It's all math

The metaphysics or worldview at the heart of my own approach to spirituality is just plain good old-fashioned Idealism.  This view is most commonly associated with Berkeley within the Western philosophical tradition, but it represents a persistent and recurrent minority report throughout the last two millennia at least.  The basic position is explored and deepened in Yogacara and other Buddhist text traditions, some orthodox Hindu sects, Platonic and Pythagorean thought, and various alchemical and mystical traditions.  But it is simply not well understood nowadays, either in Christian-based or in scientific circles.  One way to make the insights of this tradition more approachable is to understand it in terms of data and the movement of data.  Look at it this way. 

Everything we experience and know about the world is data.  Sense perception is data.  The interpretation of that data is meta-data, in other words, more data about the original data, its source and ramifications.  Money is just data about who gets what, and how much.  We are continually hungry for data in the form of experiences, movies, vacations, social media and so on.  In fact, everything that we observe in the material world is actually a network of networks of data transfer: DNA replicating, bees carrying pollen, trees sending chemical warnings to each other about pests, the rising and falling of prices and of the stock market, body language and tone of voice, blushing and smiling, social esteem and respect, birdsongs, lion’s roars and dogs sniffing each other’s butts.  Everything is data, the interpretation and organization of data (meta-data).  We think that there must be some bottom layer, some thing, stuff, or substance which carries the data.  But it’s data all the way down to photons and electron, which just are, you guessed it, data. 

This all gets even more interesting when you realize that this isn’t just an interesting metaphor.  It’s actionable in the sense that it can be precisely modeled and measured through network theory, a specialization within graph theory.  We can look at how data moves through networks, the various ways in which networks are structured and how these structures overlap and evolve.  There is, in fact, a single set of mathematical principles which can describe the natural world at many different levels: from the quantum to the cellular, from brains to music theory to social networks to empires.  And incredibly, we already know what these principles are, though they have yet to be fully worked out in the way I envision it could be. 

The Pythagoreans had it right.  It’s just math.  It’s all just math.  Send in the folks who specialize in pattern recognition.