Beyond Materialism: What It Means When Consciousness is Fundamental

We live in an interesting time where ancient spiritual traditions are suddenly meeting cutting-edge science. From neuroscience to quantum physics to psychedelic research, conversations are emerging that challenge the materialist worldview that has dominated our culture for centuries.

But what does it actually mean if consciousness is fundamental to reality, and not something separately generated by our brains? More importantly, why should we care?

The Cracks in Materialism

Materialism isn't the cold, rational truth stripped of wishful thinking that many assume it to be. It's a philosophy. A metaphysical model making radical assumptions about reality without direct evidence to support them.

The scientific method itself keeps exposing cracks in the physicalist worldview. In high-energy physics, spacetime breaks down at the Planck scale, suggesting it cannot be fundamental. The famous double-slit experiment in quantum mechanics shows that observation affects particle behavior in ways we still can't satisfactorily explain. And perhaps most tellingly, neuroscience has yet to show how even a single subjective experience could be produced by the brain, not practically, and not even in principle.

Then there's the problem of this moment. Materialism cannot explain why we experience time the way we do. There is no objective "now". Your present moment might be 150 years in the past relative to an observer 10 billion light years away. This is a fact, and yet seemingly impossible: if there's one thing we can be absolutely certain of, it's that something is happening. We are having an experience of now. And materialism offers no satisfying explanation for this undeniable truth. To say that the moment and the stream of time is an illusion, does not explain how or why we have the illusion.

The Wave and the Ocean

The view I find most compelling comes from the non-dual tradition: we are like waves in an ocean of consciousness. We are distinct, we have direction, qualities, individuality, but we are completely inseparable from the ocean. There is nothing in us but ocean, just behaving differently than the rest.

This doesn't make reality less real. It doesn't diminish our experience. We are still limited perspectives, unable to see the world as it objectively is. But we are perspectives within consciousness, not separate entities somehow generated by dead matter.

The Traps of Spiritual Bypassing

This understanding opens doorways, but it also creates dangerous pitfalls. The spiritual path can easily become another form of escape, a way to avoid what's uncomfortable rather than face it.

Manifestation and the Law of Attraction are perfect examples. Depending on how we approach them, they can either become drivers for the ego away from any real spirituality, or they can be tools for deeper alignment.

The grotesque versions tell you to pretend you're someone you're not, to monitor your thoughts obsessively, to act as if you already have what you want. This is pathological. It's using spirituality to run away from your actual challenges, your actual patterns, your actual self.

What We Actually Want

When you want something, it's always because there's a lack of it. Those two things are two sides of the same coin. And what we think we want is very often not what we actually want.

If you want money, it's not the money you want. It's the feeling of freedom or safety it provides. If you want the perfect partner, you want connection, intimacy, love, understanding. If you want the dream job, you want to feel acknowledged or proud.

The feelings behind all the things we want are already available. They're right here. The reason we haven't fulfilled these places where we feel deep lack isn't because something is wrong with us, it's because we have patterns that block us and prevent us from doing what is required to actually change. We have emotional memories tied to certain situations, and we avoid the very actions that could take us forward.

The Real Work

Your core challenges in life aren't problems to be fixed through manifestation, they're keys to your transformation. The way forward isn't to avoid the feeling but to face it, release it, and resolve it.

This is real work. It requires acknowledging emotions that have been suppressed, holding space for them, and then transmuting them. When you shift from fear-based emotions to more open states like curiosity, excitement, inspiration, you literally expand your perception. Fear narrows thinking, makes it rigid and binary. Openness creates space for solutions.

Manifestation has value when it's used to inhabit the emotional state that represents your resolution. From a neuroscience perspective, this helps rewire limiting beliefs on a felt level, creating new emotional memories and neural pathways that naturally alter your habits without force.

Living with More Flow

The constant struggle many of us experience is largely the result of forgetting who we truly are. We identify completely with our ego, the narrative shaped by our behaviors and experiences, and become driven entirely by the chase for pleasure and the avoidance of discomfort.

But when you sit in a quiet room alone and feel the presence there, that presence isn't the sum of your experiences. It's not your personality or your history. That presence is consciousness itself.

When you strip away everything, your identity, name, gender, country, relationships, what you're left with is consciousness. And if you and I were to switch personas, nothing would fundamentally change, because we are the same at that deepest level. We are consciousness experiencing itself through different perspectives.

The Practice

In your everyday life, become aware when your need to resist shows up. When you feel discomfort, stress, embarrassment, self-doubt, jealousy. Notice your automated response. Are you avoiding? Distracting? Reacting destructively?

The most important work isn't in journaling prompts or meditation retreats. It's in these everyday moments when you choose to act differently than your patterns would have you act. It's in accepting that you feel stressed or small or embarrassed, and then not following the automated response that has shaped your life up to this point.

This is how change happens. Not by controlling reality or manifesting what you want, but by transforming your internal landscape and allowing life to express itself through you with less resistance.

You are not a person living a life. You are life itself being lived. And there is profound freedom in remembering that truth.