What If Awareness Is the Fundamental Substrate of Reality?

This is not a religious question—it's a philosophical and scientific one. What if pure awareness—not matter, not energy—is the primary fabric of existence? What if everything we perceive as external (space, time, matter, self) emerges from a deeper field of intelligence or "knowing"?

There’s a line of thought—found in Advaita Vedanta, nondual philosophy, and increasingly echoed in physics and consciousness studies—that proposes that all forms, including our minds and identities, are temporary appearances within a unified, self-aware field.

It’s not about belief in a "God" as a personified being, but recognizing that the same awareness that experiences your thoughts is the same one animating all life. In this frame, the universe isn't a random explosion of dead particles, but an intricately interconnected expression of infinite intelligence—self-aware through every node.

If that’s true, it flips the script on individualism, separateness, and randomness. Every action, every connection, might be preorchestrated—not as fate, but as intelligent unfolding.

Has anyone else explored this line of thinking? Any links between this and current research in integrated information theory, panpsychism, or quantum mind theory?