Your Life is a Thought: Time, Consciousness, and the Fabric of Reality

If you have read my book Restorative Beauty, you know the basic argument is that consciousness is not a phenomenon of the brain, but a fundamental aspect of all matter in the universe.

My perspective, better known as panpsychism, conveys the idea that consciousness is the connective tissue that makes life possible in the universe.

If the universe is conscious, then I believe the universe is God.

Since the publication of my book in 2023, I have continued to refine my thinking around the theories I proposed in Restorative Beauty.

In this article, I would like to share some of those thoughts with you. I hope you find them as interesting and inspiring as I do.

If you read the whole article, I would love to hear your thoughts about where these ideas lead you.

The Strange Truth About Time

Most of us think of time like a river: always moving forward, carrying us along whether we like it or not. Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow hasn't arrived. Only the present moment exists.

It feels obvious, even undeniable, but physics tells a very different story.

In 1905, Albert Einstein published his theory of Special Relativity, and one of its most startling conclusions was that time is not fixed.

Albert Einstein during a lecture in Vienna in 1921 (age 42). Portrait by F. Schmutzer (Public Domain).

It bends. It stretches. Two people moving at different speeds will experience time differently. One person's clock will tick more slowly than another's, and both will be correct.

This isn't a trick or an illusion. It has been measured and confirmed with extraordinary precision. The GPS system in your phone has to account for it constantly, or your navigation would drift off by miles each day.

One consequence of Einstein's work is even more unsettling: there is no universal "now."

Two observers moving at different speeds will genuinely disagree about which events are happening at the same moment. Neither is wrong.

This means the present moment, the thing that feels most solid and real about our existence, is not an objective feature of the universe. It is a perspective.

The Block Universe: Everything Already Exists

This leads physicists and philosophers to a view called the Block Universe, or Eternalism. The idea is this: past, present, and future all exist simultaneously, as a single four-dimensional structure.

The universe isn't something that unfolds over time—it exists all at once.

Every moment from the Big Bang to the end of the cosmos already exists as a fixed coordinate in this structure, the way every city on a map exists whether you're driving through it or not.

A visualization of the block universe utilizing Pablo Carlos Budassi's Observable Universe Logarithmic Illustration.

Based on this view, our experience of time “moving” forward is something like running your finger along a page of text.

The words don't come into existence as you read them. They were always there. Your finger (or your conscious awareness) moves through what already exists in full.

This brings us to a question that physics alone cannot answer: if all moments already exist, why do we experience only one at a time? Why does it feel like the present is the only thing that's real?

The Book Analogy: Wholesale vs. Retail Reality

Consider a book. The entire story exists the moment the book is printed: beginning, middle, end, all of it present simultaneously between the covers.

Yet, to experience the story, you have to read it one word at a time, one page at a time, from front to back. You cannot take in the whole book at once.

Once you've finished reading, something interesting happens. The whole story now lives in your mind as a complete idea.

You hold it all at once. You know how the ending reframes the beginning, how the threads connect through the middle.

But if someone asks you to describe the book, you're immediately back to linear storytelling. You cannot transmit the whole story as a single unit, even though that's how it exists in your mind.

You have to deliver it retail—one detail at a time.

This is a remarkably precise picture of our situation in the universe. Reality exists wholesale: all moments, all at once, a complete four-dimensional structure.

But our minds can only experience it retail, one moment at a time because the human brain, shaped by millions of years of evolution, was built for survival, not for perceiving the full architecture of reality.

Our brains, the instrument through which we experience reality, filters the wholesale truth down to a manageable stream of present moments, because that's what a creature navigating a physical world needs.

We are not wrong to experience time as linear. We are simply constrained by the instrument we're using to experience it.

Light at the Foundation of Everything

Here the story takes a remarkable turn, thanks to the work of astrophysicist Bernard Haisch.

Quantum mechanics (the science of the very small) tells us that empty space is not actually empty.

