About the Researcher and Author

Alex Burdyga, PhD

Former cardiac researcher at Oxford. Reluctant convert. Fellow investigator.

Alex Burdyga, PhD

The Short Version

A scientist who followed the data somewhere unexpected

I am not a spiritual teacher. I am a lab scientist who got cornered by evidence.

For years I was a research scientist, at the University of Liverpool and then the University of Oxford. I lived inside the scientific method: design the control, blind the experiment, trust nothing you merely want to be true. That training never left me.

I was a committed materialist. Then, in 2020, the findings of quantum physics shattered my everyday picture of reality, and I could not un-see it. So I did the only thing I know how to do: I treated the question as a research problem.

If my conclusions were bias, a blinded panel would expose them. It exposed materialism instead. The model that won says consciousness is not produced by your brain; it is what you are made of.

That is why this project exists. Not because I wanted it to be true, but because the data refused to go away.

The Long Version

How I got here

By training, I am a cell biologist. I hold a PhD in cellular and molecular physiology from the University of Liverpool, where I studied how aggressive pancreatic-cancer cells spread, and I carried out postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford on microdomain signalling in heart-muscle cells.

I was a strict materialist until 2020, when the findings of quantum physics broke my everyday picture of reality apart. I could not let the questions go, and they sent me reading across forty domains: more than two hundred books and four hundred lectures.

What began as reading soon became something more direct. About two and a half years in, I spontaneously began having lucid dreams, more than four hundred to date, which let me explore consciousness from the inside and, with deliberate intent, test much of what near-death and similar experiences report.

Over more than five years I distilled some 300,000 words of notes, and one model kept emerging: that reality is a virtual-reality-like experience occurring directly within consciousness, much as a computer generates a VR world through a headset. When AI context windows grew large enough in early 2025, I gave one my entire dataset and asked how well the model fit the evidence. The answer came back a remarkably good fit. Rather than trust a single AI, I cross-examined others and built the blinded, calibrated, cross-model instrument behind this study, completing it fourteen months later.

I have presented this work at the Spiritual Awakenings International (SAI) conference twice: in 2024 on my lucid-dream research pointing to consciousness as primary, and in 2026 on this study.

Full professional background and credentials: LinkedIn · ORCID 0009-0004-5166-6555.

The Approach

Three commitments

Rigour first

Every method, prompt, score, and reconciliation is preserved, and all of it will be published openly. If the work has holes, I want them to be findable.

See the research →

Plain language always

A truth that cannot be explained simply has not really been understood. So the whole investigation is told for everyone, in a clear, accessible book, no PhD required.

See the book →

No gurus

I stand next to you looking at the evidence, never above you holding secrets, and you keep your own judgment at every step. The aim is to hand you the highest-resolution map of reality we have, so you can navigate this experience for yourself.

See the Compass →

"Show me the data" is not the enemy of science and truth. It turned out to be the way home.