Mind-Stuff

"The universe is of the nature of ‘a thought or sensation in a universal Mind’...To put the conclusions crudely—the stuff of the world is mind-stuff. As is often the way with crude statements, I shall have to explain that by ‘mind’ I do not here exactly mean mind and by ‘stuff’ I do not at all mean stuff. Still this is as near as we can get to the idea in a simple phrase."

- Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882 - 1944)

Postscript. I have long been intrigued by the propensity of some of history's great physicists to wax mystical when engaged about the "meaning" of it all (e.g., Stephen Hawking's "fire" that breathes life into our equations, and the "bit" behind John Archibald Wheeler's It-from-Bit:

"It from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom, at a very deep bottom, in most instances, an immaterial source and explanation; that what we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe." (John Archibald Wheeler, 1911- 2008)

For those of you interested in taking a slightly deeper dive into the possible relationship among the ontology of quantum physics, Jungian psychology, and Eddington's thoughts on a "conscious universe," there is also this open access paper that was published a few years ago in the Behavioral Sciences journal, and from which I borrowed the quote that appears above. While the paper makes only an indirect mention of art (and refers to photography even more obliquely), spiritually inclined readers are likely to resonate with its illuminating discussion of how consciousness is entangled with the "mystical mind"; and of how we - as conscious creative beings - both instantiate ourselves within and "see" the universe at large.