Even a perfect vacuum seethes with fluctuating electromagnetic energy called the Zero-Point Field, or ZPF. This isn't theoretical speculation. The Casimir effect, a measurable force between two metal plates in a vacuum, is direct experimental proof of it.

What is this field made of? Essentially, light. Not visible light, but the same fundamental phenomenon of oscillating electromagnetic energy, present everywhere, at all times, filling the vacuum of space.

Haisch proposed something stunning: the stability of matter itself may depend on the ZPF.

The reason atoms don't simply collapse, the reason matter has inertia and resistance, may be because subatomic particles are continuously interacting with this field.

In other words, the universe isn't a machine that was wound up at the beginning and left to run. It is being actively sustained, moment to moment, by a field of light-like energy.

There is one more detail that connects this directly to everything we've discussed: Einstein proposed that, from the perspective of a light photon, there is no time and no distance.

When a light photon crosses a billion light-years, it experiences zero elapsed time. It leaves and arrives at the same time. In other words, when you travel at the speed of light, time does not exist.  

The Zero-Point Field, which is electromagnetic in nature, therefore exists in a reference frame where the entire history of the universe is simultaneous. It is, in a sense, already operating from outside of time, experiencing the universe wholesale.

Cracks in the Filter: NDEs and the Overview Effect

If our ordinary experience of time is a filtered, retail version of a wholesale reality, what happens when the filter breaks down?

People who have had near-death experiences (NDEs) consistently report something remarkable about time: They do not experience their "life review" as a linear replay, one memory after another.

They describe experiencing their entire life all at once, as a single simultaneous whole. Not sequential. Not retail. Wholesale.

Many describe this “replay” as the most real thing they have ever experienced. More real than ordinary waking life and accompanied by an overwhelming sense of love and interconnection.

Astronauts who have seen Earth from space describe something structurally identical, though they are very much alive.

Astronaut Edgar Mitchell Source: NASA http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/apollo/apollo14/html/s70-55388.html

As I discuss in Restorative Beauty, Edgar Mitchell, during his return trip in space after walking on the moon, described experiencing a feeling of oneness with the universe, of time collapsing, of being held in something vast and loving.

This experience is now so well documented among astronauts that it has its own name: the Overview Effect.

Two radically different triggers—the threshold of death and the view from orbit—produce structurally identical experiences.

Both involve the collapse of linear time. Both involve a sense of universal connection. Both are accompanied by what experiencers consistently describe as unconditional love.

The simplest explanation is that both experiences represent a temporary failure of the filter. A moment where the brain’s normal reduction of reality breaks down, and consciousness briefly touches the wholesale truth.

Is the Universe Made of Consciousness?

This brings us to the deepest question of all, and the one that connects all these threads together.

What if the energy that underlies the fabric of the universe (the Zero-Point Field that Haisch describes as sustaining all matter, moment to moment) is not merely physical energy, but conscious? What if the field is not just light, but aware?

A number of serious philosophers and physicists have argued that consciousness is not something the brain produces, but something more fundamental.

Image by Kiril Ukr from Pixabay

Based on this perspective, the brain doesn’t generate consciousness. It filters consciousness, the way a radio receiver doesn’t generate music but tunes into a signal that was already there.

If this is correct, then what NDE experiencers and astronauts are encountering when the filter drops and time collapses is contact with the actual substrate of reality. A brief, direct experience of what the universe is at its deepest level.

And what they report finding there is love. Not a feeling projected onto the universe, but the actual texture of whatever holds everything together.

The View from the Whole Book

Let’s bring all of this together.

Physics tells us that all moments exist simultaneously, stacked in a four-dimensional structure that is complete and whole, the way a finished book is complete and whole whether anyone is reading it or not.

Our brains, shaped by evolution for survival rather than metaphysical perception, filter this wholesale reality down to a retail stream of present moments. We experience the book one page at a time, even though every page already exists.

The Zero-Point Field, an omnipresent, timeless sea of light-like energy and the mechanism by which this block universe is continuously sustained, is the paper on which every moment of the story is written.

