The garden

I’m sitting in the garden, next to a pond my father built, surrounded by lush plants my mother planted. It’s early June. I see many shades of green as the plants dance in the gentle wind. Soft white clouds are floating in the blue sky, the sun is pleasantly warming my body. Birds singing, water gurgling, wind whispering through the leaves. It’s a tranquil experience.

Sitting here always helps me think. Observing the patterns of nature is somehow very useful when I want to understand things more deeply. But often I just want to let the experience happen without much thought. Just feel the sun. Hear the birds. See the greens. Experience being.

Thoughts come anyway. I think about the experience. I think about problems. I think about what was and what should be. And as my brain thinks, my mind experiences the thinking. My thoughts manifest as conscious experience too.

In fact, the only reality that I’m directly in contact with is the world of experience: colours, sounds, tastes, smells, touch, emotions, thoughts, and memories as they rise and fade in the present moment.

Here comes the cat. It’s a large, long-haired, black and white Maine Coon, and it’s walking towards me with a cat’s elegance. My eyes see the cat – or more precisely: my eyes receive the sunlight that is reflected from the cat’s surface, transform this information into electrochemical signals that travel to parts of the brain, the brain processes the information, compares it with my memories, and does something mysterious that makes the cat’s colours, form, movement, and my knowledge about the cat appear to me as a conscious experience. The brain models the world and presents the model of the world to the mind.

So, the garden I see is not the garden itself. It is my experience of my brain’s model of the garden. It’s the content of my mind. Transient conscious experience.

Without this experience I wouldn’t feel that I am living. I wouldn’t feel anything. I wouldn’t “know” anything. Even if my body kept sensing and thinking, without experience it wouldn’t matter at all because I wouldn’t exist in any meaningful way.

Not to myself, at least. Being is subjective. To me, the whole world exists only from my own perspective. I can learn and think about other perspectives, but I still experience them from my viewpoint. I can imagine you reading this text, but I can’t experience what you experience, I can’t have your perspective. My whole being is a subjective experience.

And you might come and see me sitting by the pond writing this text, and you think “hm, your existence is not subjective, since I can see you there, sitting by the pond”. And my neighbour will agree with you too: “yep, he’s right there”. So, now you can agree that I exist objectively, and that I’m definitely wrong about subjective being.

And when you come back to the garden 50 years later, you won’t see me there any more, only a little memorial. And you might think “you are gone, and I am here, so now tell me how the whole world is a subjective experience”. But at the same time you know you too will be gone soon, leaving this whole world behind, and think “yes, being is subjective”.

Above the garden the sky is now blue, but at night it’s full of stars. If I had a telescope, I would point it at a random place in the starry sky and see what was there. I might be lucky to find a planet 2 million light-years away with little people living their lives on it. I would wave to them only to realise what I’m seeing was 2 million years ago. Still, we would be connected by the light. The connection makes us part of the same reality even when our existence is shifted in time.

If I look long enough with my extraordinary telescope, could I find a planet that is completely separate from our universe in both space and time? Since there is no connection, such a planet could never have any effect on our universe. Nobody could ever get close to it, nobody would ever know about it, and there would never be any interactions between even the smallest particles of the planet and our universe. Does this planet exist at all?

This reminds me of the famous zen koan about the tree: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

I find the question even more interesting this way: “If a tree falls in a forest and I am not around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

My whole life is a flow of conscious experience. I can’t step out of my mind and see the world beyond consciousness. Let’s say I’m looking at a green leaf. I know what I “see” is the conscious experience of my brain’s model of the leaf. I want to get one step closer to the real leaf beyond consciousness. What can I do? If I look at it with a magnifying glass, I will get the conscious experience of a more detailed picture of the leaf. If I look at my brain processes with some gadget, I will get the conscious experience of my brain’s physical processes. If I learn about the leaf’s internal structure, then I will get the conscious experience of my extended knowledge about the leaf. My efforts are futile. My life is an entirely subjective experience.

From my point of view, the existence of the whole universe depends on my being as consciousness. If I am not there in the forest to hear the sound, who else could experience it for me? If I don’t live this life, who else could live it for me?

To me, this gives clear answers to some of the biggest questions. Why are we conscious? Because this is what being means. This garden manifests as experience. Without consciousness there would be no way for it to show its existence. Without experience, reality could never actually be, just as the isolated planet with no connection to our universe does not really exist at all. Consciousness is our primary universe. Reality exists because consciousness does. Once this idea is understood it feels obvious.

I hear disagreement: “No, this is utterly stupid. You are not the centre of the universe. The world doesn’t depend on you. Why would the Sun exist only if you exist?” But my reasoning is a logical chain. We have a solid foundation: we experience. We can see that our only direct reality is subjective experience. And since our whole being is subjective, there is no reality for us without experience. Therefore, subjective experience of the “I” must stay for reality to exist. This places consciousness at the foundations of reality. The only change we made to the matter-centred model is acknowledging reality as conscious, seeing consciousness universal rather than individual. Our scientific knowledge stays intact, everything still works just like before the inversion.

The notion that the universe is conscious doesn’t mean it is also intelligent. A conscious being might experience the blue sky and hear a bird’s song without having any clue about what those phenomena are, or having any intelligence at all. Consciousness is simply about the capability to experience phenomena. The blue appears. That’s it.

The true nature of reality is apparent in experience. Colours and sounds are not things we observe, but they are the result of observation. Experience is not something to be experienced, because it is already the end result of the process with nothing left to be observed. There is no one sitting in the mind watching the show. So, when I look at the sky and I see blue, the phenomenon of blue appears directly in me, as if consciousness were revealing its own fabric.

At this fundamental level of being the “I” dissolves. The experience that appears is still a bubble that rises from the individual’s viewpoint, but the personal nature of consciousness is an illusion. My body senses the world from a particular point in the garden, so experience reflects exactly this. The cat’s local perspective creates her own bubble of experience. Even though there are two perspectives, both arise within the same consciousness. At the fundamental level, we are not separate.

Near where I sit, next to the pond, roses bloom. One of them stretches so high I can see the blue sky behind its red flower. Swallows cut across the sky. A blackbird sings from a nearby pine, accompanied by other birds in the distance. Meanwhile the cat contemplates in a bed of white flowers. I look down and see ants working diligently. Goldfish move through the pond among the water plants, while frogs watch for insects from the edge. And when I look around, I see green plants everywhere. The garden is their universe. But they are the universe. They are all individuals. And yet, they are all us.