Coemergence is the idea I keep coming back to more than almost any other in this work. The hard question of consciousness asks us to consider where consciousness arises from. I believe that this question is fundamentally flawed and should be restructured. Instead of asking where does consciousness come from, what we should be asking is: what arises from consciousness?
Panpsychism and the Observer
Many of my subscribers are familiar with the theory of panpsychism, which presupposes that consciousness is omnipresent. It is everywhere — even your chair under you, or your screen that you are reading or watching this on, is in a small way conscious. Does this seem far-fetched to you? The only other explanation is that consciousness is nothing more than a biological and chemical reaction limited to somewhere in the brain or body.
So if we presume that consciousness is everywhere and all things are conscious, then we could extrapolate that consciousness is the cause of everything. That the simple act of observation or awareness collapses the wavefront of all the possibilities of particles in superposition into our everyday world.
🔬 THE SCIENCE — WHEELER’S DELAYED-CHOICE EXPERIMENT
In 1978, physicist John Wheeler proposed a thought experiment — later verified in laboratories — in which the decision to measure a photon as a particle or a wave is made after the photon has already passed through the apparatus. The result: the photon appears to behave as though it “knew” how it would be measured before the choice was made. Wheeler called this a participatory universe. It doesn’t prove consciousness causes anything, but it confirms that the observer’s role in quantum mechanics is stranger, and less separable from the observed, than classical intuition allows.
The Apple: Subject, Object, Action
Now the stage is set for some more questions. The Buddha Dharma talks a lot about the unity of subject, object, and action. This is one of the many ways of expressing non-duality. Let’s explore this — we have three things. A subject (you or me), and an apple (object) that we would like to enjoy (action). So now, what good is a subject without an object to enjoy?
What good is an object without a subject to enjoy it? And finally, what good is an action like enjoyment without a subject to do it to an object? This system of codependent existence is very interesting to play with. What I mean here is that it is simply not meaningful or logical for one of these things to exist without the others.
Coemergence and the Middle Way
Coemergence, or co-arising, are two terms that are often used when comparing our very dualistic experience to a non-dual reality. A general understanding of this would be that both good and bad, light and dark, and up and down only exist dependent on each other.
We are pointing at the unity of two extremes, and saying that what we want or what we perceive is actually in the middle somewhere — but we do not naturally perceive this. We see or understand only the separation, or the borders between. In fact, our total understanding of the world is based on an ontological separation of all things. We project the idea of separation onto all that we see. The Buddha Dharma shows us otherwise.
Are we starting to see how all of this is connected? Now, if we ask both questions — 1) how does consciousness arise, and 2) what arises from consciousness — at the same time, we begin to close the gap between the conditioned physical world of particles and form, and the unseen world of forces, waves, and our conscious energy. Understanding that some things are not mutually exclusive but rather inclusive — both and — makes our world of experience full and complete. There is a lot of freedom in this understanding.
🔬 THE SCIENCE — A HONEST NOTE ON DECOHERENCE
It’s worth being precise here. The mainstream physics explanation for why the quantum world appears to “settle” into the classical world we experience is decoherence — a system’s quantum behaviour becoming entangled with its environment, not a conscious mind observing it. Most physicists today do not believe consciousness causes collapse. What Buddhism is pointing at with coemergence is a different claim entirely — not that mind causes physical events, but that subject and object were never actually separate categories to begin with. That is a philosophical claim about the nature of experience, not a physics claim about mechanism, and the two shouldn’t be collapsed into each other.
Closing — The Universe Seeing Itself
I want to close with two thoughts. Firstly, to quote Albert Einstein, speaking about the double-slit experiment: “It seems as though we must use sometimes the one theory and sometimes the other, while at times we may use either.” Einstein knew that a both-and understanding is optimal for a complete understanding of the very strange world of particles and waves.
And secondly, that consciousness is the universe’s way of seeing and understanding itself. What is an object — the universe — without a subject, our consciousness, to enjoy or perceive it?
A Personal Note
Of all the ideas in this work, coemergence is the one I return to most, because it quietly dismantles a habit I didn’t know I had — the habit of treating myself as the fixed point and everything else as the thing happening to me. The apple, the wanting, the me who wants it: none of those arrive first. They arrive together, or not at all. I don’t experience that as a loss of self so much as a loosening of a grip I didn’t know I was holding.
QP
Further Reading
• Eight Consciousnesses & Five Skandhas
• Panpsychism, Could It Really Be True?
• Wave-Particle Duality vs. Non-Dual Buddhism
Sources
• Wheeler, J. A. (1978). Delayed-choice experiment
• Wave–particle duality (Einstein)
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