Consciousness First

Notes toward a magical worldview

“THE ALL is MIND; The Universe is Mental.”

“This Principle embodies the truth that “All is Mind.” It explains that THE ALL (which is the Substantial Reality underlying all the outward manifestations and appearances which we know under the terms of “The Material Universe”’ the “Phenomena of Life”; “Matter”; “Energy”; and, in short, all that is apparent to our material senses) is SPIRIT, which in itself is UNKNOWABLE and UNDEFINABLE, but which may be considered and thought of as AN UNIVERSAL, INFINITE, LIVING MIND. It also explains that all the phenomenal world or universe is simply a Mental Creation of THE ALL, in which Mind we “live and move and have our being.” This Principle, by establishing the Mental Nature of the Universe, easily explains all of the varied mental and psychic phenomena that occupy such a large portion of the public attention, and which, without such explanation, are non-understandable and defy scientific treatment.”

—The Kybalion by “Three Initiates,” 1908

Welcome to another edition of Mind, Meaning, and Magic. Some of you may be receiving this newsletter for this first time after reading my recent essay on 2025 as the Year of Magic. If so, welcome aboard! If not, you might want to read that one first to catch up…

In this essay, we’re going to take a deep dive into one of the main pillars of a magical worldview: that reality is fundamentally based in consciousness, rather than matter.

This is an idea seemingly as old as human civilization, if not older. If it’s true, it provides a basis for many other components of a magical worldview: from psi phenomena like telepathy to Near Death Experiences (NDEs), shamanism and other far-out experiences. But before we get there, we need to address the 800-pound gorilla in the room: scientific materialism.

An Age-Old Debate: Idealism vs. Materialism

Materialism is the dominant philosophical paradigm of the modern western world. Materialism holds that everything that exists is made of matter, and that matter is the fundamental substance of reality.

The problem with materialism is that it has a difficult time accounting for the existence of consciousness, resulting in the so-called “hard problem”: how can purely material interactions give rise to subjective, first-person experiences? For example, even if we can perfectly map the neural correlates of a person seeing a flower, why is there a first-person experience of “seeing a flower” at all?

Beyond this fundamental problem, a number of other observed phenomena would seem to challenge the materialist worldview.

I discussed psi phenomena (including the experiments featured in the Telepathy Tapes podcast) in my last newsletter. For now, it’s sufficient to say that if consciousness is confined to a single location, such as a human brain, it’s difficult to explain how two or more individual consciousnesses could communicate with each other without some physical means of connection. And there’s now over 100 years of scientific evidence for psi phenomena like ESP.

Similarly, medical studies on Near Death Experiences (NDEs) such as those documented by Bruce Greyson, MD, often include instances of out-of-body experiences, where individuals see or hear things they should not have been able to experience while unconscious (or even medically dead), and which are later confirmed by third parties.

An example of this is a patient who, while totally unconscious, was later able to report seeing a ketchup stain on the doctor’s tie—as well as details of a conversation the doctor had with a person in another room. (For more on NDEs, check out the excellent

Coming Home

).

If consciousness is limited to physical brains, it’s hard to account for this kind of experience. On the other hand, if consciousness is fundamental, (the principle tenet of idealism) then there’s no reason why it needs to be confined to a particular body or brain, and all kinds of psi phenomena as well as NDEs and other ‘woo’ phenomena become easy to explain.

“Spacetime is Doomed”

The materialist paradigm also struggles to account for some of the findings of modern physics, leading some scientists to conclude that “spacetime is doomed.”

The basic idea is that spacetime as we understand it—the smooth four-dimensional fabric described by Einstein's general relativity—may not be fundamental but rather emerges from more basic underlying principles.

For example, In quantum entanglement, particles can influence each other instantaneously regardless of their separation in spacetime, suggesting spacetime relations may not be fundamental.

Furthermore, the observer effect in physics suggests that particles exist potentially in many locations at once, until a conscious agent (or recording device) makes an observation, causing the particle to appear in one definite place.

Although the role of consciousness in physics is a matter of debate, some scientists are turning to consciousness-first theories in their attempts to resolve these paradoxes.

Bernardo Kastrup, a Dutch double Ph.D. in philosophy and computer engineering, embraces an idealist worldview, arguing that materialism fails to explain consciousness and that consciousness is fundamental. His book Why Materialism Is Baloney covers many of the points in this essay, with supporting arguments from modern physics.

Interestingly (especially for those of us who are into IFS therapy or who have worked with dissociative identity disorder) Kastrup compares our individual, isolated experiences of consciousness to dissociated parts or ego states within a larger, universal consciousness.

Donald Hoffman, an American cognitive scientist, rejects the dominant (but unproven) idea that brain activity causes conscious experience and instead attempts to solve the “hard problem” by proposing that consciousness causes brain activity. In Hoffman’s theory, reality consists of the interaction of conscious agents, and the physical world we experience is something like the graphical user interface of a computer screen, rather than anything ultimately real or objective.

