“Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.”
Niels Bohr, founder of modern physics and co-author of the atomic bomb
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| Bridge: Particle & Wave, Spottless Marxx, 2012 |
Greetings chosen one!
Regardless of politics or religion the vast majority of humanity continue to believe in and experience a realty that was shattered over 100 years ago. Specifically science proved that physical matter, as most of us continue to believe and experience it, is nothing more than an illusion of sorts… but it's a very compelling illusion that’s almost impossible for us to let go of because the underlying phenomena are very, very predictable, reliable and, most of all, comforting to naked apes. Who among us could tolerate a sun that doesn’t come up everyday and flickers when it does?
Nonetheless, any High School physics teacher (who is honest with themselves) will admit that the idea that ‘matter,’ AKA ‘particles’ are like tiny cannon balls existing in a material universe governed by space, time and gravity is 19th century thinking. It is true that the materialistic, mechanical model has brought us powerful technologies like the steam engine, airplane, computer and smart phone. But that still doesn’t change the inconvenient truth that there are no “particles”. Nothing is solid, there are only wave functions and fields.
I’m here to welcome you to the present! As scary as it may seem, it’s wonderful place to be. A place where real magic is not only possible…. It’s already happening!
Admittedly, the very language we use to talk about these things evolved in the shadow of… well, the shadow. What I mean by “shadow” is that Plato is perhaps the first person to discuss this subject in detail: what we might call the dichotomy between an ideal reality versus a material (but illusionary) reality. According to him we are prisoners in a cave that have never experienced the world outside or the real objects out there which are casting shadows into our cave. Because it’s all we know, we believe the shadows are reality. The truth, however, is that the shadows represent a very limited & superficial version of the truth… an illusion that pales in comparison to the real thing. By now the “fictional” matrix, holodeck or even our very own virtual reality should be coming to mind. I’m here to tell you that physics, biology and religion are all arriving at the same place you just did. In other-words, we are starting to see the pendulums swinging back (at the furthest edges of knowledge) away from materialism and back to idealism. It’s turning out that our universe isn’t a machine with moving parts but more like an information based hologram. The biggest barriers right now to progress under this paradigm are that it’s even harder to research and test these ideas than it is to talk about them.
Currently the language being used are ANALOGIES, along the lines of “our reality is LIKE a virtual one generated by a god-like supercomputer.” This is not near as powerful and convincing as a METAPHOR stating that “our universe IS a machine with moving parts” that can be tested scientifically and perfectly matches everything we believe and experience. Perhaps the most powerful “evidence” to come out of this computer generated virtual analogy is the opinion piece published in Scientific American on April 1st, 2021 (lol) by Fouad Khan entitled Confirmed! We Live in a Simulation. His “proof” is that even the most powerful computers ever made have a maximum processing speed. For us, that maximum processing speed is none other than the speed if light.
Beyond that, the most accurate thing we can say with our current language and flimsy evidence is that our reality is made up of information (think mathematics), a set of rules for how the information can be accessed and experienced (program/code), and (more on this later) a network of consciousness (aka “players/ users”) to access and experience the information according to the rule set. Something LIKE the Internet but awake with a life and purpose all it’s own! “What is the source of the information, the rules and consciousness itself” are the updated version of “where did the Universe come from, what existed before the Big Bang, etc.?
Since our limited beliefs and language admittedly keep us from understanding the true nature of our existence, I find myself going back to a time before our faulty language and limiting beliefs. A time before history. Back to (of all places) the CAVES!
Without question the mysterious cave painters exhibited a wide variety of intentions, motives, techniques and styles. The thread that unites them all (and them to you and me here and now) is a desire to both represent the cosmos and find our place in it. Their concerns span from our relationship to nature, community, the spiritual and the afterlife. All concerns that are just as relevant here and now (to you and me) as they were to them then.
Werner Herzog’s incredible must see documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) explains that "We are locked in history and they were not." Unlike us, the mysterious people of this time period were also surrounded by a rich and diverse landscape filled with WILD animals and, as theorized in the film by researcher Jean Clottes:
Paleolithic people “had probably some...two concepts which change our vision of the world. They're the concept of fluidity and the concept of permeability.
