‘The Mental Universe’ (Published in NATURE), Reflexive Monism and the nondual view of the Great Perfection
The Question Every Practitioner Is Asked
Sooner or later, every student of the Great Perfection meets the question. It may come from a friend, a colleague, a family member, or from the quiet voice of doubt within: But what about science? Science has given us electricity, an understanding of germs, satellites, and the Internet. It has shown us the age of the universe and the structure of the atom. Surely, the question implies, science has also shown us what reality really is: matter, energy, particles, fields. And surely a teaching that speaks of primordial awareness, of luminous space, of a ground that is mind and not matter, belongs to the age before telescopes.
The question deserves a serious answer, and the answer is surprising. Some of the most respected voices in modern physics and consciousness science have arrived, by their own methods, at the very edge of the view the Great Perfection teaches. In 2005, the journal Nature, the most prestigious scientific journal in the world, published an essay by the Johns Hopkins physicist Richard Conn Henry under the title The Mental Universe. Its conclusion was that the universe is not material at all. And the psychologist Max Velmans of Goldsmiths, University of London, has spent decades developing a theory he calls Reflexive Monism, in which the universe is a single psychophysical whole that becomes conscious of itself through beings like us.
Neither of them is a Dzogchen master, and neither claims to be. They arrive at their conclusions through concepts, arguments and the interpretation of experiments. That is their strength, because it makes their work accessible to the scientific world; and it is also their limit, because the view they describe remains a view held by the conceptual mind. The Great Perfection points to the same reality without imputing it conceptually at all. Between the two lies one of the most fruitful bridges a modern practitioner can walk.
The Mental Universe: What Nature Published
On 7 July 2005, Nature printed a one-page essay by Richard Conn Henry, Professor in the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. Its opening line reads like a sentence from a Yogācāra treatise: the only reality is mind and observations, but observations are not of things. To see the universe as it really is, Henry writes, we must abandon our tendency to conceptualise observations as things.
Henry’s argument is simple and bold. Galileo convinced the world to believe the unbelievable: that the Earth moves around the Sun. The quantum revolution of 1925, Henry says, solved the problem of the universe’s nature and led the brightest physicists to believe something even more unbelievable: that the universe is mental. He calls on the great physicists of the early twentieth century as witnesses. Sir James Jeans wrote that the stream of knowledge was heading towards a non-mechanical reality, and that the universe was beginning to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Sir Arthur Eddington admitted that it is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept that the substratum of everything is of mental character.
Henry then dismantles, one by one, the attempts to rescue a material world. Attempts to preserve an underlying material reality, he says, produce no new physics and serve only to preserve an illusion. The idea that the physical environment alone creates definite reality, without the mind, he regards as an evasion. And he ends with a sentence that has been quoted around the world ever since: the universe is immaterial, mental and spiritual. Live, and enjoy.
He is also honest about where physics stops. Beyond this insight, he writes, physics can no longer help: one may descend into solipsism, expand into deism, or into something else if one can justify it, but one should not ask physics for help. This is a remarkable admission. The physicist leads us to the threshold of the mental universe and then hands us over to philosophy and contemplation, because the tools of physics end there.
The Physics Behind It, Explained Simply
Henry’s conclusion rests on a particular way of reading quantum mechanics, the theory that describes the smallest building blocks of the world. To understand it, one needs no mathematics, only a few strange facts and the different ways physicists have tried to make sense of them.
The strange facts
In the famous double-slit experiment, single particles of light or electrons are fired one at a time at a screen with two narrow openings. If no one checks which opening each particle passes through, they build up on the screen, dot by dot, a pattern of light and dark stripes, the signature of a wave passing through both openings at once. If one installs a detector to see which opening each particle goes through, the stripes vanish, and the particles behave like little bullets passing through one opening or the other. What the particle is seems to depend on what is asked of it.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle adds a second strangeness. The more precisely one knows where a particle is, the less precisely one can know how fast it is moving, and the reverse. This is not a limitation of our instruments. In the standard understanding, a particle simply does not have both a precise position and a precise momentum at the same time.
