Nothing is real.

Thread.

Take the most solid object around you. How about a granite countertop?

It’s made of almost nothing. Zoom in and its smooth surface becomes rough and cavernous. Keep zooming in. Everywhere you turn your gaze, “something” will give way to “nothing.”

It’s all empty space.

And this giving way to nothing will continue down to the atomic level, until you get to an atom’s nucleus.

Until then, you’ll never encounter anything solid or “real.”

Why? Because every atom – this “thing” which comprises all other “things” – is mostly empty space.

By mostly, I mean 99.9% nothing.

An atom has a nucleus (which contains almost all the atom’s mass), and an empty electron cloud.

You can’t find a diagram that shows an atom to scale because if you drew the nucleus big enough to see, its cloud would be larger than the room you’re in.

But here’s an analogy.

Imagine we could enlarge an atom’s nucleus to the size of a marble. The full atom then, including the empty space, would be roughly the size of a football stadium.

That’s how empty an atom is. It’s almost literally nothing.

It’s also what all matter is made of.

We are made of nothing.

Would it shock you to hear that if you removed the empty space from a person, you could fit what’s left into a golf ball? It’s technically true.

But the whole truth is more shocking: You could actually fit what’s left into a grain of sand.

In fact, to have an analogy that’s even remotely meaningful, you have to include the entire human race.

If you removed the empty space from all 7.5 billion people on earth, you could fit what’s left over into a smaller than average orange.

we.are.made.of.nothing.

While it’s crazy enough that everything is made of mostly nothing, what do I mean by “everything”?

Well, “everything” is a misnomer here, because it turns out that ~ 95% of the universe’s matter – yes, 95% – is “dark” matter and energy that we cannot see or interact with.

To say this differently: Everything we can see and interact with is just 5% of what the universe apparently is.

Make your peace with that, because we haven’t even started to get into the mind-bending stuff yet.

Let’s talk about consciousness.

Everything you see and experience is you.

Your entire field of consciousness is created inside your brain. External stimuli are converted into sensory experiences which are assimilated into your complete conscious experience.

It’s all created within you; it is you.

People hear this and skim over it as something too abstract. But try to absorb it.

Whatever you experience – a symphony, a sunset, a person, the glow of the milky way – it’s all actually you.

It’s not “out there.” The experience is created in your mind. And that makes it you.

Consciousness creates reality.

When a tree falls in the woods and no one’s there, does it make a sound?

No.

A series of disturbances bother the air, but no sound. Why? Because “sound” can only be experienced by a conscious being. Without one, there is no such thing as sound.

The sun, clouds, stars, galaxies. It is you that give them their form and beauty, and you do it by your conscious observation, and it all happens within your mind.

You’re doing it.

Once you understand that everything you see or experience is in fact you, then the definition of what’s “real” becomes very slippery.

Why?

Our brains filter out more information than we could possibly know.

Think of a full Encyclopedia Britannica set worth of information being ignored with every moment that passes.

This is an evolutionary mechanism to help us survive; we see only what our brains deem relevant.

But we all have different brains, so we all see things slightly (sometimes drastically) different.

What is “real” to one person may not be “real” to another, simply because one’s brain has either ignored information or has interpreted it differently from another’s.

So. To recap.

- We experience less than 5% of what we know exists in the universe.
- That 5% is mostly empty space.
- The “experience” we are talking about is subjective and fully generated within us.

But. We can still go deeper.

Earlier I mentioned “external stimuli” being assimilated by our brains into a conscious experience. It may bring peace of mind to think that at least this external stimuli is “real.”

Surprise: It isn’t.

At least not in the way our conscious experience tells us it is.

Consider the sun. It’s “there,” right?

Probably. But light takes ~8 minutes to travel from the sun to the earth. When you “see” the sun, you’re seeing it as it was 8 minutes ago.

It could’ve exploded 3 minutes ago, and we wouldn’t know for another 5 minutes.

How is this relevant to consciousness? Let’s look at a simple image.

Here we see the sun, the moon, a distant mountain range, a lake, and a grassy field.

Imagine you were there and saw this in real “time.”

You were seeing the sun as it was 8 minutes ago, the moon as it was about a second and a half ago, the lake and mountains as they were almost in that moment, and the grassy field a few Planck lengths earlier than that.

Your consciousness assimilates your full experience into one thing. This oneness is real: It is you. You are the one thing.

But it’s also illusory. The illusion is that it all appears as now, but none of it is now.

And of course it isn’t. How could it be? Let’s think about it.

It may be “now” in your mind, but in terms of reality, it was then.

By the time you consciously experience anything, it is already the past.

This is true of every experience, right down to the immediate. Touch something and you feel it “now,” right?

It seems like it. But no.

The sensation of touching something takes time to unfold.

It involves electricity traveling up your arm, though your neck and shoulder, and into your brain – all of this before you feel anything.

You feel it well after it actually "happened."

Everything you sense as real and now is only a very rough approximation of reality.

But your brain is playing a great trick on you, to convince you otherwise.

Ok, ok so what?

Let’s say you’ve bought into all I’ve said. It’s just what we have to deal with, right? Aside from being interesting chatter, does it really matter to our lives?

Maybe.

We all want to live in the “now,” live only in the present moment.

Many people struggle to do this, since the past and the future seem so real (even though they aren’t).

But as we’ve seen, what we often think of as “now” isn’t quite real either.

Rather: What most people consider to be “now” is actually the past masquerading as the present.

This means that the “now” must be something else, something more than the sum of our current experience.

What is “now”? Your awareness is now.

You don’t experience “now” by seeking it; you experience it by removing everything but it. By being aware that you are aware.

Your awareness in this moment is all that there is. It’s all there ever will be. It’s all there ever was.

This was inspired from thinking about this tweet from @naval https://twitter.com/naval/status/1036008323819102208?s=20