First published Feb. 2007 in my original blog on DList called "Curved Tantric Space." Last reposted on the original Whistling Dog Nov. 13, 2007.
There are something like 200 to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way, and our spiral galaxy is the just one of perhaps 100 billion galaxies in the part of the universe that we can see (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy). Let me repeat: that we can see. Because what we can see from earth is simply a sphere of stars in every direction from the earth, and as the Catholic Church learned from Galileo, Tycho Brahe and other early astronomers, the earth is not the center ... of anything.
Here's another astonishing fact: In spite of the popular notion that the universe is something like 13-14 billion years old, astronomers know that this estimated age is based on measurements taken from the background radiation supposedly left over from the Big Bang. The age of the known universe is not based on how far we can see across the heavens. That distance is more than three times as far, about 45 billion light years in any direction, and any astronomer will tell you that he or she has no idea how large the universe really is or how old it really is. Many scientists who look at the stars accept a view more akin to the beliefs of ancient Hindu yogis: that the universe is infinite, and infinitely old. The yogis might have added ... and created by an infinite consciousness that had no beginning and will have no end.
As difficult as the idea of infinite is for us to grasp in our daily lives -- except perhaps when it comes to enduring the faux-presidency of the current occupant of the White House -- I agree with the astronomers and Hindu yogis about the nature of existence. I believe that we, too, like the stars and galaxies, are merely expressions of an infinite consciousness that is living out through each of us one of an infinite number of possible paths of existence.
When Joseph Campbell advised Bill Moyers (http://www.amazon.com/Power-Myth-Joseph-Campbell/dp/0385418868) long ago in his series 'The Power of Myth' to 'follow your bliss,' he wasn't making a snarky joke at Moyer's expense, he was stating a profound truth: if we each follow the deepest most enduring desire of our hearts, we give physical expression to the conscious intent of the universal consciousness that is expressing itself through our personalities and our bodies.
Heart, mind, body, spirit in each of us are simply different vibrations of that single purpose expressed in each of us by the universal consciousness to be 'who we are.' We can recognize a song sometimes from just a few notes, and the rest of the song is instantly recalled to our inner ears in all its verses and choruses. We can recognize someone we care about, even far across a room, by a signature spoken phrase, a gesture, or the shape of his ears or the color of his hair. Our senses, in fact, are designed to relay stimuli to our brain, and it is our brain's job to sort out the familiar from the unfamiliar by comparing those stimuli to an already established grid of patterns we have experienced. In this way, we can recognize the distinctive surface of brick with our fingertips, coffee by its smell, a summer evening breeze by its softness and warmth, the coming of autumn by the color of leaves and the way they crunch under our feet.
Compiled and sorted together, our ever-growing body of experiences, and the patterns of likes and dislikes we glean from our stroll through life, constitute who we 'are.'
All of these patterns are not accidents. They are the products of repeating vibrations in specific patterns in the energies that underlie everything that we see, like intersecting ripples in the water on a lake. Physicists have even begun creating a mathematical structure -- variously known as 'String Theory' or M Theory' -- to explain these patterns. (Yes, Virginia, this is real.) These ripples -- like the sounds of violin strings serenading our ears in a concert hall -- produce what we see, smell, hear, taste and touch around us, everything that we perceive as solid matter. We have each come to recognize the properties of the physical world around us from repeated experience with these patterns. And that experience -- that 'knowing' -- is what the universe is after, in all of its infinite variety.
Patterns certainly explain how we recognize 'love' when we see it. 'Falling in love' is really the act of releasing ourselves -- either consciously or unconsciously -- to the flood of brain chemicals that make us 'lovesick.' (I love that word; it has so many layers to it.) When we encounter someone who has the right pecs, abs, hair color, eyes, voice, way of walking and speaking and looking into our lovesick orbs, the patterns our brains have learned to associate with romantic and sexual pleasure can drive us crazy-as-March-hares right into the arms of (yet) another boyfriend. (Whether this is good or not might or might not be the topic of another blog entry. I haven't decided yet.)
