Can something be more than one thing at the same time?

Yes. Because I am both autistic and someone who loves chocolate ice cream.

The universe is the same: it’s not one single thing, but many things at once. It depends on how you look at it. So you can’t really say: everything is physics and math. Or everything is religion. Well, maybe if you wear that lens, yes. But in reality, something is never just one thing.

It’s sometimes a bit of this and a bit of that.

Two things that are exactly the same don’t exist either. Even in “1 + 1 = 2,” the left one is a bit more to the left, and the right one is a bit more to the right. It depends on how you look at it. If you’re very critical, you can’t really solve “1 + 1.”

I think tiny particles have the same problem. They don’t always feel like behaving as quantum particles—they sometimes just want to eat chocolate ice cream or roll around a bit. Sometimes, at least.

We partly live in a world without physics

Let’s say we want to describe our universe through physics.

We start with a human being. A human is made of molecules. The problem with this analogy is that a human is much more than that.

You can use the same analogy for our entire universe. The universe is much more than the particles it’s built from. Seeing the universe only through the lens of physics is like looking at just a small slice of a big cake. There are many more ways of looking at reality than that.

Are you unhappy with a part of your body? How did you expect it to look? Where does that expectation come from?

Would you have had that same expectation if you were the only person on Earth?

What I often think happens is that we project the expectations of others onto our own bodies, like a kind of film laid over us — “it could have looked like this instead.” The real art, of course, is learning to enjoy how your body actually looks right now. The sad thing is that fewer and fewer people seem able to do that.

A particle always moves exactly from A to B. That’s the kind of answer you want.

But that’s not how the universe works. There are no questions with only one answer.

Is the chance of flipping a fair coin 50/50? No. Because we might lose the coin forever and never find another one. That’s also a possibility — an answer to the question.

Is one plus one two? If you strictly follow the rules, yes. But if you look very critically, it isn’t. Because the left “one” is a different one than the right “one.”

Approaching questions from multiple angles is what we call dimensions. Dimensions are very hard to explain. It’s a bit like understanding that depression can, from another angle, be sadness, or a lack of meaning. It’s not one question, or one answer.

A person is also never just one thing. You can’t say: that’s an autistic person. Because it’s also a person who loves ice cream with sprinkles.

Consciousness is like that too. The answer to consciousness is multiple things at once. The world is a bit scientific, a bit religious, a bit spiritual, a bit energetic, and a bit traditional. The reason you think it’s not is because you want to use one single framework to answer a question.

Whether a person must be a man or a woman is the same kind of thing. A person can be a man or a woman — or anything in between. No matter which side you’re on, both can be true at the same time.

Consciousness is many things at once

Nothing in the world is ever just one thing.

Someone can be an annoying person but also love chocolate ice cream. That all happens at the same time. Buddhists often act as if people don’t really exist – they call that the ego. I think Buddhists got a bit confused there.

One of my favorite ways to look at consciousness is to notice which thoughts you fill your head with. I’ve had a head full of many different thoughts. A few years ago, my thoughts were completely different from the ones I have now. I decided to take some out and put new ones in their place. Well, actually, you don’t really want to throw old thoughts away, because you also want to keep the bad ones – they’re the ones you learn from.

Ideally, you want a mix: some pleasant thoughts and some unpleasant ones. And also thoughts that have nothing to do with each other. So you take a few ideas from religion, a few from science, a few from Buddhism, a few old sayings from your grandmother, and you add your own experiences, the books you read, and – even more importantly – the things you come up with yourself.

My head is full of things I’ve come up with on my own. To be honest, I’ve realized that many of those things already existed – other people have come up with much smarter versions. But I stubbornly hold on. I just pretend that everything I’ve thought up is true.

One of those things is that I sometimes think everyone on Earth is watching me while I’m thinking. For a while, I also thought I was being followed all the time, but that’s gotten better since I started living more healthily.

Consciousness is useful because it lets you see which thoughts and feelings you have – and why they’re there. Sometimes, for example, you don’t dare go outside anymore because something bad happened to you, or you saw something scary on TV. You have to be a bit careful with that. Recently, I read something about dieting, and now I’m afraid to eat bread – but by writing this down, I’m using my consciousness to deal with that problem.