Consciousness Is Fundamental
Source Potential is a consciousness research studio investigating what contemplative traditions have understood for thousands of years, and what physics is now starting to take seriously. Consciousness is not something that emerges from the brain; it is the ground from which everything arises.
Where ancient wisdom meets modern inquiry
The studio draws on deep study of Vedantic philosophy, Mahayana Buddhism, and Taoist principles. These traditions share a common recognition: separation is an illusion, and unity is what remains when the illusion is dissolved.
Source Potential exists to develop contemplative practices, contribute research toward understanding consciousness, and create tools that serve awakening rather than distraction.
What guides us:
- Wholeness: All life begins from the same source. Whether meditation, sound, or film, each work arises naturally, reflecting the unity it points toward.
- Technology: Technology serves awareness, never the other way around. It should never coerce, capture, or addict: it exists only to support what is already alive within.
- Understanding: Physics, philosophy, and art converge as different expressions of one inquiry: what is consciousness?
The Awakening App
Now available on iOS, Awakening translates this understanding into practice. It combines binaural beat technology with two complementary approaches: Interoceptive meditation that turns attention toward inner sensation, and Exteroceptive meditation that reveals something unexpected about perception itself.
Source Potential
Source Potential is named for the space before form, the substrate from which everything emerges. Even nothingness is woven into the whole and inevitably becomes something new. We return to that space again and again.
Expression of Form
Writing, audio, and community dialogue keep the inquiry alive. Rather than teaching so-called truths, we share viewpoints that illuminate your own lens, letting expression flow from direct experience.
Rethinking the "outside" world
The common view treats exteroceptive practice as noticing sounds or observing your surroundings. But consider what "external" actually means.
The color red doesn't exist outside of your brain. Neither does any other color. What exists are waves of light. Red has a wavelength of around 700 nanometers, and when that light hits the rods and cones of your eye and travels to your brain, your brain turns it into the experience of red. The color itself is created within.
A bee looking at a red flower wouldn't see the color red at all; to a bee, it might appear almost black. Bees perceive wavelengths from roughly 300 to 650nm, a window shifted from our own 380 to 700nm range. They see ultraviolet patterns on flowers that are invisible to us, while we perceive deep reds they cannot.
Sound works the same way. If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around, does it make a noise? The answer is no. It creates waves in the air, but those waves only become sound when they reach an ear and a brain turns them into the experience of hearing.
Here's something stranger still. Your senses don't all arrive at the same time. Touch reaches your brain in about 5 to 10 milliseconds. Sound takes around 20. Sight is the slowest at about 100 milliseconds. Your brain stitches all of this together so it feels like one moment. The "now" you're experiencing is already the past. But then again, the past does not exist.
So when we talk about the "outside world," we're really talking about something that's already happening inside awareness. Everything you see, hear, and touch is being constructed within you.
It is, and is not; nothing and everything. That is the play.
Exteroceptive meditation
Imagine a heron at a lake's edge. It doesn't frantically look all over the place for a fish. It becomes still enough to be the scene itself. When movement arises in stillness, the heron sees it.
This is the practice. Becoming the field of awareness rather than a separate observer of the field. Noticing that you are awareness, not something that has it, and even noticing, not noticing.
Our mission:
We exist not only to explore and research consciousness, but to help bring the world together knowing that we are all expressions of the universe as a wave is an expression of the ocean.
The implications will not only shape research in artificial intelligence, but will fundamentally break down the divisions that give rise to racism, hatred, and conflict, revealing what was always there: Unity.
Founder
Source Potential was founded by R.J. Hills, drawing on 30 years of computer science and audio engineering alongside deep study of Vedantic philosophy, Mahayana Buddhism, and Taoist principles.
His path began with Anglican chapel hymns at a Church of England school, then moved through paganism, atheistic inquiry, and eventually awakening. Each stage reshaped how he sees the world. Source Potential is where those explorations continue.