A third strangeness is entanglement. Two particles that have interacted remain connected in such a way that measuring one instantly fixes what will be found when the other is measured, however far apart they are. In the 1960s John Bell showed that this behaviour cannot be explained by assuming that the particles carried hidden, definite properties all along. Experiments by Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger confirmed Bell’s prediction, and in 2022 they received the Nobel Prize in Physics for it. The comfortable picture of a world made of things with definite properties, waiting to be discovered, did not survive.
The interpretations
The equations of quantum mechanics work with astonishing precision. What they mean is another matter, and here physicists have never agreed.
The Copenhagen interpretation, associated with Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, says that we should not speak of what a particle is doing when no one observes it. Physics describes observations and their relations, not an independent world behind them. Henry quotes John Marburger, scientific adviser to the American president, who explained that in the Copenhagen view there are neither waves nor particles; the wave lies in the spatial pattern of detector clicks, and the particle language comes from our psychological habit of associating localised events with little pieces of stuff. This is the ground on which Henry builds.
The interpretation associated with John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner goes further: the quantum state settles into one definite result only when an observation is registered in a conscious mind. Henry leans towards this view when he cites the Renninger-type experiments. Imagine a particle that may go either left or right, with a detector placed only on the left. If the detector stays silent, we immediately know the particle went right, and its quantum description changes accordingly, although nothing physical touched it. In Henry’s words, the wave function is collapsed simply by your human mind seeing nothing. What changed was knowledge, not matter.
Against these readings stand several attempts to keep a material world. Decoherence explains how interaction with the environment makes quantum effects disappear at everyday scales, and is often presented as making the observer unnecessary; Henry calls it an evasion. The pilot-wave theory of David Bohm keeps real particles guided by a hidden wave. The many-worlds interpretation of Hugh Everett says that every possible outcome happens, each in its own branch of reality. Murray Gell-Mann’s consistent histories speak of alternative histories of the universe; Henry, quoting the playwright Michael Frayn, points out that histories and narratives are themselves human constructs, as subjective as the act of observation.
A century after quantum mechanics was discovered, these interpretations still coexist. Each explains the same experiments; none has been decisively proven. Henry chose the readings in which mind is fundamental, and he chose them openly. Others choose differently. That disagreement, as we shall see, is itself part of the story.
“I Don’t Know”
If Nature published this, there must be something to it. And yet, outside a small circle, one rarely hears physicists say that the universe is mental. The great majority of working scientists continue to speak and think as if the world were made of independent material things. How can both be true?
I put this question to Professor Henry directly:
“Hence it would be of immense value for me to understand why it is that a highly respected scientist of your caliber is able to say with such great confidence (as in your essay) that this is the truth, that observations are not of things, that the universe is not material but spiritual etc., while the mainstream myriad other scientists seem to remain stuck in total material objectivist reductionism? Are they simply ignoring it because it is uncomfortable or because it is hard to develop a career with it?”
His reply was one line:
“Thanks! The answer to your good question is, I don’t know!”
There is something deeply moving in this answer. A physicist who had published in the most prestigious journal of his field that the universe is mental did not pretend to have an explanation for the silence of his colleagues. He did not accuse them, and he did not claim a special insight. He simply said that he did not know.
Perhaps the honest answer is that physics, as physics, does not need to decide. The equations work whatever one believes about what lies beneath them, and most physicists do their work without ever having to ask what an observation is. The question of the mental universe is not a question that an experiment can settle, because every experiment is itself an observation. It belongs, as Henry himself wrote, to the place where physics can no longer help. That place is exactly where the contemplative traditions begin.
Reflexive Monism: A Universe That Knows Itself
Where Henry approaches the question from physics, Max Velmans approaches it from the study of consciousness. His Reflexive Monism, developed over three decades and summarised in the Journal of Consciousness Studies in 2008, offers a picture of the universe that is closer still to the nondual traditions, and Velmans himself acknowledges that, in one form or another, it has been present in human thought for more than three and a half thousand years, from the Upanishads onwards.
