We have to be very careful of misunderstanding here, for the Buddha is not saying that the physical world is a figment of imagination. That would imply a “real” world to compare with, and this is the real world. We are not “making it up,” but neither are we misperceiving a reality “out there” where things are solid and individuals are separate. What the Buddha is telling us is precisely parallel to what the quantum physicists say: When we examine the universe closely, it dissolves into discontinuity and a flux of fields of energy. But in the Buddha’s universe the mind-matter duality is gone; these are fields in consciousness.

When Einstein talked about clocks slowing down in a powerful gravitational field, or when Heisenberg said we can determine either the momentum or the position of an electron but not both, most physicists felt a natural tendency to treat these as apparent aberrations, like the illusion that a stick bends when placed in a glass of water. It took decades for physicists to accept that there is no “real” universe, like the real stick, to refer to without an observer. Clocks really do slow down and electrons really are indeterminable; that is the way the universe actually is. Similarly, the Buddha would say, this universe we talk of is made of mind. There is no “real” world-in-itself apart from our perceiving it. This doesn’t make physical reality any less physical; it only reminds us that what we see in the world is shaped by the structure of consciousness.