Does this mean that all matter goes away, leaving us with nothing but thoughts floating around? Actually, matter still exists — just not in the way that dogmatic materialists would have it. Remaining true to the proof that all is mind, we can only search for matter within the mental realm (because that is the only realm). To find the true nature of matter, we'll begin with a modern scientific study of the mind.

 

In the human brain, sensations cause thoughts. But on closer inspection, we find that not every sensation becomes conscious. Sensory cells spontaneously fire even when nothing stimulates them, and the brain needs a way of filtering out all of that background noise, or all that we would ever hear would be static. So the central nervous system (CNS) is a massively parallel, distributed system, and it takes the combination of many sensory cells all firing in unison for a sensation to become conscious. Analogously, it starts like a crowd of people, where everyone is talking just to whoever is nearby, and from a distance, you really can't tell what any of them are saying, but if one group starts chanting in unison, they'll stand out above all the rest, and you'll be able to tell what they're chanting. So getting above the noise floor requires a concerted and sustained effort, and the things that fill up our conscious minds are only those things that persist.

 

This basic principle — of persistence being the substance of conscious thought — shows up in all levels of mental activity. At the threshold of consciousness, we can see this in action. If we thought that we saw something out of the corner of our eye, but when we looked, it wasn't there, it wasn't real — it was some sort of illusion, perhaps just a fluke of imperfect biological light receptors. But if we looked and it was still there, then it was real.

 

Another visual example will help clarify the distinction between reality and illusion. If we take a deck of playing cards and fan them toward ourselves, we see that the colors and shapes on each card become gray and indistinct, because each card is different. Yet if we put a little black dot on each card, at exactly the same place, and fan the cards again, the black dot will be clear and crisp. That's because it doesn't change from one card to the next, and the perception is reinforced by each card. Hence we would say that the black dot is definitely there, and it's real, while there are some other things that seem to come and go without rhyme or reason, which were probably just artifacts of our less-than-perfect vision. So those were illusions. Interestingly, if we look at any single playing card, that little black dot might not be the salient feature of that card — the colors and shapes that designate the denomination and suit might stand out a bit more. But in the fanning, these become illusory, and the little black dot becomes real. So persistent perception is the working definition of reality.

 

Furthermore, some things are so persistent that we come to think of them as independent of our consciousness of them, in which case we consider them to be very real. If we leave home to go out, and if we come back and our homes are still there, just like they were, we conclude that their characteristics persisted even while we were not perceiving them. Such is the nature of "matter" — it is stuff that just is, regardless of who is there to recognize it for what it is. So it's all mind, in the sense that we know our homes by the sensations they give us (i.e., sights, sounds, smells, etc.), which is all mental stuff, and if our homes ever ceased to issue such sensations, we would conclude that our homes had ceased to exist. But as perceptions go, homes tend to be semi-permanent structures, which change slowly if at all, unlike the highly dynamic perceptions that we experienced on the way there. We can only conclude that it's all mind, but there is a subset of mind that is very robust, and such is the stuff that we consider to be material.

 

The same is true of higher-level mental entities, such as scientific theories. An hypothesis that only lasts a couple of minutes in a debate was never real in the first place — it was just somebody's bad idea. But a model that stands the test of time, such as the Atomic Theory, comes to be considered a charter member of the reality club. So again, it is persistence that is the essential ingredient of the "material world."

 

We go on to believe that the most persistent stuff was here before we got here, and it will be here after we're gone. Thus it exists independent of our consciousness of it, and it has the same properties, regardless of the quirks of our perceptions. Not that we're ever going to know if something is still here after we're gone. But the study of the material world reveals processes that just wouldn't make sense if they all came into being when we were born, and would stop when we die. This seems to put matter, made entirely of perceptions, outside of the mental realm, which has caused no small degree of confusion. The true reality is that it is all mind, but some of it is so robust that it seems to transcend the limits of mind, while on closer inspection, we realize that all of it is still made of mental stuff. The material world is just those mentalities that have stood the test of time.

 

If we only become conscious of that which is persistent, and if persistence is the definition of the material world, the substance of consciousness is entirely "material" (i.e., the persistent perceptions). Of course, some stuff is more "material" than others, but at the very least, only those things that were persistent enough to get above the brain's noise floor were ever consciously perceived in the first place. Thus all mind is matter.