"Anyway," I continued, "we've now completed the first stage of our journey: reality and consciousness are the same thing. The implications of that are magical."

"Like what?" Zac asked.

"Firstly, in a hippy-dippy kind of way, we are all literally One. Separation is an illusion because the extra dimensions of space and time are an illusion. This explains why the famous psychologist, Carl Jung, hypothesized a 'collective unconscious' to explain phenomena he observed in patients. Or schizophrenics, who report feelings of oceanic oneness which can lead to paranoia, because they think there are no boundaries between their thoughts and other people. In fact, several mental illnesses have these kinds of echoes and ties to the lower dimension — something that neurotypical people can't quite perceive. This also explains why LSD studies suggest that there is some kind of subconscious super-highway connecting everything and everyone."

"Oh, did you ever do ayahuasca when you were in Colombia?" Zac asked.

I laughed. "You know I've never taken drugs in my life, right? I didn't even take a painkiller until I was sixteen! If I want to get high, I'll go workout. Plus, I can manipulate my brain chemicals on-demand by focusing my eyes in a certain way."

I stared at the stone wall, concentrating on a small patch of air about a hand's width from the rough surface. I then shifted my gaze into a kind of non-focus until a thick, hazy mist began dancing on the surface of the stone.

"There." I pointed to the wall. "When I realized I could do this a few years ago, I would sit in the park for hours watching these huge tongues of energy wrap around the trees. I remember my eyes being so sore for the first couple of weeks until they adjusted properly. If I could focus long enough and slow my brain waves down, I could even make myself gently hallucinate — no drugs required. I'd lie on the lawn outside my Thai apartment and watch the grass turn into waves. I could feel it all — this peaceful, up-and-down rhythm of life. It was great for creativity, and quite fun to walk around the world and observe a deeper reality that I was previously unaware of. Occasionally I see vibrant colors floating around and 'auras,' but not very often, because I'm not very good at it. I trained for a while but then got busy with work. But I certainly know that feeling of oceanic oneness."

"You're not schizophrenic, are you?"

"Zac," I sighed. "Schizophrenia must be terrifying for the people suffering from it. To not observe consensus reality? That's so isolating and confusing. Not to mention the stigma associated with mental illness."

"You mean, it would literally be like living in another universe?"

"Yes," I smiled. "Literally. If tonight's exploration has taught us anything, it's that our society woefully misunderstands mental illness. That's one reason I'm so furious at the scientific community for suppressing and ridiculing ideas that challenge materialism. Vulnerable people are counting on them for help, but ego-driven dogma is making these scientists blind, stupid, and mad.

Plus, it's so easy to place the 'crazy' label on anyone that deviates from the norm. Just because my consciousness sees the universe differently, doesn't mean my mind is sick. You know me — I'm highly sane, albeit a little odd. But I have to keep reminding myself of that. I've spent my whole life wondering if there is something wrong with me."

"Oh, don't worry. I've wondered the same thing about you too."

"Thanks. I'm trying to be all deep and meaningful and vulnerable or whatever, and you're a terrible person to do that with."

Zac beamed with pride, as if I'd just bestowed the highest compliment on him.

"It's just that when everyone tells you you're crazy for seeing the world differently, and you're not entitled to an opinion until you've been indoctrinated with a formal education — even if that formal education is completely unnecessary to deduce basic high-level facts about the world, and when they laugh in your face or ignore you or ridicule you for something that is just so damn basic and obvious in your eyes and you just want to scream at them and say, 'Look! It's right there in front of your nose, and if you'd just dismount from your intellectual high horse then you'd see it too!' — well, it's hard to wonder if maybe you're the crazy one, not them."

Zac pat me on the back. "There, there. If you're a little mad, then there's no hope for my diagnosis."

I laughed. He was right.

"Anyway," I continued, "the second implication is that we need to invert our perspective on reality. Just like in a dream or a computer game, matter doesn't move through space — space moves through matter. Matter doesn't move through time — time moves through matter. Everything all exists at once, and an observer is merely stitching information together into the appearance of continuous space and time.

Thirdly, as we've discussed, your thoughts, dreams, and imagination are not separate from physical reality, because separation is an illusion. Therefore, it's highly plausible that your consciousness can affect what manifests in your outer reality. I'll go over this in detail later, but just know that it explains a lot of very unusual phenomena — the placebo effect, miracles, uncanny coincidence.

Fourthly, your consciousness is not in your body — your body is in your consciousness. Therefore, it's entirely possible for your consciousness to float outside your body, or go to some kind of 'higher dimension' in a near-death experience. The whole thing is an illusion.

It's kind of like my Minecraft game. In Minecraft, my consciousness appears fused to my body, but I can also press the F5 key and make my consciousness hover over my body. I can even enter a different game world, which is equivalent to entering a different dimension. There's nothing holy or religious about it, in the same way that there is nothing holy or religious about entering a different realm in a computer game. It's just math."

"There are a bunch of other implications," I continued, "but these are the main ones. Basically, everything we think we know about reality is wrong. Our reality is much more wondrous than we initially thought, and we appear to have much more creative control over it than we once believed.

Now let's move on to establishing the next part of this theorem, which is much quicker and easier."