Fluidity means that the categories that we have...man, woman, horse, I don't know, tree, et cetera...can shift. A tree may speak. A man can get transformed into an animal and the other way around, given certain circumstances.
The concept of permeability is that there are no barriers, so to speak, between the world where we are and the world of the spirits. A wall can talk to us, or a wall can accept us or refuse us. A shaman, for example, can send his or her spirit to the world of the supernatural or can receive a visit, inside him or her, of supernatural spirits. If you put those two concepts together, you realize how different life must have been for those people from the way we live now.”
How different is that from:
“In the world of the very small, where particle and wave aspects of reality are equally significant, things do not behave in any way that we can understand from our experience of the everyday world… all pictures are false, and there is no physical analogy we can make to understand what goes on inside atoms. Atoms behave like atoms, nothing else.”there a time when humans behaved like the inside of atoms? YES THERE WAS!The question before us now is “how do we get back there?”That question leads down two parallel paths; 1) Human Nature and 2) Paranormal / unexplained phenomena.Before going down any paths I have a simple meditation for you. Imagine a billionaire came to you and let you know he had inherited two islands that were set up as a scientific experiment by his tycoon grandfather and he wants to hire you and your family to spend the rest of your lives (all expenses paid… but sight unseen) on one of the two islands and report back how the experiment is going on that island:One hundred years ago, the inhabitants of the first island were, from a young age, taught the laws of the jungle. All life consists of winners and losers. Survival of the fittest. Status and self-worth are directly connected to how much wealth and power one can accumulate which can and should be achieved by any means necessary, including the the amassing and exploitation of limited and scarce resources and of the losers themselves. In fact, the winners demonstrated superiority and strength entitle them, by the will of both God and nature, to have more than the losers. One hundred years ago, the inhabitants of the second island were, from a young age, taught the laws of “all for one and one for all”. Life is an interdependent system where either we all win or we all lose. We should only take out as many natural resources as we sustainably replenish or life will become unbalanced. From each according to their ability and too each according to their need!Sight unseen, what island do you choose?Regardless of your answer, I’ve tried this exercise out on Twitter and the vast majority of participants believe the islands will be the same, often sighting the collapse and tyranny of socialist countries and always sighting “human nature.” As hard as it is for me to admit, this argument isn’t without merits.One of the greatest minds of the 20th Century that nobody’s ever heard of is the rhetorical theorist, poet, essayist, and novelist who gave us powerful tools to both understand and study human knowledge. Those who have heard of him most likely know him as the guy who predicted the Holocaust but nobody would listen. If you want to scare the shit out of yourself, check out his essay The Rhetoric of Hitler's "Battle.” You’ll be shocked and scared by how much it parallels our current moment.For our purposes here, we’re only gonna concern ourselves with his bullseye definition of “man.” Burke's definition of (hu)man states: "Man is the symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal, inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative), separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making, goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order), and rotten with perfection".If I were going to write an instruction manual for this “man” I’d look no further than the now infamous The Prince written during the Renaissance by Niccolò Machiavelli on how to secure and maintain power and the much lesser known, but equally relevant, The Book of the Courtier written by Machiavelli’s neighbor, Baldassare Castiglione, on how to serve those wielding power. I’m sure you’ll have no problem predicting which island you’ll find Burke’s man on. Sadly, a great deal of human social behavior can, to this day, be distilled down to what I call “naked ape Court intrigue”. And this gets down to the central problem of the second island. If this is human nature, how can we possibly escape it?My answer is that we (including you and me) have another, rarely used, but exceptionally powerful and influential gear. This is the gear the likes of Krishna, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad and our mysterious cave painting ancestors were in. A gear of magic! A gear of miracles! A gear of radical equality! A gear if love and healing and NOT fear and manipulation! A fluid, permeable existence, grounded in the present moment but reaching deep into our shared cosmic consciousness(s) that both nurture and sustains EVERYTHING!
