How the Unseen Becomes the Seen
What is reality?
It seems like such a straightforward question. But the moment it’s asked—not as a concept, but as an ache—the bottom drops out. The familiar world begins to tremble at its edges. The trees, the stars, the body, the thought of asking—all of it begins to shimmer.
The question isn’t asking about things. It’s asking how things appear at all.
Where does appearance come from? How does anything show up? And why should anything show up, rather than nothing?
Is the universe made of things—or of appearing?
Physics, at its most advanced edge, no longer sees the world as made of little bits of matter—atoms, particles, stuff. Instead, it sees fields. These fields are not things in space. They are space. They are the very fabric of what shows up as the world.
Each particle is a ripple, a local excitation, of a field. The electron is not a self-contained object; it is a resonance in the electron field. The photon is not a beam of light but a pulse in the electromagnetic field. The Higgs boson? A ripple in the Higgs field.
There are no “things” beneath the appearances. There are only fields vibrating.
Mystical view: There are no things, only appearances within the One.
Mystics across traditions say the same in other words: what we call the “world” is not made of matter, but of manifestation. It is the play of appearance within a formless ground. Form dances for a time. Then dissolves.
From the Heart Sutra: Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form.
The Sufis say: There is no reality but the Real, and everything else is a veil.
Reality is not made of things. It is the shimmering of the Unseen into the Seen—the ripple of God into the ten thousand things.
What is the quantum vacuum—and why is it not nothing?
In quantum physics, the “vacuum” isn’t empty. It’s not a void, but a seething, fluctuating field of potential. Particles blink in and out of existence in what’s called quantum foam. Virtual particles emerge briefly, interact, and vanish.
This “nothing” gives rise to everything. It’s not blank. It’s alive with possibility.
All that we call real emerges from this invisible sea of activity. Not from outside it. From within it.
Mystical view: Nothingness is not absence. It is presence unmanifest.
Mystics speak of the Void—but not as a lack. Instead, it is the womb of all creation.
Meister Eckhart called it the Godhead beyond God—the fertile nothing out of which God and the world arise.
Dzogchen masters speak of the “ground” as radiant emptiness—a no-thing that nevertheless gives rise to everything.
Shunyata, in Buddhism, is not nihilism. It is openness, potential, formless fullness.
So the quantum vacuum and the mystical ground point to the same reality: nothing that is not nothing. A zero that contains infinity. Not potential in time—but the very capacity for time, space, and form.
How does form emerge from this ground?
Physics says: through symmetry breaking. In the earliest moments of the universe, all was perfectly balanced. But perfect balance contains no differences. Nothing can happen.
As the universe cooled, symmetries broke—differences emerged. Forces separated. Particles formed. And from this imbalance, structure appeared. The One fractured just enough to let form arise.
Mystical view: Manifestation requires contrast. The One plays as the many.
Mystics have long understood that form arises through contrast.
Light appears against darkness.
Sound arises in silence.
The Divine knows itself by becoming other than itself.
In Sufi cosmology, the Hidden Treasure longed to be known. To know itself, it had to appear. And to appear, it had to fracture into multiplicity—without ever ceasing to be One.
So form arises not as separation from the ground, but as the play of the ground with itself.
What gives matter its weight—its persistence?
Enter the Higgs field. Unlike other fields, the Higgs field doesn’t turn off. It has a constant value throughout space. When certain particles move through it, they interact—and acquire mass. Mass is resistance. Persistence. The ability to last.
Without the Higgs field, everything would fly apart at the speed of light. There would be no atoms, no structure, no time.
The Higgs field is what allows anything to remain.
Mystical view: Mass is presence. Persistence is the echo of Being.
Mystics do not speak of Higgs bosons—but they speak of density, gravity, solidity in the inner world.
Mass is not just physical. It is ontological. When something fully is, it has presence.
In the Diamond Approach, presence is a quality of Being itself. It is not a thing you can hold. It is what holding is made of.
