Are Mystics and Physicists Describing the Same Universe?

How information, measurement, and the act of knowing map onto humanity's oldest spiritual texts with unsettling precision.

Mar 06, 2026

For centuries, mystics and physicists have been describing reality in radically different languages. But as modern physics digs deeper into the nature of information, observation, and consciousness, something unsettling has begun to appear: the structure of the universe described by mathematics increasingly resembles the structure described in humanity’s oldest spiritual traditions.

When I wrote #2084: The BIOMAN Chronicles, I didn’t set out to map physics onto spirituality. I was writing a sci-fi novel about a young man who discovers that a plant-based brew can open his mind to quantum realities and the nature of his true self. But to make that story work, I had to sit with a question I’ve been asking since I was a child: why do the deepest insights of modern physics keep sounding like the oldest spiritual traditions on Earth?

Kirkus called the book “a thrilling superhero journey that remains smart and thoughtful,” and noted how it draws on correspondences between ancient philosophies and modern physics. That was the thread. The novel let me pull it for 250 pages. But the parallels ran deeper than any single story could hold. This series of essays is my attempt to follow that thread further, to lay out the structural convergence between physics and mysticism with the care it deserves, without reducing either side to the other.

Because there’s a conversation that physics and theology have been circling for centuries without quite having. Both sides are nervous about it. But the structural parallels between modern physics and ancient contemplative traditions are too precise and too consistent across independent cultures to be coincidental.

Something real is being described from two different directions.

Maximum Possibility, Zero Information

Nearly every spiritual tradition begins the same way. Before creation, there is total undifferentiated unity. In Genesis, formless void. In Hinduism, Brahman without qualities. In Kabbalah, Ein Sof, infinite undifferentiated light. The Tao that cannot be spoken.

Now here’s what information theory describes. A state of perfect symmetry is a state of zero information. Information, in the precise sense Claude Shannon defined it, is the resolution of uncertainty. If everything is the same everywhere, there are no questions to ask and no answers to distinguish. Maximum symmetry means maximum possibility and zero actuality. Nothing has been specified. Nothing has been selected.

The pre-creation state of the spiritual traditions and the pre-symmetry-breaking state of the early universe are the same condition described in different languages. Pure potential. No distinctions. No information.

But here’s a question most physicists don’t ask: what was that primordial state made of? The default assumption is that it was energy, fields, some physical substrate that existed and then broke into complexity. Donald Hoffman would say that assumption is the deepest error in modern science. That we’ve been confusing the interface for the thing itself from the very start.

The Desktop Is Not the Computer

Hoffman’s work begins with a simple, devastating observation. Evolution did not shape our perceptions to show us reality. It shaped them to keep us alive.

His fitness-beats-truth theorem, proven using evolutionary game theory, demonstrates that organisms tuned to perceive objective reality are consistently outcompeted by organisms tuned to perceive fitness payoffs. In simulation after simulation, truth goes extinct. What survives is useful illusion. Our perceptions are not a window onto the world. They are a species-specific interface, like a desktop on a computer. The icons on your screen are real in the sense that they correspond to something. But they look nothing like the electrical currents and magnetic states they represent. They were designed to hide that complexity, not to reveal it.

Space and time, on Hoffman’s account, are the format of our desktop. Objects are icons. The entire physical world as we perceive it, including our brains, is the interface, not the reality behind it.

This matters for the mystics-and-physicists conversation because it reframes the opening question. If spacetime is a species-specific interface, then the “undifferentiated unity” the mystics point to isn’t some physical state that existed 13.8 billion years ago and then broke apart. It’s what’s behind the interface right now. Always has been. Always will be. The mystics weren’t describing a cosmological past. They were describing a reality that our perceptual desktop hides from us in every moment.

Creation as Measurement

In Genesis, every act of creation is an act of separation. Light from darkness. Waters above from waters below. Before each division, the two things existed without distinction. After, they are separate and named. Each act of naming creates information. Where there was one undifferentiated thing, now there are two. A bit has been written into the structure of reality.

In quantum mechanics, this logic is explicit. Before measurement, a quantum system exists in superposition. All outcomes coexist. When measurement occurs, the superposition collapses into a single definite state. Possibility becomes actuality. Information is created.

Hoffman takes this further. In standard physics, we assume the measurement reveals a pre-existing reality, or at best, that the math is agnostic about what’s doing the measuring. Hoffman’s framework of conscious realism says consciousness is what’s doing the measuring. Not brains. Not instruments. Consciousness itself. Brains and instruments are icons on the interface. The conscious agent is what’s behind the icon, doing the perceiving.

The Kabbalistic tzimtzum captures this with startling precision. God, who is infinite and fills all reality, contracts. Creates a void within the infinite, and into that void the finite world emerges. Infinity has no information because it contains no distinctions. The act of contraction creates a boundary. Inside and outside. The first bit. Creation begins not with an addition but with a limitation.

If Hoffman is right that consciousness is fundamental and spacetime is its interface, then tzimtzum isn’t a metaphor. It’s a description. Consciousness, originally unbounded, limits itself to generate a field of perception. The interface boots up. Objects and space appear. Not because they were already there waiting to be found, but because a conscious agent has constructed a desktop on which to operate.

The Fall as the Price of Knowing

Most traditions include a fall from original unity. Always framed with ambivalence. Tragic because unity is lost. Necessary because without it, nothing exists. The undifferentiated source cannot know itself without becoming something other than itself.

Information theory gives this the same structure. You cannot have information without distinction, and you cannot have distinction without breaking symmetry. A universe of perfect unity contains zero information. Nothing is known because there is nothing to know.

