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Video Description
A particle is not quite anything real until it is measured, which raises an old question: is the world broken, or have we only ever looked at it wrong? This video from the Conscious Radical channel puts two ancient answers side by side and refuses to flatten them together.
One tradition says the world is broken and your task is to find the fault; another says nothing was ever broken and only your perception needs to shift. The Gnostics stand on one side, Advaita Vedanta on the other, and modern physics hovers in the middle. The video suggests the answer you reach for says more about where you are in life than about reality itself.
Full Video Transcript
A particle is not any one thing until it’s measured. It’s the measuring that turns it
from a possibility into something real. So if our reality is just the measured version of something
larger, did something go wrong or have we just misunderstood it? A quick caveat before I go on.
In physics the thing that fixes a particle’s state doesn’t have to be a mind. A device can do it just
as well as a person so i am not claiming the universe needs you to be watching for it to exist
but at the root of it observing and things becoming real are tied together and that’s what
i want to look at in this episode frame a something went wrong so if something did go wrong
in creating this world we’d need to go back to the beginning and examine what has shaped everything
since the jewish text we now call the book of the watches was written around the 3rd century bce
and describes a class of beings whose sole job was to watch the gregory the watchful ones
the book of watches is based on an older mesopotamian story about sages who gave
knowledge to humanity the hebrew writers turned these teachers into figures who broke the world
but that is a story for another time going back to the book of watches the watches are pulled down
by desire they come to earth they take wives and teach forbidden skills and knowledge weapons
sorcery the reason of the stars and it’s this that causes it all to go wrong now let’s go back
to quantum mechanics if we think about measurement and observation the watching wasn’t the issue
the real issue started when they stopped watching and became involved until then the watchers had
only observed but driven by desire or jealousy their pure observation became mixed up with the
world and from then on everything they did brought harm to the earth and everyone in it so you might
wonder as i have if an all-seeing god can see everything why are watches needed to observe at
all? Is it their act of observing that brings us into being? The Gnostics also held that the world
we live in was a flawed copy of the Pleroma. In texts like the Apocryphon of John, the world as
we know it was created by something lower down the chain of being, a lesser craftsman named the
Yaldabaoth, the Demiurge, who didn’t realise there was anything above it. And it created the archons
who became the rulers and enforcers and then they hung a veil of forgetting. But what do us humans
do when something is broken or not working? So think about when an app on your phone glitches
or a computer program freezes. What do you do? Usually we try to find out what is broken and
look for ways to fix it because this is a basic human reflex and supports the dualistic instinct
at our core if the world feels off if we sense a problem we want to know or understand what is
broken so we can figure out how to fix it the main difference between a glitch on your phone
and these old stories is how big the problem is and what is at stake you might also be caused to
wonder whether the fault was intentional and there is also a darker way to see this which
i’ll mention briefly if observation makes reality solid then a being whose main job is to watch is
doing more than just seeing the system is actually helping to keep the system in place and that idea
is big enough for its own video if we were to pull all of this together into one story we’d have the
scenario that something went wrong at the beginning yaldabaoth made a botched copy of the original
or the watchers stopped watching and entangled themselves in the world either way the veil went
up and somewhere in the system there’s an error so in this version it’s our job to find the fault and
fix it or to reset everything because it’s not going to be quite as simple as turning something
off and then on again however this idea may explain the sense of wrongness many people feel
but can’t quite name and it’s a satisfying answer because if there is a cause it’s something you can
try to fix the collision every part of that story depends on one thing that there is a fault the
fall the copy the error the veil all rely on something having gone wrong but if you take away
the fault the whole story falls apart there is however another tradition that removes the idea
of a fault although it does start in a similar way that the world is not what it seems we’ve
been deceived and what we see is one thing wearing many masks this is similar to gnosticism and
ancient jewish apocalyptic texts but then the stories go in different directions this other
tradition says nothing was ever broken there was no botched copy or coding error the world was not
corrupted but what changed was our understanding of it and our instinctive search for an enemy
became the real enemy and our effort to fix the system is actually the problem but couldn’t that
also be the perfect cover story if something was done to us on purpose then a calm voice
saying nothing’s wrong there’s nothing to fight and you just need to see more clearly and stop
struggling wouldn’t that be the best way to convince prisoners that the prison walls are
a figment of their imagination so how could we find out which one of these stories is true
well you’d need to step outside and check you’d need to stand in a neutral place you’d need to
look at the world and your own mind from the outside and see whether the fault is really there
or if you were just seeing it that way but the challenge is that the only tool you have to examine
reality is your own perception your own mind your own consciousness but that’s exactly what’s in
question if what you see and perceive is compromised how can you use the same tools to
