Living as a Wave vs. a Particle

                                     Living as a Wave vs. a Particle

                         “Everything is impermanent, everything is without a self.” 

                                                     Buddha

                                        

In quantum mechanics, related to light, there is the principle of wave/particle duality. This is essentially the fundamental nature of reality, depending on how we want to measure and observe. We can observe and set up instrumentation to see reality as wave like or particle like, but we can’t do both simultaneously. Just as we can’t know a particles position and its momentum simultaneously, the more we know about one, the less we know about the other.

Quantum mechanics is as close as we can get in science to mysticism. The good physicists, and scientists in general, are becoming more and more philosophical and mystical in their descriptions and models of reality. That’s because reality is just so weird and mysterious, have you noticed?!

Broadly speaking, there are two camps of mathematics that attempt to model/describe reality; 1) mathematics that directly describes a reality that is independent and objective. In this view, quantum mechanics is an ontological theory (ontology is the branch of philosophy dealing with what truly exists). For the second camp, however, the mathematics of quantum mechanics describes only our knowledge of the world. For these folks, quantum physics is an epistemological theory (epistemology is the branch of philosophy dealing with what human beings know and how they know it). Ontology vs. Epistemology: the world in-and-of-itself vs. just our knowledge about the world. This is the difference between the act of learning about our interactions with the world, not the world in-and-of-itself.

If we look at living a human life, we can see that there are wave and particle aspects, the aspect we inflect in our consciousness will determine, in large part, our fulfillment or our attendant suffering.

Life has patterns and periodicity, it ebbs and flows, reaches crescendos and then crashes on the beach before it starts the process all over again. This is true for breathing, heartbeats, thoughts, relationships, jobs, birth and death.

We live in a culture that is a tree culture, which means that we lose sight of the forest aspect of life because we get caught up in the details of the trees. We are inclined to get sucked into the particulars, and miss the bigger patterns of the bigger picture. Thus we often end up repeating patterns and expecting different results. This kind of identification is what the Buddha termed as the cause of suffering. It is the true meaning of idolatry, which is the worship of the golden calf vs. the living, moving, changing spirit.

To remain detached and free of these kinds of attachments is key to happiness. Living in the wave like flow of life is what the Buddha called skillful means.

In psychology, there is the tendency to believe that one’s biography is what makes us who we are. If I can only realize how my mother treated me when I was a child, I will have healthy relationships. This is an illusion. Sure, how my mother treated me is a context of a certain kind of influence, but understanding this will not make much difference in my present life flow, unless I consciously invest in creating new energetic patterns of dynamic. That is to say, I send out waves of intention that are loving and kind. I can consciously raise my energetic, vibrational wave pattern.

In classical mechanics, dynamics is concerned with the relationship between motion of bodies and its causes, namely the forces acting on the bodies and the properties of the bodies. In quantum mechanics, action at a distance is the concept that an object can be moved, changed, or otherwise affected without being physically touched (as in mechanical contact) by another object. That is, it is the nonlocal interaction of objects that are separated in space.

Quantum entanglement is an example of non-local interaction, it is a physical phenomenon that occurs when pairs or groups of particles are generated or interact in ways such that the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently — instead, a quantum state may be given for the system as a whole.

This is an example of how the whole cannot be separated into parts without greatly compromising wholeness. Buckminster Fuller incorporated this in his ideas of synergy, which is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Fritz Pearls drew on wholeness in his creation of Gestalt psychology.

The tendency of people to get caught up in a localized, particular, literal, fundamentalism comes out in many forms; religion, psychology, science, politics, etc. It is a confusion of a symbol compared to what a symbol refers to. We see this all the time when people get upset about a flag, a Koran, a Bible, a person, what someone says, some kind of personal insult, etc. This is what starts wars!

The things that we identify with and see as our self, such as our body, our name, our wife, our children, our job, our football team, our country, our religion, our political party, what we’ve done, awards we’ve won, letters after our names, etc. are our particular, localized sense of our self. We see them as a permanent unchanging sense of self. This is the function of the ego, to hold onto separate, particular, illusory notions of who we are.

In reality, we are none of these things, none of them define or describe who we are, how could they?! All of these things are constantly changing and dissolving before our very eyes, but we are trained not to see it. In Tibetan Buddhism, adepts are trained in the art and science of dissolving the sense of self. This is the Tantric tradition, and what the Tibetan Book of The Dead is about. In our culture, the ego learns to fear dissolving, we do everything we can to bolster the ego including all our psychological models, and the ego fights for its illusory life and not let go. This creates much suffering. The Beatles song “Let It Be” is a song of letting go, allowing, opening, and dissolving into primordial being. In the 12-steps we say; “Let go and let God.” Life is mostly about letting go.

It is infinitely more fulfilling to see ourselves as a wave of awareness; observing, experiencing, feeling, relating, entertaining, dancing, and dissolving into other forms. We are infinite in our being, recognizing the macrocosm in the microcosm, seeing infinity in a grain of sand, but seeing ourselves as a beach vs. a grain of sand.

We are a unity in a diversity of forms. Behind every form is the intelligent energy that cannot be destroyed but morphs into other concretized, crystalline incarnations of matter, ever creative in the dance of hide-and-seek to know and be who we really are. This is the dance of creation which has been described in many wave forms; an explosion, an ejaculation, a fart, a burp, a breath, a spoken, vibrational word, the blinking of an eye, the plucking of a string, and a dream.

All of these creation myths, from countless cultures, evoking a wave like undulation that brought the primordial formless void into manifestation, only to eventually be sucked back into the wave like vortex of emptiness to start the process once again.

Be mindful of your local, particular attachments, and loosen the grip of your ego into a more expansive wave of awareness that your consciousness is observing and surfing all the way home to the beach!