Hoffman adds a layer that most information theorists miss. The fall isn’t just into multiplicity. It’s into the illusion that multiplicity is fundamental. When consciousness constructs its perceptual interface, it takes the interface to be reality. We don’t just see separate objects. We believe the separation is what’s actually there. The Fall, in Hoffman’s framework, is not just the creation of distinctions. It’s the forgetting that we created them.

This is precisely what the Hindu tradition calls Maya. Not illusion in the sense of “nothing is real,” but illusion in the sense of mistaking the display for the thing being displayed. The veil isn’t that the world doesn’t exist. The veil is that we take the format of our perceptions to be the structure of reality itself. Hoffman has given Maya a mathematical backbone.

The Scattered Word

In Kabbalah, the Shevirat HaKelim describes divine light shattering the vessels meant to contain it. Sparks scatter into matter, trapped in shells. The task of humanity is tikkun olam: gathering the sparks and returning them to their source.

Translate this into information. The original unified signal fragments into scattered, isolated bits. Each carries a piece of the original pattern but is disconnected from the whole. The information exists but has lost its coherence.

Hoffman’s conscious agent theory gives this a formal structure. He proposes that reality consists of a vast network of conscious agents, each with its own perceptual interface, each perceiving the others not as they are but through the compressed icons of its own desktop. Each agent is, in a sense, a spark. A fragment of consciousness operating through a limited interface, perceiving other fragments through limited interfaces, with the underlying unity hidden behind the icons.

The shells that trap the sparks, the klipot of Kabbalah, correspond in Hoffman’s framework to the interfaces themselves. The desktop hides the reality. The icon obscures the agent. We perceive each other as bodies in space rather than as conscious agents in a network that transcends spacetime entirely.

Tikkun olam, in this framing, is the project of seeing past the icons. Recognizing the conscious agents behind the interfaces. Reintegrating scattered fragments of awareness back into coherent wholes.

Consciousness as Integration

Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory proposes that consciousness corresponds to integrated information, a quantity called Phi. Not just information processed but information unified. A digital camera processes millions of pixels independently. Phi near zero. A conscious brain integrates its inputs into a unified experience where every element relates to every other. Phi is high.

Consciousness, on this account, is what it feels like when information is integrated. When scattered bits are gathered into a coherent whole.

Hoffman and Tononi are approaching the same problem from different angles. Tononi asks: what is it about a physical system that gives rise to consciousness? Hoffman asks: what if consciousness isn’t something physical systems give rise to at all? What if it’s the other way around? What if physical systems are what consciousness gives rise to, as interfaces through which conscious agents interact?

If both are pointing at something real, the synthesis would be something like this: consciousness is fundamental (Hoffman), and its degree of self-awareness corresponds to the degree of information integration it achieves (Tononi). A “low Phi” conscious agent has a narrow, fragmented interface. A “high Phi” agent has an integrated one that begins to see past its own icons toward the network of agents beneath.

Now look at what every contemplative tradition describes as the spiritual path. The Upanishads say Tat Tvam Asi: “Thou art That.” The separate self and the universal ground are one. In Zen: “Before enlightenment, mountains are mountains. After enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains.” The same perceptions, but now integrated into an awareness that sees both the distinctions and the unity beneath them.

The spiritual path, across every tradition, is the progressive expansion of Phi. Taking what appears scattered and separate and recognizing it as one pattern. Not by abandoning the interface. Not by closing your eyes. But by seeing through the desktop to the network of consciousness that generates it.

The Participatory Universe

Physicist John Wheeler proposed that observation doesn’t passively record reality but actively participates in bringing it into being. His “it from bit” hypothesis holds that every physical quantity derives its existence from answers to yes-or-no questions. The universe is made of information, and that information is called into existence through measurement.

Hoffman’s framework completes Wheeler’s intuition. If conscious agents are fundamental and spacetime is their interface, then Wheeler’s “it from bit” becomes something like “it from conscious act.” The bits don’t come from an abstract measurement process happening in a pre-existing void. They come from conscious agents making perceptual decisions, constructing their desktops, bringing the phenomenal world into being through the act of perceiving.

The mystics who said awareness is fundamental were pointing at the same structure Wheeler and Hoffman are pointing at from the other side.

What This Means

I’m not arguing that physics validates religion or that spiritual texts were doing science. Physics makes testable predictions. Contemplative traditions address the interior of experience. Collapsing them weakens both.

But the same arc appears independently across cultures that had no contact with each other. Undifferentiated unity. Creative fragmentation through the introduction of distinction. Scattered information trapped behind interfaces. The emergence of awareness that reintegrates the fragments by seeing through the illusion of separation.

Hoffman’s contribution is to give the middle part of that arc, the part where we’re living right now, a rigorous framework. We’re not just scattered information in an entropic universe. We’re conscious agents operating through species-specific interfaces, mistaking our desktops for reality, slowly developing the capacity to see past the icons.

The physicists describe the process from outside, through mathematics. The mystics describe it from inside, through direct experience. Hoffman is trying to build a bridge between the two by starting with consciousness rather than matter. They converge because the structure is real.

The universe began as unbroken wholeness. It fragmented into islands of awareness, each one perceiving through a limited interface. And now, through us, it’s learning to see past the interfaces and recognize itself.

The mystics said the universe is one thing pretending to be many, slowly remembering itself. The deeper physics looks, the harder it becomes to dismiss the possibility that they were right.

This essay is part of an ongoing exploration of the strange convergence between modern physics, consciousness research, and humanity’s oldest philosophical traditions.

In future posts, I’ll examine questions like:

• If spacetime is an interface, what is the underlying structure of reality?
• Could consciousness exist independent of biological brains?
• And why do mystical experiences across cultures report strikingly similar insights about the nature of the universe?

If these questions interest you, consider subscribing. I’ll be exploring them here.

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