What Velmans says
Velmans begins from a simple observation. When you look at a cat, you do not experience a picture of a cat inside your head and, separately, a cat outside. You experience a cat, out there in the room. The world you see around you, the world we normally call the physical world, is in fact the world as experienced: it is part of consciousness, not apart from it. The neural processes in the brain produce an experience that is projected, in Velmans’ technical sense, into the space where things appear to be. He calls this perceptual projection, and he treats it as an observable fact rather than a theory.
From this he builds his monism. The universe, he argues, is made of one fundamental stuff, which can appear in two ways: as physical when viewed from outside, and as conscious experience when lived from within. The brain of another person appears to me as neural tissue; to that person, the same processes appear as a living world. Neither aspect is reducible to the other. Velmans calls this ontological monism combined with epistemological dualism: one reality, known in two irreducible ways. And he gives the theory its name because the universe, differentiating from a primal undifferentiated state into beings with perception, becomes conscious of itself through them. Reality is reflexive: it turns back upon itself and knows itself.
Sāṅkhya in a modern key
Read with Indian eyes, Velmans’ theory has a remarkable lineage. His universe unfolding from a primal undifferentiated state into both mental and physical forms recalls the Sāṅkhya account of prakṛti, the unmanifest ground, avyakta, which evolves into intellect, ego-sense and mind on the one hand and into the subtle and gross elements on the other. In Sāṅkhya, too, the mental instruments and the material world arise from the same source and are of the same stuff. What Sāṅkhya sets apart is the puruṣa, the pure witnessing consciousness that never mixes with prakṛti. Velmans does not keep this separation. For him, the knowing and the known arise from one psychophysical ground. In that sense he has taken the Sāṅkhya cosmology and dissolved its final dualism.
Yogācāra in a modern key
His analysis of perception follows another Indian path. The Yogācāra masters Asaṅga and Vasubandhu taught that what we take to be an external world is the appearance of consciousness itself, vijñaptimātra, mere representation, and that every cognition has two aspects: the appearance of the object and the appearance of the knower. Velmans’ claim that the phenomenal world is part of experience, not something outside it, is a modern form of this insight. His perceptual projection is close to the Yogācāra description of how consciousness casts its own object-aspect outward and then takes it to be an independent thing.
Yet Velmans stops at an important point. He keeps what he calls the noumenal cat, the thing in itself that exists whether anyone observes it or not, and he calls his position critical realism. In Buddhist terms this places him nearer to the Sautrāntikas, who held that we know external objects only through their images in consciousness, than to the Yogācāras, who denied the external object altogether. He is a bridge-builder between the scientific world and the contemplative one, and like every bridge, he stands with one foot on each shore.
The View of the Great Perfection
Henry says that the universe is mental. Velmans says that it is one psychophysical reality that knows itself in two ways. The Great Perfection says something that sounds very similar and is in truth more radical: there is one ground, empty in essence, luminous in nature, unobstructed in its responsiveness, and everything that appears, whether we call it mind or matter, is its self-display.
Samantabhadra and Samantabhadrī
The tantras of the Great Perfection express this through the image of Samantabhadra in union with Samantabhadrī. Samantabhadra is awareness, rigpa, the knowing that has never been obscured. Samantabhadrī is the expanse, dbyings, the open space in which everything appears. They are depicted in union not because two beings meet, but because awareness and space were never separate. There is no awareness without the space in which it knows, and no space that is not luminous with awareness.
Velmans’ two aspects, the subjective and the objective, consciousness and matter, are a conceptual image of exactly this union. What he calls the psychophysical ground is close to what the Heart Essence calls the ground, gzhi. What he calls the reflexive universe becoming conscious of itself is close to what the tantras call self-knowing awareness, rang rig, the ground recognising its own display. Where Velmans speaks of a universe that differentiates and then knows itself through its parts, the Great Perfection speaks of the ground shining forth as the ground-manifestation, gzhi snang, and either recognising that display as its own, as Samantabhadra did, or failing to recognise it, as beings did.
