Roberta Grimes

All Reality is Consciousness

Posted by Roberta Grimes • February 08, 2025 • 1 Comment
Quantum Physics, Understanding Reality

… He can turn the tides and calm the angry sea.
He alone decides who writes a symphony.
He lights every star that makes the darkness bright.
He keeps watch all through each long and lonely night.
He still finds the time to hear a child’s first prayer.
Saint or sinner calls and always finds him there.
Though it makes him sad to see the way we live,
He’ll always say, “I forgive”
– Richard Mullan & Jack Richards, from “He” (1969)

What you and I experience as conscious awareness is in fact all that exists. In all things and in every aspect of reality, consciousness is everything. It is both the sculptor and the clay. Or, as my darling Thomas so well put it to me, long before I could have understood who that tall stranger in the long blue robe who spoke to me and taught me in the empty lot beside my childhood home actually was: everything there is or there ever can be is just a thought in the mind of God.  He told me that there never has been and there never can be anything else.

The fact that consciousness is all there is was first discovered by the earliest quantum physicists around the start of the twentieth century. And it was a major reason why mainstream science so resolutely drove itself off the rails into materialism at about the same time, in what the scientific community imagined was its own defense. I first discovered this crisis of science just in passing, as I was browsing in used-bookstores and reading popular-science magazines and casually discovering so much wonderful turn-of-the-twentieth-century afterlife evidence. It is easy to see why Max Planck, who won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics as the father of quantum mechanics, must have inadvertently panicked the whole field of traditional physics when he began to go public with his discoveries! If you have not yet done it, you ought to read the ultimate quantum-physics-for-dummies book, Quantum Enigma by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner. Quantum physics makes sense, and their book will help you to understand why it is so easy for consciousness to be all that exists. But our great friend Max Planck really did a number on Newtonian physicists when in 1931 he said, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness! Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” 

Wow, that was pretty definitive, was it not? By then, the mainstream scientific gatekeepers understood that what they truly were protecting their precious against was the possibility that some scientist might inadvertently claim to have found the God of the Christians and of the Hebrews. So they clamped down on enforcing their materialist dogma ever more strictly as the twentieth century wore on.

And, sure enough, Max Planck at least did indeed come to understand the ever deeper implications of what he had found. In 1944 he said, “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.” Bingo! God had at last been found. So then, how far does this penetration of consciousness go? What about animals? Are they conscious, too? Well, of course they are. Even the birds at the feeder outside my window will look in through the glass and cock their heads at me with what clearly is individual awareness. That has to be true of birds, when it is also true even of plants!

The most transformational book that I ever have read is The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. I first read that amazing book in 1973, its year of first publication, and I didn’t realize until years later the way that book had helped to form a basis for my fifty years of afterlife research. And it primed me to accept the evidence that what we experience as human consciousness truly is universal among all living things! The fact that such a seminal masterwork which is so fundamental to our understanding of life has been so steadfastly ignored by mainstream scientists because it doesn’t fit their predetermined materialist narrative was my first clue that the mainstream scientific emperor is sadly altogether naked. And that scientific emperor appears now likely to remain naked, not only for the rest of your life and mine, but perhaps naked even for our children’s and our grandchildren’s lifetimes as well.

The Tompkins and Bird book’s fundamental insight is that plants are conscious, they mentally communicate with one another, and they also mentally communicate with us. And what an amazing revelation that is! Consider only the work of Cleve Backster, who in the nineteen-sixties was one of America’s leading experts on lie detectors. One morning in 1966, Mr. Backster decided on a whim to use his office plant as an experimental subject. He attached a galvanometer to one of its leaves. And, what do you know? He found that the plant in his office was reacting very much as a person would react as it sat there contentedly in its pot having its transient and amazingly human-like thoughts. Backster soon found that the most extreme reactions in his plant were produced when he decided to burn one of its leaves. Its frantic reaction was less if Backster only imagined burning the leaf, without actually intending to do the plant harm. His plant would react, too, if other living things in the room were mentally threatened with harm. And Backster and other researchers later demonstrated that these strong reactions are present even in living fragments of plants. My goodness, plants can read the minds of their own particular keepers even from a distance of miles away! There is so much more to Backster’s work that mainstream science still ignores. These amazing discoveries are now nearly sixty years old, and they are all by themselves sufficient reason for you to pick up and read one of the most amazing and most unjustly ignored books in human history.  

Here is an astonishing video that gives you some sense of just how sensitive and mutually cooperative, and even how oddly aware and almost human-like plants actually are as they work and live together in their wild communities, right there in our own backyards. Please do take the time to watch this video, since I cannot do it justice. I only can tell you that after you have watched it, you will forever after see each patch of forest as a thriving community of sentient individuals in communication with one another, sharing their resources and caring for their young. You will never look at any plant of any size in the same way again.

