We experience things all the time, by the way of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching and thinking, and we safely assume that our brain somehow does all of it. We take our brain to be a complex-enough organ capable of knowing and experiencing things. For instance, we describe seeing as a process of light bouncing off various objects, entering our eyes, falling on our retinas, getting converted into neural signals, traveling through the optic nerves, stirring certain neural activity in the brain, and voila we see the objects. But when probed, we are unable to explain this “voila”. It is an assumed miracle that the brain somehow regenerates an image of the objects and perceives it. A similar process is assumed for all other sense perceptions too (i.e. hearing, smelling, tasting and touching), as well as for the thoughts and emotions which are also considered as neural activity in the brain known by the brain. Even while scientists are struggling to find a full explanation for this, a quick and simple investigation can reveal that it is actually impossible for the brain to know anything. Let’s understand why:
What exactly is the brain or, technically speaking, the central nervous system? It is just a collection of neurons or nerve cells, nothing more nothing less. (Continuing with the example of seeing described earlier), when information reaches a subset of the brain’s nerve cells through the neural signals, each cell only gets a fraction of the total information, as per the capacity of that cell to process. And, even though the cells are interconnected, there is no single cell that has access to all the information required to regenerate and see the whole image. Even if we assume that another part of the brain gathers all the information from these cells, that part will itself be a collection of cells, each of which will again get only a part of the total information. The same problem will continue to occur even if we consider a subpart of this part, and so on. And even if a single cell somehow manages to gather all the information, we know that a cell itself is made up of smaller and smaller parts — molecules, atoms, subatomic particles, and so on — and the information will always remain dispersed across various parts and particles, lost into oblivion and never able to come together.
It can be argued that it is not required for a single cell to have all the information. Instead, the collection of interconnected cells produces something that enables us to see the whole image. But anything that is produced by a collection of parts will also be made up of parts, as each part of the source will contribute to a part of the product, and the same problem of information being dispersed across parts will continue. One could further argue that it is not necessary for all the information to be accessed simultaneously and that it can be accessed in parts but so fast that it gives the impression of being simultaneous. But even in that case, at least some amount of information has to be available simultaneously to form one unit of seeing. And no matter how little this information may be, it will continue to be dispersed across parts and particles and will not be able to come together coherently to enable even one unit of seeing (or any other way of knowing for that matter).
Hence, it is simply not possible for the brain (or any other part of the body), to see or know or experience anything. The only way anything can ever be known is if the entity that is knowing is not made up of parts (i.e. it is partless) and all the information required for that knowing is contained within this partless entity. And since it is an undeniable fact that we know and experience things, such a partless entity actually exists and that is what consciousness really is.
What exactly is this partless consciousness like? Since it cannot be compared to anything in this universe as everything is made up of parts and particles, we have no objective way of describing what a partless entity is like. But some subtle thinking can reveal it:
If an entity is partless, it must also be formless. Because even if it has the most nondescript form (like a spherical object), it will have different sides to it. And when something is in contact with one side of the entity, it can only be in contact with that side and not with another side. In other words, it can only be in contact with a part of the entity leaving the other parts untouched, which implies that an entity that has a form will also have parts. So, an entity that is partless must be formless too.
And if an entity is formless, it has to be limitless in every possible dimension. Because if it is limited even in one dimension, that will result in a boundary, and boundaries define a form. For example, an infinite line is limitless only in one dimension but limited in other dimensions and hence still possesses the form of a line. Similarly, an infinite plane is limitless in two dimensions but limited in the third dimension and hence still possesses the form of a plane. Hence, anything which is limited even in one dimension will possess a form imposed by that dimension. So, an entity that is formless must also be limitless or infinite.
Based on this reasoning, we can conclude that partless consciousness must be formless and limitless. This means that nothing can exist outside of consciousness because anything existing outside would impose a limit where consciousness ends and the other entity begins. Hence, there can be only one infinite consciousness and the whole universe (and anything else that exists) must all be within that one consciousness. Moreover, since consciousness is partless and the universe is made up of parts, the universe cannot be real as nothing made up of parts can really exist within a partless entity. At the same time, the universe cannot be completely non-existent as it is being experienced; and anything that doesn’t actually exist but seems to exist is called a virtual reality. So, the universe is a virtual reality seeming to appear within consciousness. It is important to note that consciousness is also eternally unchanging because change is either external, induced by something else from outside, or internal, induced by one part on another, neither of which are possible in the case of infinite partless consciousness.
Why does a virtual reality appear in consciousness at all though? It is because the very nature of consciousness is to be conscious or to know, and since there is nothing else to be known, it just knows itself. In fact, an entity can know only itself. Whenever we talk about an entity knowing anything outside of itself, we are basically talking about information coming from outside and reaching the entity and then the entity knowing only that much information about outside that gets inside it. But, as we have already seen, nothing can exist outside of the infinite consciousness, and so there is no question of any external information reaching it. Moreover, it is impossible for external information to get inside an entity that is partless. Hence, consciousness only knows itself as it is intrinsically.
But since it is limitless, it cannot know itself in entirety, because anything that can be known in entirety must have a limit. It cannot know itself in bits and pieces either because it is partless. But when the infinite tries to know something it will definitely know at least something. And so, if infinite consciousness cannot know itself as it is in reality, it ends up knowing itself as it is not i.e. as a virtual reality full of fake finite knowable things. Since there are infinite possibilities of the type of fake finite things that can appear within the infinite, every possible imaginable and unimaginable finite thing is actually appearing.
This universe is just one such set of things. It can be described as a set of virtual dream-like simulations, with each simulation representing a mind passing through a series of thoughts and sense perceptions corresponding to the body of a living being along with a world teeming with other beings and things that this body seems to be interacting with — all within a paradigm of time, space and causation, very much like a dream. The infinite consciousness knows each simulation or mind individually and separately from each other, because if it would have known multiple of them together, it would have become a hodge-podge, with too many overlapping thoughts and sense perceptions, not making much sense at all. All these simulations are still interconnected though, as they are all appearing within one consciousness, so they share common objects and events giving rise to the feeling of one coherent universe. Each of these simulations has such a structure that it makes the mind feel attached to the body appearing within it (just like it happens during a dream), but consciousness itself always remains unattached, untouched and unaffected by any of these fake simulations. Also, interestingly, there is no limit to the number of simulations that can represent a universe, or even to the number of such universes that could be appearing within consciousness, because it is infinite.
In conclusion, since infinite consciousness cannot be known as it really is, even by itself, it can never be available for direct investigation making it impossible to fully describe its nature in entirety. As a result, the complete mechanics of how this virtual reality seems to appear within consciousness cannot be explained, but we can still draw a few inferences, like we just did, based on our experience of this infinitude. In the process, it becomes obvious that since life appears within consciousness in its attempt to know itself, the sole purpose of life is to know itself as consciousness. It is an open secret and the choice is always available whether you want to take yourself to be this infinite consciousness, the one and only eternal unchanging reality that actually exists, or you want to take yourself to be an infinitesimally small mind-body complex, which is nothing but a fake simulation seeming to appear within consciousness and known by consciousness. Hope you pick that which is real.