and something stands out. Physicist, mystic, philosopher or old book, none of them stops where common sense does. Every one says the world of separate, solid things is the surface, and that underneath there's one thing, moving, and we're part of it. That's where they meet, and it runs through every layer we've looked at.

They don't agree on what that one thing is. Bohm believed the world is there whether anyone looks or not. His enfolded order doesn't need a mind to exist. Goswami believed nothing is settled until consciousness settles it. They can't both be right, though they're often quoted together as if they held one view. And The Kybalion's claim that the universe is a mind can't be tested at all. No experiment could prove it or rule it out.

It helps to know what the physics does and doesn't say. The science writer Philip Ball gave the introduction to Beyond Weird a blunt title: "No one can say what quantum mechanics means." The theory is superb at predicting what we'll see, but what it tells us about reality is still argued over. In the maths, the observer can be any measuring device; it doesn't have to be a person. Physicists call one process decoherence, the world constantly bumping into itself, and it explains why big things look solid and definite with no mind required.

So when someone says quantum physics proves that consciousness creates reality, that goes further than the physics does. It's one reading, held by a minority of physicists. Fields are mainstream physics. Bohm's enfolded order is one way of reading that physics. The idea that it's all made of mind is a philosophy, much of it very old, and the physics neither proves it nor rules it out.

Which brings us back to Griff's question. If none of it is solid, does any of it matter?

Still a bench

The boldest book here has an answer for him. The Kybalion says the universe is mental, and then it adds a warning: to anyone living inside it, the universe must be treated as real. The half-wise, it says, notice how unreal the world is and imagine they can defy its laws, and "they are broken against the rocks."

Goswami said something similar. Everyday realism isn't the whole truth, but it's a very good map for a world of benches. Alan Watts used the old Sanskrit word maya for it, and he didn't mean fake. He meant real at its own level, without being the whole story.

So the bench is still a bench, and Griff can still bang his knee on it. What changes is where he fits. Last night he felt like a speck, dropped into a cold universe from outside. None of these pictures leaves him outside. Watts wrote that we don't "come into" this world. We come out of it, like leaves from a tree.

Morning light falls through the workshop window, and sawdust turns in the sunbeam. The wood on Griff's bench grew out of sunlight and rain, and the same sunlight is warming his feathers now. The chair, the tree it came from and the hand shaping it are one movement, holding different shapes for a while. Griff is one of those shapes, and tonight the stars will feel a lot less lonely.

What it changes

So what is reality made of? Up close, the bench is atoms, and the atoms are mostly space. That space is full, a sea of fields, and every particle is a ripple in it. Bohm said all of it is folded together into one undivided movement. Some say that movement is, at bottom, mind. Nobody can tell you for certain which layer is the last, but past the first one, every thinker here says you're part of it.

Bohm thought that one idea could change a lot. Dividing the world into pieces, he wrote, is "convenient and useful mainly in the domain of practical, technical and functional activities," which covers building and fixing things. The trouble starts when we forget we did the dividing and begin to see ourselves and the world as "constituted of separately existent fragments."

Here's something to try this week. The next time you knock on a table, pause for a second. Feel how solid it is, and remember what it's doing underneath. Every layer we looked at, you're made of too.