If you could remove all the empty space from the atoms that constitute every human being on Earth - if you could compress the actual matter, the protons and neutrons and electrons, into a volume with no space between them - the entire human race would fit into a volume smaller than a sugar cube. This is not an exaggeration. Here's the thing: it's atomic physics. Know what I mean?The atom is almost entirely empty space. The nucleus, which contains virtually all of the atom's mass, occupies approximately one quadrillionth of the atom's volume. The rest is emptiness - or more precisely, the electromagnetic field that holds the electrons in their probabilistic orbits around the nucleus.
You are ninety-nine point nine percent nothing. The solid feeling of your body - the weight you feel in the chair, the resistance your hand encounters when it presses against the table, the apparent solidity of every material surface you have ever touched - is not produced by matter contacting matter. It is produced by electromagnetic fields repelling each other. When your hand rests on the table, the electron fields of the atoms in your hand are repelling the electron fields of the atoms in the table surface. The matter never touches. The fields interact. And the interaction, experienced through the nervous system, is interpreted as solidity. But the solidity is an electromagnetic illusion. A field effect. A phantom produced by forces operating in the vast emptiness that constitutes ninety-nine point nine percent of everything you are and everything you touch.
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Edward Bouchet studied the interaction of light with matter - the way electromagnetic radiation behaves as it passes through material substances. What he was studying, at the atomic level, was the interaction of one electromagnetic field (light) with another electromagnetic field (the electron clouds of the material). Fields interacting with fields. In a vast emptiness. Producing the appearance of solidity. Bouchet's refractive index measurements were measuring the illusory solidity of matter with the same precision that Shankaracharya used to describe the illusory solidity of the world: vivarta - the apparent transformation of the real into the unreal, the way a rope appears to be a snake in dim light. The rope is real. The snake is an appearance. The electromagnetic field is real. The solidity is an appearance. And the appearance, however convincing, does not change the underlying fact: you are mostly nothing. And the nothing is not nothing. It is the field. The field is the reality. The matter is the appearance.
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The Vedantic Reading of Atomic Emptiness
The Mandukya Upanishad describes Brahman as the turiya - the fourth state, beyond waking, dreaming, and deep sleep. The turiya is described through negation: it is not this, not that, not the other thing. It is without qualities, without attributes, without content. It is, in the language of atomic physics, the emptiness. Not the atoms. Not the electrons. Not the nucleus. The space between them. The space that constitutes ninety-nine point nine percent of every atom in every molecule in every cell in every body in the universe. Explore more in our hidden knowledge guide.
The emptiness is not passive. The quantum vacuum - the emptiness between particles - is the most energetically active field in the cosmos. Virtual particles emerge from the vacuum spontaneously, exist for fractions of a second, and return to the vacuum. The vacuum fluctuates. The vacuum creates. The vacuum is the generative ground from which all material form arises. not empty nothing. Here's the thing: it's creative nothing. What we're looking at is the sunyata of the Buddhist tradition - emptiness as the ground of all form. That's the nirguna Brahman of the Vedantic tradition - the attributeless reality from which all attributed reality arises. The emptiness that science measures and the emptiness that the mystics perceive are the same emptiness. And the emptiness is the fullest thing in the universe. Paul explores this deeply in The Electric Rose.
When you sit in deep meditation and the thoughts slow and the body quiets and the awareness opens into a space that has no content - no images, no words, no sensations, just the vast, luminous, dimensionally infinite openness of consciousness without an object - you are perceiving the atomic reality of your own body. You are experiencing, from the inside, what the physicist measures from the outside: the emptiness that constitutes ninety-nine point nine percent of what you are. And the emptiness, experienced from the inside, is not empty. It is alive. It is vibrating. It is full of the potential that the material world is the partial expression of. You are not meditating yourself into nothing. You are meditating yourself into the everything that the nothing actually is. The everything that the atoms are mostly made of. The everything that the cosmos is mostly made of. The everything that you are mostly made of. The fullness that the mystics call Brahman and the physicists call the quantum vacuum and the meditator experiences as the ground of being. Same emptiness. Same fullness. Same you.
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Why Solidity Is the Illusion and Emptiness Is the Truth
The solidity that your senses report is the illusion. Here's the thing: it's not metaphysics. What we're looking at is the measurement. The atom is empty. The body is empty. The table is empty. The planet is empty. Everything you have ever called solid is a field effect occurring in a vast emptiness. The solidity is Maya - not because a religious text declares it so but because the measurement confirms it so. Here is the thing most people miss.The measurement says: the matter is a rounding error. The emptiness is the substance. The field is the reality. The particle is the appearance. You might also find insight in The Electromagnetic Spectrum as Dimensions of Awareness -....
Bouchet measured how light interacts with the field effects that we call matter. His measurements were precise. His data was reliable. And his data, extended to its logical conclusion, tells us that the substances he was measuring were not substances at all. They were field configurations. Patterns of electromagnetic interaction occurring in a space that is ninety-nine point nine percent empty. Bouchet was measuring the behavior of light in a void. And the void, far from being an absence, was the most present thing in his laboratory. It was the most present thing in his body. It is the most present thing in yours. You might also find insight in The Manifestation Lie - And What Real Spiritual Growth Ac....
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The next time someone tells you that the spiritual teaching of emptiness is unscientific - that the mystic's claim that the material world is appearance is a pre-scientific superstition that modern physics has debunked - invite them to explain why the atom is ninety-nine point nine percent empty space. Invite them to explain why the solidity of matter is an electromagnetic field effect rather than a material fact. Invite them to explain why the quantum vacuum, which is the emptiness between particles, is the most energetically dense state in the known universe. And then invite them to sit in meditation - to quiet the mind's noise, to open the awareness into the space that has no content, to experience from the inside what the physics describes from the outside - and discover, through direct perception, that the emptiness the atom is made of and the emptiness the meditator perceives are the same emptiness. And the emptiness is not nothing. It is everything. It is you. It is the cosmos. It is the ground of all being. And it has been here, constituting ninety-nine point nine percent of everything, since the first atom formed in the first second after the Big Bang. It is here now. It is the space you are sitting in. It is the space you are made of. And it is the space that Brahman has always been. Full. Alive. And waiting for you to notice. If this hits home, consider an intuitive reading with Paul.