The Cymatic Source Code

Thomas Campbell's TOE and the Structure of Reality

Once I started traveling more for work, podcasts became my lifeline—thanks mostly to my wife nudging me toward them to kill time on planes (Even if she regrets it now, lol)

Like a lot of folks, my first real entry and obsession was the Joe Rogan Experience. These days I don’t tune in as often (too many of the same stories on repeat, dude), but one episode absolutely rewired me: #2259 with Thomas Campbell.

I was driving to a job site in Cincinnati—about three hours from home—and by the end, my face hurt from grinning so wide the whole way. If you haven’t listened to that three-hour deep dive, do yourself a favor and carve out the time; see the link at bottom.

For anyone new to him, Thomas Campbell is a former physicist who transitioned into consciousness research. He’s best known for his massive trilogy My Big TOE (Theory of Everything—yep, the cover literally features a photo of his big toe).

He’s got the hard-science chops of a physicist, but he’s also spent decades as a dedicated meditator, using out-of-body experiences to run personal experiments on the nature of reality itself.

And he kind of looks like a modern-day wizard; could easily pass as Gandalf the White with a short beard…so you know he’s legit.

I haven’t tackled My Big TOE yet, but just hearing Campbell talk was like someone finally handed me the user manual for existence. He describes everyday waking reality as a super-advanced user interface—a virtual reality rendered for consciousness to interact with and explore itself through.

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Now, if you’ve read any of my stuff before, you know I’ve long called the human body a “meat avatar” for our deeper consciousness to reside in. Simulation theory always sounded cool in passing, but I never bought in fully—until Campbell laid it out so cleanly.

To be clear, I do not fully believe we are in some gigantic computer game, but the operating principals seem to be very similar.

We’re essentially ultra-complex avatars running on streams of coded information (light, data, whatever substrate you prefer), and our shared consciousness collectively renders this world we navigate.

The whole point of the “game”? To lower entropy.

Here entropy isn’t just thermodynamic disorder; it’s the breakdown of complexity—the very complexity that gave rise to life, minds, and the universe itself. The goal is evolution toward love, cooperation, and growth rather than fear, ego, and separation.

Choices that reduce personal and systemic entropy move us (and everyone else) forward.

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Campbell uses an IT analogy that clicked for me instantly: we’re like individuated virtual machines (IUOCs) emulated from the source “server”—call it God, Source, the Absolute, or in Campbell’s terminology, the Larger Consciousness System (LCS).

Even without being a software engineer, I dabble in enough tech to see how perfectly this maps onto ancient wisdom: the Vedic Maya (the illusion we take as real), the Gnostic Demiurge crafting a flawed reality to trap souls, Plato’s shadows on the cave wall.

It’s the same insight, just dressed in modern physics and computing terms.

I don’t buy everything he says—especially the speculative bits about non-human intelligences toward the end of the Rogan talk—but the core model is rock-solid and mind-bending.

At the deepest level, zoom down to the Planck scale, and “matter” vanishes. There’s no tiny billiard balls; just quantum foam—waveforms and probabilistic energy flickering in and out of existence.

That endless oscillation—“clicking in and out”—generates binary-like information patterns—call it the base code—that loop, interfere, and build into ever-more-complex structures.

These patterns rebounding on themselves forever create the “pattern of patterns” that underlies everything. Consciousness, as the ultimate observer, organizes and renders those probabilities into the stable experience we call solidity.

Think about it through the lens of evolutionary biology:

Lighter elements to Heavier Elements→

Crystals to Minerals and Rocks→

Protolife (viruses?)→

Microbial single celled life→

Multicellular microbes→

Fungi→

Plants→

Animals→

Sentient Beings such as ourselves.

Each stage getting more and more complex until complexity and recursive iterations complex enough to generate a nervous system advanced enough to house a small piece of Source consciousness; aka you and me.

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You don’t need a particle accelerator to see echoes of this. Look at cymatics: sound waves vibrating through water or sand produce stunning fractal geometries that mirror natural forms everywhere.

The same self-organizing magic shows up in turtle shells with their perfect hexagonal fractals, the rosette spots on jaguars, the jagged-yet-symmetric ridges on trilobite fossils.

Our “solid” world is the emergent result of unimaginably vast, iterating patterns—vibrating, flexing, organizing—until consciousness collapses them into tangible experience.

Scale it up a bit: inside your body right now, trillions of cells are churning—proteins folding and unfolding like origami machines, DNA unzipping to be read, chemicals shuttling, cells dividing in perfect frenzy.

Nothing about it screams “solid matter.” It’s all dynamic process at every level. And we continue on with everyday life like nothing is going on. Our brain acts as a reducing valve, filtering out the raw chaos so we can function without drowning in the data stream.

If that filter lifted even a little, we’d see the vibrating, probabilistic dance underneath everything.

Fellow psychonauts reading this, you know EXACTLY where I’m going with this—because down in those deep states, the veil thins, and you glimpse the flux directly: infinite patterns without edges, no “things,” just pure, infinite process.

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Campbell’s framework flipped a switch for me. We (and every biological thing) aren’t accidental meat machines in a cold, empty cosmos. We’re expressions of the universe evolving to know itself—complex systems bootstrapped from pure potential, here to lower entropy through conscious choices that favor love over fear, connection over isolation; anything to reduce entropy.

Because too much entropy = lack of complexity = no self aware consciousness.

Reality isn’t “out there” independent of us; it’s participatory. We render it together, moment by moment, and the quality of what we render depends on the quality of our consciousness.

That Cincinnati drive didn’t just get me to a job site. It got me somewhere much farther out (or in?)—and I’ve been smiling about it ever since.

If this resonates, grab the podcast below, dip into My Big TOE, or just sit with the question:

What if the real frontier isn’t outer space, but the inner code we’re all running on?

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Meditation:

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