The five lights and the five elements
The Dzogchen tantras describe how the physical world arises with unusual precision. The radiance of the ground shines as five lights, the natural colours of its spontaneous presence. When these lights are recognised as the self-display of awareness, they are the five wisdoms and the five Buddha families. When they are not recognised, when awareness takes its own radiance to be something other than itself, the lights solidify. They become the five elements, space, air, fire, water and earth, and with them the body, the senses and the whole material world. Matter, in this view, is light that has forgotten it is light.
This is the deepest answer to the dualism that both Henry and Velmans try to overcome. There is no need to explain how mind arises from matter, or how matter affects mind, because both are the same radiance seen in two ways: recognised, it is wisdom; unrecognised, it is the elements and the deluded mind that grasps them. Henry is right that observations are not of things. Velmans is right that consciousness and the physical world are two aspects of one reality. The Great Perfection adds what neither of them says: that this nondual reality is primordially pure, that it has never been anything other than awareness and its radiance, and that its recognition is liberation.
The Decisive Difference: Imputed and Non-Imputable
If the views are so close, what separates them? Not their content, but their mode. The mental universe of Henry and the reflexive universe of Velmans are views held by the conceptual mind about reality. The view of the Great Perfection is not a view about reality at all. It is the recognition of reality by itself, before and beyond any concept.
Science works, and must work, in the realm of what the Buddhist philosophers call the conceptually imputed, kun brtags. It forms hypotheses, defines quantities, builds models and tests them against observation. Even when it concludes that the universe is mental, it holds that conclusion as a concept: the concept of mind, applied to the concept of universe. Henry’s mental universe is still an object of thought. Velmans’ psychophysical ground is still a theoretical posit. This is not a weakness; it is what science is. A science that abandoned concepts would no longer be science.
The Great Perfection works in the realm of the non-imputed and the non-imputable. Rigpa is not the concept mind. Primordial purity is not the concept emptiness. The union of Samantabhadra and Samantabhadrī is not a model of reality that one believes. It is what is recognised when the activity of conceptual imputation itself is seen through, when the mind that builds models rests in its own nature and finds that it was never other than the space in which models appear. A physicist can believe that the universe is mental and still live in complete duality, grasping at self and other. A practitioner who recognises rigpa may never have heard of quantum mechanics and yet live in the very nonduality that physics only points to.
Henry wrote that we must abandon our tendency to conceptualise observations as things. The Great Perfection goes one decisive step further: we must abandon our tendency to conceptualise observations at all, including the observation that the universe is mental. When that tendency is released, what remains is not a new theory. It is awareness, luminous and empty, recognising its own display. That is the difference between a door and the room it opens into.
The Bridge: Nāgārjuna’s Two Truths
If science works only with the imputed and the Great Perfection only with the non-imputable, must they remain strangers? The Noble Nāgārjuna gave the answer eighteen centuries ago, and it is the most elegant bridge between science and contemplation ever built.
In the twenty-fourth chapter of the Root Verses on the Middle Way, the Noble Nāgārjuna writes that the teaching of the Buddhas relies on two truths: the conventional truth of the world and the ultimate truth. Those who do not understand the distinction between them do not understand the profound meaning of the Buddha’s teaching. Without relying on the conventional, the ultimate cannot be taught; and without realising the ultimate, nirvāṇa cannot be attained.
Science belongs wholly to conventional truth. That is not a demotion but a dignity. Conventional truth is the truth by which bridges stand and medicines heal, by which we know that the Earth goes around the Sun and that two entangled photons will show correlated results. Within the conventional, science is the most refined instrument humanity has ever made for distinguishing what works from what does not. A practitioner of the Great Perfection has every reason to honour it, study it and be moved by it. And when, within the conventional, science itself arrives at the edge of materialism, as Henry and Velmans have done, it is fulfilling the Noble Nāgārjuna’s principle: the conventional, followed honestly, points beyond itself.
