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!

Personality, Ego, and The Divine

                                         Personality, Ego, and The Divine

 

“Growth of personality at the cost of essence, that is, a growth of the artificial, the unreal, and what is foreign, at the cost of the natural, the real, and what is one's own. Contemporary culture requires automatons. And people are undoubtedly losing their acquired habits of independence and turning into automatons, into parts of machines.... Man is becoming a willing slave. He no longer needs chains. He begins to grow fond of his slavery, to be proud of it. And this is the most terrible thing that can happen to a man."

Gurdjieff

 

One of the launching events of the Renaissance, was Cosimo de' Medici commissioning Marsilio Ficino to translate a Pagen work called The Corpus Hermeticum. Medici (whose family started banking as we know it), had the intelligence to know this would be invaluable to have this work translated from Greek into Latin. The effect of this translation was to see that the symbology, myths and images of the Pagan world are indeed, the very same imagery and motifs that are in Christian symbols.  This launched artists like Botticelli, daVinci, Michelangelo, etc. out of the darkness of Christian orthodoxy into a re-visioning, sexy, embodied art form that was a whole lot more than what the medieval Christian dark ages had to offer.  

 

 

 

 

What we know of and call ‘God’, is the personification of divine energy. Because we are rational beings living in material bodies and a material world, we try and make rational sense of what is not material, i.e. what is spiritual, so we give it names, create rituals, religions, and all the interpretations that our rational culture trains us to do. But the spiritual is transcendent of all this, that’s why it’s called spiritual! Our concepts only point to something beyond the concepts when it comes to what is divinely spiritual. This is why art and nature are such pure experiences of transcendence, they move, evoke, and inspire (literally fill with spirit-breath into), spiritual experience.

 

 

We create suffering when we try to put spirit in a bottle, label it, and market it as a known and knowable quantity. Can anyone possibly articulate and package the love they have for their children? It’s a mystery, something that is real and tangible, but not knowable and communicable. The only way it is communicable is in the way you show your love, herein lay the practice of physicalizing what is spiritual.

The book “The five love languages” is helpful in this respect, because it helps people acknowledge the ways they feel loved, and gives their partners guidance on how best to express love in a way that your partner will feel it.

 

 

Being willing to take the perspective of another is one of the hallmarks in the evolution of consciousness. We generally are so wrapped up in our own perspective that our ego won’t allow another consideration in.

This is quite odd when you think of it, because we have other perspectives all the time. For example, when we watch a good movie, read a good book, or see/hear something hilarious that cracks us up, we instantly have an experience and perception beyond ourselves, which is beyond our ego personality. Even this saying “Cracks me up,” is denoting a crack in my ego egg that makes an omelet out of my usual perceptions!

 

 

It is a delightful experience to be cracked up, this is why people do drugs, to get outside themselves, the word ecstasy means being outside one’s self, so it’s in our language that it’s a pleasant experience.

 

 

 

Another way we daily go outside our usual ego perceptions is in our dreams. Every night we find ourselves in a strange land and have perceptions and experiences that are quite beyond our usual daily experiences. If you pay attention to your dreams you will find that they all make sense in a way that is quite beyond your ego, it is a way to come into wholeness and the experience that you are way bigger and more than you ever imagined, in fact, you are infinite!

We also step outside our usual perceptions with our pets. That’s one of the reasons pets are so therapeutic to be around, because they will draw us out of ourselves, out of our pain and neurosis. A dog is so genuinely itself, so authentic in its being, that is to say unpretentious, that this facilitates us to get outside our usual pretentions.

 

 

We also project and personify our pets just as we do our gods, giving them all kinds of silly names, coats, costumes, and stories about what they’re thinking or feeling. We imagine that they enjoy looking glamourous, or are feeling really guilty about chewing up the pillow, and we video them with some story we made up when we catch them in their bad behavior and we are the merciful god that bestows forgiveness as we document our latest u-tube video that will bolster our ego.

This is the same game we play with religion. We come up with some localized form of the divine which we create all this pageantry, ceremony, and dogma, and proclaim this as the “truth” that everyone should see and accept.

 

 

We create conditions and myth around our interpretations and get others to buy in, sign up, and “spread the good news.” It’s the same game that we play in capitalism, where we have a product or a service that we figure out how to market and create a niche that will create a false sense of need.

 

 

This is the history of bait and switch humanity that has displaced our spiritual nature in terms of a limited version of ourselves that is afraid and vulnerable.

 

 

Just as Darth Vader is a sad and lonely man masquerading as a powerful villain, so too our ego, both individually and collectively, is hiding under the cloak of pious grandiosity.

 

 

 

This time of the year is when the Kraken (a word designating an unhealthy animal or something twisted) is unleashed unto the world at shopping malls, on the internet, and around the family dinner table. It is the devouring ego writ large, whose greed, and imperial lust consumes consumers whilst they are consuming. Save yourself whilst ye can, lest your ship and crew perish! 

 

Because we are beginning a New Year, we owe it to ourselves, our children, our planet, and our pets to stop believing in fairy tales that make us think we're special and that daddy is bringing us presents if we behave like we think he wants us to, that is simply childish!  

 

 

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