But lets take this another step. The matter that we taste, touch and feel around us is, in fact, as much empty space as the infinite universe that we see above at night. Only a very tiny fraction of what we perceive as solid is actually 'stuff' that we can measure and study, and ultimately that stuff is just energy ... just vibrations intersecting. The rest is vacuum.
Physicists say they have no idea how far down the rabbit hole they will have to look to find the smallest energetically charged particle(s) that may underlie this material world -- the one that Madonna is so fond of. But even she will tell you probably, from her study of the Kabala, that the material world isn't really real. It only seems like it is to us, because we have come to associate the patterns our senses feed to our brains with actual surfaces (gas, liquid, solid -- take your pick). But those surfaces are actually illusions created by the electromagnetic forces that bind atoms and molecules together. And those atoms and molecules are the products of patterns of vibrations created in the substructure of the universe.
We can study the interactions of various elements and compounds in chemistry 101, but they don't really exist in the way we think they do. We can smell them, drink them, suck on them, stroke them and fondle them, but that latte you are drinking at Starbucks is more an illusion created in your own brain than the real creamy goodness you believe it to be. I'm not saying that if you leave that latte glass on the table that it will disappear when you walk out the door before the barista can pick it up. It will not. Still, physics has already proven that this wafer-thin dimensional plane is more like 'The Matrix' than anything else I could compare it to. That is also true.
Does existence have limits? Your guess is as good as mine. But I believe, as do some physicists, that the universe is really a fractal. It is infinitely small in one direction, and infinitely large in the other. And in spite of how we can describe it in all of its infinite detail, the universe doesn't really exist. And neither do we. Except in our heads, on some fundamental level.
And yet, of course, you are reading this blog right now. And before human beings walked out of Africa in search of food some million or so years ago, it was not humans swimming in some long ago lake in what is now the Sahara Desert, but mastodons and giant alligators, and long before them, dinosaurs and trilobites and long before them, pre-Cambrian fish, bacteria and algae. None of the truth of our existence changes the fact that other life preceded human beings. We have the fossil records to prove it.
But this new knowledge -- that how we perceive the world around us is also part of the equation of reality -- makes our quest to find the truth of it all a little more interesting. In spite of all the improbabilities surrounding our existence, we exist. 'I think, therefore I am,' said Rene Descartes in 1637 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito_ergo_sum). Physicists have proved in recent years that his statement was more prescient than anyone before our time could have known.
The joke goes in 'Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy' that the answer to 'the ultimate question' is '42,' and that the earth was created as a computer program to decipher the meaning of that ultimate answer to the ultimate question. Perhaps author Doug Adams wasn't entirely joking. Because his farcical assertion is close to right in its own way: self-consciousness, in the pure sense of the word, allows for curiosity, and it is our need to explore, to ask questions -- to understand -- that has led us to this new way of looking at the universe that I've discussed in this essay.
The current generations of human beings -- our seniors, ourselves, and our juniors -- are unlikely to know any ultimate truths for certain. I doubt even the aliens known as 'Grays' from the Pleiades -- or wherever -- even know the Truth (if they even exist). But we can each begin to experience the world and our lives in a different way because we have today scientifically proven insights into the nature of reality that our parents and grandparents did not. Because this knowledge is new. No human beings before our time really understood this single scientific truth: our perception of reality can effect change on that reality, because the structure of reality is energy. And energy is interactive.
The next time you wake up, try an experiment with yourself. Try to step out of your own daily patterns for a day and experience the world the way you saw it as a child, when every moment was new. Instead of doing the usual -- moving from bed to bathroom to kitchen to closet to hallway to subway or car to coffee to work to meetings to lunch to meetings to bar to subway or bus or trolley or cab to home or gym to dinner to movies or clubs to kissing or fucking to sleep -- remember to look up at the stars and connect with the infinite. Remember to look down at your feet and connect with whatever surface seems solid under your feet. Then look inward and connect with who you are, right now, without judgment, just acknowledgement. Then look around and take in all the people whom you love, and who love you, visit the places that give your life meaning, and recall all the memories you cherish.
Because none of it is real, or important, ultimately, except to you. And if you are not happy with your life, you alone have the power to change it.
This is not new age mumbo jumbo. This is now a scientific truth.
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