When human beings briefly lose the filter that keeps them reading one word at a time via NDEs or the Overview Effect, they report the same thing: that the whole book exists, that it is held together by something vast and conscious and unconditionally loving.

Many refer to this consciousness as God.

Universes as Thoughts: The Mind Above the Block

If consciousness is the substrate of reality and the Zero-Point Field is its physical signature, a further question emerges: what is the relationship between this higher-dimensional consciousness and the universe it sustains?

One compelling possibility is that our universe represents a discrete thought within a higher-dimensional mind. Another way to put this is that our universe is a thought inside of God’s mind.

All 13.8 billion years of our cosmic history might be the equivalent of a single firing pattern. One thought. One memory in a much larger framework.

This would point to the idea that, similar to the human mind that contains 86 billion neurons, there are billions or trillions of universes within God’s mind. Each complete, each bounded, each containing its own spacetime structure, the way a single neuron’s firing pattern contains a discrete piece of information within the larger network of a brain.

There are numerous theories in physics that support this idea: the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, eternal inflation’s bubble universes, string theory’s vast landscape of possible physical constants.

Moreover, NDEs consistently report encounters with beings who describe our universe as one among many.

What all of these frameworks share is that our universe is one instance within a larger generative structure.

Instantaneous Observation and the Question of Grace

Given that consciousness is the underlying substrate of our reality, what if our universe is nothing more than a thought in God's mind?

If the higher-dimensional mind thinks our universe into existence, then the entire four-dimensional block of our universe is available to it the moment it is thought.

There is no waiting for the story to unfold. The complete history of our universe, from Big Bang to heat death, is simultaneously present to a mind that operates outside the temporal dimension that history occupies.

This is not a new theological intuition. The sixth-century philosopher Boethius argued that God does not foreknow the future the way a prophet does, seeing it before it happens.

Rather, God perceives all of time simultaneously from a position of eternal present, the way a person on a hilltop watches a procession pass below, seeing beginning and end at once not because they can predict it, but because their vantage point is simply higher.

A visualization of Boethius' theology.

If we are a completed thought in God’s mind, then God observes our entire life in an instant from birth to death.

Indeed, every human life would be a data point to be observed, not coldly in the way a researcher regards a cell culture, but in the way a novelist regards characters they have genuinely come to love, whose choices matter, whose suffering costs, whose moments of grace are genuinely beautiful to witness.

This matches the texture NDE experiencers consistently report about God as a being who has been watching with profound care and love.

Existence as Gift: The Theology of Continuous Choice

Here is perhaps the most arresting implication of the entire framework: In the model we have been building, the universe persists because the higher mind continues to think it.

The thought could come and go, meaning our universe could come into existence from start to finish and dissolve in an instant, similar to so many thoughts in our minds.

Instead, God continues to think the thought of our universe so that we remain.

The Zero-Point Field supports this idea. The ZPF is the signal of that continuous thinking. Every moment that signal continues is an active choice.

The universe has no independent existence. It exists because something is choosing, moment-by-moment, to keep it in existence.

That means every morning you have woken up, every person you have loved, every idea that has mattered to you—all of it exists because something decided, in that moment, to keep thinking; to keep the thought going; to sustain the signal rather than let it drop.

Not because it had to; because it chose to.

This is not a cold mechanical fact about physics. It is an act of continuous, moment-by-moment generosity on a scale so vast it has no human analogue.

Every instant of existence is a gift that could have been withheld. The universe’s continued existence is not inertia. It is will.

If the texture of that will is what NDE experiencers report encountering as unconditional love, then the act of keeping the universe in existence is not merely generous, it is loving.

Reality persists because something loves it enough to keep thinking it.

The universe is the ultimate example of grace: the standing decision to keep the thought alive.

It is what the universe is made of, at every moment, all the way down to its smallest parts.

The mystics on the mountain, the astronaut suspended over the Earth, the person at the edge of death who encounters something vast and loving, they are all touching the same thing: the continuous, freely chosen, love-saturated act of a mind that could stop thinking at any moment and simply does not.