know your perception has been compromised is your brain starting to ache yet frame b nothing was
ever broken okay so let’s come back to the anchor for a moment a particle isn’t any one thing until
something measures it and it’s the measurement that turns possibility into a specific outcome
in the simulation piece which i’ll place the link in the comments if you haven’t already watched it
i used the sanskrit word maya and translated it as that which is not someone later offered a
considerate correction vedanta doesn’t actually use maya to mean illusion or unreal as english
translations often suggest. The word used in the tradition is methia. Methia means
dependent existence. What you see exists but not independently of the
consciousness observing it. It’s real but not real on its own at the same time. So
for example a fake copy needs an original that it’s less than which is a
dualistic view. In this view something went wrong because there is a real thing
behind this flawed version on the other hand a dependent existence doesn’t need
an original to be less than it only needs an observer so there is no broken
copy just the act of looking and what comes from that someone else explained
it in everyday terms like this so right now there are 8 billion realities being
observed on this planet one for every person we share the same grass the same
sky and eight billion versions of what it all means the tradition that gives language to all
of this is Advaita Vedanta Vedanta lays out three orders of reality which run simultaneously there
is the absolute which is consciousness itself it’s unchanging and sits beneath everything
there is the shared world where the grass is green and the cup holds water and we all agree on it
we interact with it and it feels real and then there is the personal world our apparent reality
this is the layer of your thoughts and feelings and the meaning you place on what you see
the absolute is steady and unchanging while the shared and personal worlds shift and adapt
according to verdanta the sense of corruption we feel happens only at our personal layer where our
perception shapes our experience of the world in this tradition nothing has to
have gone wrong with the world for the world to look wrong because it’s our
perception of the world and someone else gave me this very literal image for it
our senses are a prism light comes through and what you experience is
whatever spectrum the prism gives back if you look at it without awareness the
prism becomes a prison your own conditioning creates your reality but you don’t notice or
realize that you’re the one bending the light because the bent light is the only light you’ve
ever seen and i can relate to this i’ve watched this happen in my own life and i wonder how many
times you’ve seen it too when your perception and previous experiences shape what you see in every
situation and i’ve seen this in my work too we call it distorted cognition or projection
if the lens you look through is distorted and bends the light the only proof of the world you
have is from that perspective now imagine this idea on a larger scale if the problem lies in
how we know or understand things not in the world itself then there is no enemy outside
the fault is a habit of our perception but it’s been playing this way for so long that it feels
like reality the way to deal with this is to become aware of it so from this tradition i can
understand that the work of a lifetime is not to find a fault and fix the system but to change
how we see things and we stay in the same world but choose to look at it differently and then
things change standing in the gap so here’s where we are we have texts that tell us there is an
error in our world that it’s been corrupted and that our own way out or through is to find the
fault to awaken and have awareness the other says nothing is broken but our work is to have
awareness of our perception and choose to see things differently both traditions use similar
words they say the world is a deception that our way of seeing is a problem and that freedom comes
from waking up but beneath these shared terms they disagree about whether anything is truly wrong
and you might feel tempted to choose one view over the other to see which one feels right and ignore
the rest but i’m just going to ask you to pause for now and reserve judgment just for a moment
if you take the gnostic or ancient jewish tradition as truth then the world becomes a
place that requires your vigilance every system you see is potentially iconic and the distortion
that we see and feel is the proof you may walk through your life as if you were in a very long
war against a real adversary where continued hyper vigilance is required the light in this tradition
is an awakening the feeling of waking up to a direct connection with source whereas the shadow
side of this can lead to paranoia, exhaustion and never being able to rest. In the other tradition
the work is inner work, there is no external enemy but your job is to keep adjusting the lens, to keep
watching the watcher until you notice that your reality was shaped by your own perception. The
light here is the space that gives you inside yourself and the knowledge that you’re not
fighting an external enemy. However the shadow side to this is spiritual bypassing, deciding
nothing is ever wrong even when some things actually are. You can see that both traditions
have a light and a shadow side and the shadow side of each is exactly what the other warns us against.
Asking which one is true might not be the right question. Maybe the real question is which one
are you drawn to right now and what does that say about your life at the moment? I don’t live fully
in one way or the other and I do move between the two. Sometimes something real is happening to you
and you need the Gnostic clarity to see it. Other times nothing is happening except in your own
mind and you need the calm of Vedanta to stop creating a crisis. So it would have been easy
for me to end this piece with an answer and maybe a few years ago I would have done that
but now I think it’s better to end with another question. Which view do you turn to when you need
one and what does that choice say about how you are living right now?
Source: The Conscious Radical