The ultimate truth is not a second world behind the first. It is the nature of the conventional itself, seen without imputation. The Noble Nāgārjuna teaches that the two truths are not two realities but two ways of seeing one reality, and that in realisation they are found to be inseparable. The Great Perfection speaks of the same inseparability as the union of appearance and emptiness, of Samantabhadra and Samantabhadrī. Before that realisation, the practitioner lives within the conventional and can appreciate science fully. After it, science does not lose its value; it is simply seen for what it is, the luminous play of mind measuring its own appearances.
Our Root-Guru has always held science in deep appreciation, and this is no paradox. Love of the conventional and realisation of the ultimate do not compete. The more clearly one sees that phenomena are empty, the more freely one can delight in how precisely they appear.
Nāgārjuna’s Prediction
Science asks one thing of every theory: that it make predictions that can be tested. Spiritual teachings, it is said, cannot do this, and so they cannot be taken seriously as knowledge. The objection is fair. But let us conduct a small thought experiment.
Suppose the scientific method had existed in second-century India when Nāgārjuna composed the Root Verses on the Middle Way. Suppose someone had taken his central insight, that no phenomenon possesses its own independent, fixed nature, svabhāva, and that everything exists only in dependence on other things, and turned it into a prediction about the physical world. The prediction would have run like this: however far human beings investigate matter, they will never find a final, independent, observer-free object with fixed properties of its own. Even in two thousand years, the ultimate nature of objective reality will remain open.
That prediction has been tested, and it has held.
When physicists looked closely enough at light and electrons, they found that whether these behave as waves or as particles depends on how they are observed: the double-slit experiment shows a phenomenon without a fixed nature of its own. When Heisenberg formulated his uncertainty principle, he showed that a particle does not possess both a precise position and a precise momentum at once; its properties are not simply there, waiting to be read off. When Bell’s theorem was tested by Aspect, Clauser and Zeilinger, it was shown that particles do not carry independent, local properties that fix in advance what we will find. And a full century after the birth of quantum mechanics, the physicists themselves still do not agree on what the theory says about reality: Copenhagen, many worlds, pilot waves, consistent histories, decoherence and more continue to stand side by side. Even among the physicists who have thought most deeply about these questions, some have turned to Nāgārjuna by name; the physicist Carlo Rovelli, one of the founders of loop quantum gravity, devoted part of his book on quantum mechanics to the insight that things exist only in relation to one another, and named the Root Verses as one of his inspirations.
None of this proves the Middle Way. Physics cannot prove emptiness, any more than it can prove the mental universe. But it is a strikingly accurate prediction. An insight reached through contemplation and logic in second-century India would have told us, correctly, that the search for a final material substance would end not in a thing but in relations, possibilities and uncertainty. Few scientific predictions have held for eighteen centuries.
So, What About Science?
The next time someone asks, But what about science?, there is no need for defensiveness, and no need to claim that physics proves the Dharma. The honest answer is richer than either.
Science, followed to its own frontier, has stopped finding things. A physicist writing in Nature concluded that observations are not of things and that the universe is mental. A consciousness scientist concluded that the world we see is part of experience, and that the universe becomes conscious of itself through us. A century of quantum physics has shown that the objects we take to be independent have no fixed nature of their own, exactly as the Noble Nāgārjuna would have predicted. And when asked why so few of his colleagues follow these conclusions, one of the bravest of these scientists replied simply that he did not know.
These are doors, and they are open. Through them the conceptual mind can glimpse what the Great Perfection teaches: that the ground is nondual, empty and luminous; that awareness and space were never two; that the elements are light, and that the light is awareness. But a door is not yet the room. Science can lead to the threshold of nonduality as an idea. Only recognition can cross it.
There is a beautiful symmetry in this. The physicist hands the question over at the point where physics can no longer help. The Great Perfection receives it at precisely that point, not with a better theory, but with an invitation: look at the one who is asking. In that looking, the mental universe of the physicist and the reflexive universe of the psychologist are no longer conclusions to be believed. They are what one already is.
Science and the Great Perfection need not be rivals. Within the conventional truth, science deserves our deepest admiration. Within the ultimate, there is nothing left to measure, because the measurer has recognised itself as the space in which every measurement appears. Live, and enjoy, Professor Henry wrote. The tantras would add only this: and recognise.
