“Atoms are mainly empty space. Matter is composed, chiefly, of nothing.” ~Carl Sagan

“The atoms, or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.” ~Werner Heisenberg

“Observations not only disturb what is to be measured, they produce it.” ~Pascual Jordan

“It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fairly consistent way without reference to the consciousness.” ~Eugene Wigner

    All of a sudden, those primitive people and spiritual wackos don't sound so crazy. On the contrary, they now seem to be very much in tune with the latest in scientific knowledge. In fact, once they had gotten over the shock of finding themselves largely in agreement with the ancients, some of the leading edge scientists started studying some of the ancient writings and learning from them.

    So what science is now saying is that the physical universe gets it's shape from thought and from consciousness. It has no inherent shape of it's own. The thoughts of all of us collectively are largely responsible for shaping the world we live in. So if we are not particularly happy with the world we live in, yelling at it, or hitting it with a stick to make it behave isn't going to help. To get a better world, we have to think a better world, we have to control our thoughts and emotions. It's a hard thing to do, but we can do it.

    I particularly like that last quote from Wigner. He doesn't talk about “consciousness” which could be interpreted as many distinct individual ones, but of “the consciousness”, singular, the one and only consciousness, the consciousness of God. I disagree to some extent with Sagan though. Those empty spaces are not nothing, they are full of energy and spirit.