Hoffman argues that we evolved to experience reality not as it actually is, but in a way that helped us navigate reality while maximizing our evolutionary fitness. He’s also developed mathemetical models of how this could work. Here’s a link to his TED Talk.

The Ancient Alternative

In contrast to materialism, ancient philosophies and mystical traditions such as Mahayana Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, Kashmir Shaivism, and Hermeticism tend to agree that consciousness, rather than matter, is fundamental. In other words, matter emerges from consciousness, rather than the other way around.

The Hindu philosophical school of Advaita Vedanta, with its roots in the ancient scriptures known as the Upanishads, holds that the ultimate reality is Atman/Brahman, unchanging universal awareness. The transient, phenomenal world that we experience is described as an ultimately illusory appearance within this universal awareness.

At the same time, the experiences of the phenomenal world are not separate from ultimate consciousness, because they arise within it and are part of it, much like how a wave is not separate from the ocean.

The Advaita philosopher/guru Adi Shankara (8th century CE) famously compared consciousness to a piece of rope that is mistaken for a snake:

"As the rope whose nature is not known is imagined to be a snake, a watercourse, and so on, so the pure Consciousness is imagined to be the world. If the rope is known to be the rope, all the wrong notions about it disappear and the rope alone remains; similarly, if the pure Consciousness is known, all that is superimposed on It (i.e., the world) disappears.” (Shankara, commentary on the Mandukya Upanishad)

The Dzogchen (“Great Perfection”) tradition of Tibetan Buddhism similarly sees phenomenal reality as a kind of illusory display within the infinite space of awareness, often using metaphors like a dream, a rainbow, or a magic show to describe the world we experience. In the following passage, “space” is used as a metaphor for awareness or consciousness:

“Mind itself is a vast expanse, the realm of unchanging space (...)
The universe of appearances and possibilities—
the six kinds of sense objects manifesting in dualistic perception—
appears within the realm of the basic space of phenomena just as illusions do, manifest yet nonexistent.” --Longchen Rabjam, The Basic Space of Phenomena

While the various nondual traditions disagree with each other on important points (such as whether universal awareness is God, or apparent phenomena are something or nothing), they tend to agree that consciousness is fundamental and that the material world we experience appears within consciousness.

This perspective also aligns with our intuitive experience as humans. Right now, the words you are reading are appearing in your consciousness. Your phone or laptop, the room around you, your dog, your spouse, even your own body are similarly appearing in awareness. You might believe that your awareness is only arising as a result of brain activity, but even your brain can only be perceived by and through consciousness. There’s no way around it.

While science attempts to observe and measure the physical world, the world can only be observed by consciousness. Every scientific experiment in history was designed, observed, and recorded by a conscious agent. In fact, there’s no way to definitively prove the existence of the physical world in the absence of consciousness.

One World

Carl Jung’s concept of unus mundus (Latin for “one world”) may provide a bridge between materialist and idealist paradigms. Based on his studies of medieval alchemy and his own observation of synchronicity, (“meaningful coincidence,” a theory he developed in collaboration with Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli) Jung argued for a unified, transcendent reality underlying matter and consciousness or psyche.

In this view, matter and psyche only appear to be separate things, but are actually both aspects of a deeper reality. The concept of unus mundus could help to explain the phenomenon of synchronicity, as well as certain phenomena in physics such as quantum entanglement and non-locality.

Jung saw the the realization of the world’s underlying unity as part of the task of individuation, not only for us as individual humans, but for human civilization:

"The unity of the world is at first purely potential or unconscious, and its gradual realization in the course of time is the meaning of existence and the goal of science and the arts. The multiplicity of the empirical world rests on an underlying unity, and the task set man by God is to realize this unity by transforming multiplicity into unity." (Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis)

Consciousness First

Whether consciousness turns out to be fundamental or an aspect of a deeper, transcendent reality, I believe that materialism is doomed.

Materialism fails to explain the existence of conscious, subjective experiences like the one you’re having right now. It fails to explain the role of consciousness in physics, as well as psi effects, NDEs, and other ‘woo’ but nevertheless scientifically documented phenomena. It fails to explain the experiences of the world’s great mystics and meditators as well as those reported by indigenous people since time immemorial.

In short, I believe that in order to attain a coherent explanation of the reality we inhabit, we should pursue a “consciousness first” approach. A consciousness first approach is also critical to the project of re-enchanting our world, because it allows for a world of infinite possibility. As I wrote in a previous essay:

In order to restore meaning to our lives and prevent or mitigate the existential risks to our world, we need a worldview that sees life as interconnected, not disposable; meaning-rich rather than meaningless; and full of possibilities rather than dead ends.

To that purpose, I propose “Consciousness First” as a guiding principle for our metamodern movement to integrate spirituality, philosophy, and science.

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That’s all for this edition of Mind, Meaning, and Magic. What do you think? Do you lean toward idealism, materialism, or somewhere in between? Have you had experiences that lead you to favor a “consciousness first” worldview, or something different? Let me know in the comments.

Thanks for reading,

Chris Cordry, LMFT

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