To all appearances reality is dual. The objective world exists "out there" to be measured, but its existence is known only through subjective experience, which is "in here." Both worlds need each other, and to be trapped in only one is unsatisfactory. The world turns into a dream only if you are conscious of your inner feelings, moods, sensations, and images. Yet if you rely only upon the physical world, you may wind up with meaningless data that don't provide any link to what is truly important in everyday life. This point is easy enough to see, but joining the two worlds into wholeness isn't easy.
The two worlds "in here" and "out there" are either split for a reason or it just happened that way. If it just happened that way, fine. Science will go on, and so will subjective experience, and the two will uneasily meet somewhere in the brain. But if "in here" and "out there" are split for a reason, that's a new story. There have been many versions of the story so far. In many cultures, there was once a Golden Age that was innocent, pure, and untroubled (in other words, whole) while now we live in a fallen age, and our separation from God or the gods has resulted in a fragmented world. Good is forced to come to terms with its opposite, evil, and therefore a reality of light and darkness envelops us. Needless, to say, such a story has not been satisfactory in a rational, scientific age. It persists as myth and religion, which billions of people still prefer to science.
We come closer to a rational story via complementarity, because when complementarity holds that opposites have a hidden unity at the limit of observation (revealed through mathematics), a complete view of quantum physics is satisfied. An opposite pair light wave and particle arise from the same source, and even if this source is beyond the five senses, lying in some invisible virtual domain, quantum mechanics can link the opposites and thus make every measurement turn out right. By extension, can we say the same about "in here" and "out there"? Do they spring from a common source?
But this argument, which seems so common-sensical, is fallacious. The principle of complementarity tells us that "in here" and "out there" aren't just compatible; they are necessary to each other, intertwined aspects of the whole. You can't have one without the other. Grasping this fact is hard. Classical Western science, from the ancient Greeks through Newton and beyond, was based on atoms, molecules, and other physical "stuff" that exists on its own. But just as there cannot be particles without waves; "out there" needs consciousness, "in here." This is a participatory universe, and leaving the participant out cannot be valid. In a fundamental sense, the universe is human, because we aren't just isolated observers like kids pressing their noses to the window of a bakery shop. The three-part model needs all three parts: observer, observed, and process of observation.
Many thinkers have tried to wriggle out of this apparent trap, but without success. Our position is that their denial serves only to keep the human mind encaged, creating further and further problems for our collective and individual selves. We entitled this series of posts "Can Reality Set Us Free?" to underscore that by its very nature, the human mind is not limited, not even by its own short-sighted concepts. Boundaries and edges, the things that separate one thing from another, are always conceptual, manmade. Where does your body stop? From the everyday level of scale, your boundary is your skin. From the atomic level of scale you and the planet are linked -- every atom in your body comes from water, earth, and air taken in from the planet. From this perspective, human beings don't liver on the planet, we are the planet. Reality itself is a seamless flowing process where all phenomena are linked. There are no actual boundaries.
But the most liberating boundary that anyone can break free of is the one that encircles the mind, like a fence around a corral, so that there is "my" mind and "your" mind (like two different horses inside the corral), and using a bigger fence, the "human" mind, which is so self-enclosed that outside the corral there is "no" mind. Several of the quantum pioneers, such as Planck and Schrödinger, had enough clarity to see that this boundary, too, is manmade. There is only one consciousness, in fact, and it must be basic to creation.
Reality, then, is boundless, immeasurable, and conscious. It cannot be otherwise if the three-part model and complementarity are correct, which has been demonstrated over and over.