I spend my days working on my laptop computer in a big bow window as part of a supportive community that consists mostly of houseplants, both large and small. Of course, this way of life is healthy for all of us. Plants exhale oxygen and they breathe in carbon dioxide, while people do the reverse; and it has lately been shown that plants also help to improve indoor air quality in tightly-constructed modern homes. And surprisingly, these plants in my mixed person-plant community actually miss me when I am gone! I still practice business law in Massachusetts, and I travel to see my clients for a week at a time several times a year. I leave my plants well-watered; but still, no one comes into my office for that week, so, depend on it: some of the smaller plants will drop a leaf or two whenever I am away. Is that loneliness? Or is it worry? Should I ask my family to come in here every so often and talk to the plants while I am gone?

Oh yes, what we experience as human consciousness is the base creative force, and it is governed by what we experience as emotion.  Consciousness is all that objectively exists, which means that it should not really surprise us to find that every living thing is in some way conscious. And in fact, that may also be true of even what we consider to be non-living things. If Consciousness is the base creative force and all that exists, then perhaps even things like rocks might also be in some way conscious, too? One of the things that we generally do when we first return to our eternal home is to go sightseeing, and often on random distant planets. After all, there is neither time nor distance in the afterlife, so we can easily travel to very faraway places. I recall long ago reading an account by someone who had been enjoying doing his post-death touring, and he talked about having visited a planet where the life was not carbon-based, but instead it was silica–based. That entire planet teemed with life! But you didn’t realize that at first anything at all on the planet that he was visiting was alive, because it all moved so ve-e-e-ry sl-o-o-wly. And, you know, come to think of it now, the rocks all around us on planet earth are moving ve-e-e-ery sloo-o-owly too-o-o….

When we fully understand that Consciousness is both the sculptor and the clay, and truly nothing else exists, it does not surprise us at all to learn that life is a core attribute of consciousness. It is difficult to fully understand everything that this most fundamental sentence of all Apex sentences actually means, although, wow, we are coming to realize more and more completely some of what it means. Even the bit that we can see is boggling!

I have been an eager science hobbyist for decades. So I can tell you with confidence that all through the latter part of the twentieth century and the early part of the twenty-first, traditional scientists have been sure that they were just about to figure out how life began. The theory on which most bets have been placed has long been that lightning must have hit just the right random mix of chemicals in some primordial pool, and Presto! We had life. So they would try to replicate this  or that mix of chemicals and then zap it in their laboratories. But the problem with solving this most difficult of all scientific  problems was figuring out how that spark of life, even if it might have begun this way, could have maintained itself for long enough to have created a self-sustaining living cell with all that cell’s necessary components. Those popular-science magazine articles of late are far less common and not nearly so hopeful.

But my dear ones, those materialist scientists’ primary problem lies in the fact that they long ago turned what should have been a field of unrestricted inquiry into the closed-minded religion of atheism. And what good is that to anyone? They still even today are forcing working scientists to spend endless effort trying to find a source of consciousness inside the human brain, where of course no such thing ever will be found. Scientists are still stuck with their foolish “fundamental materialist dogma,” even a hundred and twenty years after a few panicked gatekeepers first adopted it as a stopgap measure to try to protect quantum physicists from inadvertently finding the religionists’ God, they are forced to come up with endless arbitrary nonsense. Like, for example, a “Big Bang” as their frankly arbitrary explanation for the origin of reality, even though of course any reasonably intelligent twelve-year-old child can simply ask, “So, what came before that?” And the scientists are undone. That child’s excellent question is one that no materialist scientist can honestly answer. Yet even now, and based on  no real evidence, materialist scientists still are forced to  defend  the baseless proposition that consciousness is just an ephemeral nothing.  

My dear ones, Consciousness is all that exists. That fact is by now established beyond all doubt. And since consciousness is both timeless and eternal, and life is a fundamental property of consciousness, once mainstream science as a discipline stops adhering to the silliness of atheism, and it frees all scientific researchers to at last do truly open-minded scientific research, then in short order the answers to every question that they even now still have to fudge will be found. In non-time and non-space, all reality lies in the simple, underlying truth that consciousness underlies it all! 

… He can grant a wish or make a dream come true.
He can paint the clouds and turn to gray the blue.
He alone is there to find a rainbow’s end.
He alone can see what lies beyond the bend.
He can touch a tree and turn the leaves to gold!
He knows every lie that you and I have told!
Though it makes him sad to see the way we live,
He’ll always say, “I forgive.”
– Richard Mullan & Jack Richards, from “He” (1969)

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)