For years I’ve had this idea about the ultimate nature of reality: consciousness precedes reality. As I’m not a philosopher (yet), I wasn’t exactly sure what that really meant. My conception of it was that reality as we know it requires humans to know it. Without human consciousness, reality looks very different. What is reality to a fly, a kangaroo, or a tuna? Certainly not the reality we know.

Now, in an interview in the most recent issue (Spring/Summer 2010) of the unbelievably great magazine EnlightenNext, consciousness researcher Stuart Hameroff, MD, puts forth a theory that a “fundamental field of protoconscious experience has been embedded all along—since the big bang…”

According to Hameroff, other renowned thinkers such as Betrand Russell, William James, and Baruch Spinoza, have put forth this same basic theory, known as neutral monism. “Neutral monism says that there’s one common underlying entity that gives rise to, on the one hand, matter, and on the other hand, mind.”

So even though I never read any of those philosophers, I had the same intuitive sense of the universe; the notion that reality is a transactional process between matter and mind. Perhaps we are necessary for the protoconsciousness embedded in the universe to manifest, just as humans are a particular configuration of the same sub-atomic particles that make up everything else in the 4% – 5% of universe we live in—the part that isn’t dark matter or dark energy. Or maybe protoconsciousness is part of dark matter and dark energy that doesn’t yet exist for us, because we haven’t yet gotten our minds around it.