What we call mass, the mystic experiences as Being showing up with weight—an ontological density. A rootedness in the Real.
What about the paradox of particles—are they real?
In quantum physics, particles are not tiny balls. They are events—probabilities collapsing into momentary form.
And even stranger: particles like electrons are identical. There is no individual identity. This led to Wheeler and Feynman’s playful “One Electron Theory”—the idea that every electron is just one electron looping through time.
Not many, but one, appearing as many.
Mystical view: All appearances are faces of the One.
This echoes the perennial mystical insight: all forms are the One playing as the many.
You are not separate from me. The tree is not separate from the stone.
Multiplicity is a veil over unity.
The One doesn’t become many by dividing. It becomes many by appearing as relationship.
And that appearance, in its purest truth, is love—the One recognizing itself across difference.
Where do the fields themselves come from?
Physics can describe them. It can measure their dynamics. But it cannot say why they exist at all. They are built into the structure of the universe.
They are assumed.
What gives rise to the capacity for law?
What gives rise to the very possibility of structure?
These questions mark the edge of physics, where description must yield to ontology.
Mystical view: The field arises from the groundless ground.
Mysticism does not stop with description. It turns inward. It sinks below the surface of manifestation, into the ground of Being.
This ground is not a cause. It is not prior in time. It is prior ontologically—prior in depth.
It is what allows any field to arise. Any time. Any appearance.
It is the field of infinite presence. Not vibrating. But capable of vibration. Not doing. But capable of all doing.
The mystic touches it not by reaching—but by un-becoming.
By silence.
By letting the question ask itself.
So, what is Beingness?
Being is not a thing. Not even a sum of all things. It is the fact that anything appears at all.
It is the suchness, the is-ness, the presence of what is—before it is defined.
Being is not what appears. It is appearing itself.
Being is not in you. You are in Being.
It is not distant. It is nearer than breath. It is what breath floats within.
Mystical view: Being is the Divine before the name of God.
Before God speaks, there is Being.
Before the world is formed, there is Being.
Before the question is asked, there is Being.
And this Being is not static. It flows. It expresses. It dances.
In Kashmir Shaivism: Spanda—the first subtle tremor of the Absolute.
In the Tao: The Way that cannot be named.
In the Gospel of John: In the beginning was the Logos…
In your soul: The quiet sense that you are…before you are anything else.
What is reality?
Not a collection of things.
Not even a structure of forces.
Reality is the radiance of nothing—the silent shining of what cannot be grasped.
The field isn’t out there. It is here, and you are in it.
Reality is not what appears.
It is appearance itself.
And even now, as you read these words—
It is shining.
Not because something is happening.
But because Being cannot help but appear.
And what appears…
Is the mystery asking itself:
What is this?
What do we call something that is nowhere in particular, yet everywhere? That is not a thing, but gives rise to all things? That can’t be seen, but without which nothing could appear?
The Higgs field is one such mystery. It is said to permeate all of space—an invisible sea that gives particles their mass. But here’s the riddle: the Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle,” is not the field—it’s a ripple in the field. So, which comes first? The field or the boson? The medium or the manifestation? It’s the old paradox, dressed in quantum clothes: the chicken or the egg?
Paradox isn’t a bug of reality—it’s a feature. At the most fundamental level, the universe doesn’t offer simple cause-and-effect. It reveals a kind of recursive mystery, where presence gives rise to form, and form reveals presence. The deeper you go, the more circular it gets. And perhaps that’s the point—not to find a final answer, but to awaken to the dance itself.
John Harper is a Diamond Approach® teacher, Enneagram guide, and a student of human development whose work bridges psychology, spirituality, and deep experiential inquiry. He is the author of The Enneagram World of the Child: Nurturing Resilience and Self-Compassion in Early Life and Good Vibrations: Primordial Sounds of Existence, available on Amazon.