A 21st CENTURY UNDERSTANDING OF LIFE, DEATH, AND EVERYTHING ELSE

As neuroscience and physics are understanding more and more about our life in this universe, we’re confronting some very un-intuitive and mysterious revelations. For anyone who has spent time studying and attempting to understand metaphysics – literally that which exists beyond the physical or manifest existence we know as everyday reality – these recent discoveries make sense. But they make sense only to the degree we are willing and able to let go of all preconceived notions about life.

In physics, a quantum refers to the miniscule amount of any physical property involved in an interaction. Quantum mechanics is a body of scientific laws that has earned the description of the “wacky” behavior of photons, electrons, neutrons and other ever more esoteric particles that make up our universe. They move in waves of invisible energy. And as we know, EVERYTHING is ultimately energy. We, who exist as human beings, demonstrate the densest forms of energy, as do all the other forms that our physical senses recognize as parts of our reality.

When you close your eyes, try to imagine the infinite void that has neither a beginning nor an ending, total and complete blackness in every direction. This blackness, that can’t be seen with our eyes, only sensed with our minds, gives you an idea of the quantum field in which all possibilities exist….the field from which all creation emerges….the field of limitless Love, which I associate with God. As creatures “born” from this unbounded potential, we come into being as energies coalesce and ultimately merge as form. This process happens so quickly we can’t begin to comprehend it. As my grandmother used to say, faster than the blink of an eye, are we born, exist as human beings, and then die as we move on to our next great adventure.

And so it goes. Time itself is a manmade construct that allows us to live and operate in the manifest world in an organized fashion. You may have wondered who invented time. I’m not talking about clocks, days, calendars, centuries and so on. Rather, I’m considering TIME in its most inclusive meaning. Going back just a bit, Hipparchus proposed dividing day into twenty-four hours, twelve light and twelve dark, as observed on equinox days. But many people continued to use seasonably varying hours for centuries. (You may wonder who invented the concepts of hours or centuries!).

Bottom line to these and all other related time concepts: they’re arbitrary. Recording time is simply the way humanity has observed the “heavens” and subsequently significant events occurring in the natural environment. From sundials, star maps, the Gregorian calendar (introduced in 1583), which succeeded the Julian calendar (due to the latter’s erroneous rule for calculating leap years), the ways we tell time and its passage go on and on. The goal has been to sync the calendar with events. Turkey was the last country to stop using the Julian calendar in 1927. The United States converted its calendar in 1752.

Before calendars became a topic of consideration, time was still passing. Our ways of “telling time” were invented, not discovered. They are measurements humans found convenient, for many obvious reasons. So you might wonder, is time an illusion? Why is there SOMETHING rather than NOTHING? And that might be asked of anything! These are both scientific and philosophical questions. If you’re interested in “Pondering the Imponderables,” I invite you to check out The Templeton Foundation’s World Science Festival, on-line.

Back to quantum science for a moment. You may wonder how subatomic objects become something other than “weird.” When no one is looking, observing something, a particle has virtually limitless potential. And while time isn’t a particle, per se, it IS an illusion, according to theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli. Our perception of its movement doesn’t correspond to physical reality. According to Rovelli, the apparent existence of time – in our perceptions and in physical descriptions – comes more from ignorance than from knowledge.

Einstein showed us that time is a fourth dimension and that there is nothing special about “now,” “past,” or “future.” Much has been expressed and understood recently about the truth that everything that happens, happens NOW. What happens depends entirely on how one observes it. Thanks to Einstein and quantum mechanics, we’re finally coming to the understanding that the flow of time is a subjective feature of the Universe, not an objective part of any physical description.

Rovelli has noted that “A storm is not a thing; it’s a collections of occurrences.” While we may observe anything in nature or otherwise as a single, independent “thing,” events and even apparently static things are really the interactions of particles at a particular position in time. But time and space themselves really only manifest as a result of their interactions and the “web of causality between them.” Still curious, or simply confused? More information can be found in https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04558-7. So don’t take my words for what’s going on that represents our widely held understanding of reality.

In my most recent book, MIND over MATTER: An Old Adage Gains New Meaning, I did my best to de-mystify some of quantum science’s quirkiest understandings of life. And I wove some of those theories, such as the all-important observer theory (that nothing exists until it is observed) into my understanding of our Spiritual nature – which many understand as God.

Admittedly these theories are not easy to understand based on our popular beliefs in a material existence as explained through our physical senses. But if you’ve ever wondered, is there MORE? Yes, indeed there is. And it’s up to each of us to manifest that MORE according to our willingness to question and open our minds. For it is TO THE DEGREE we are willing and able to remember our truth – that we are spiritual beings, first and foremost, having this human experience – we will be ready to realize the tremendous and as yet untapped potential we each have to shape the future for ourselves and those to come. This ultimate (as of right now) shift in our thinking can only occur when we recognize that “consciousness creates physical manifestation, through which it then expresses itself in stepped-down, accessible form. As I further explain in MIND over MATTER, “the choices we make and our beliefs create our experiences and our world. We choose, therefore we are.”

I invite you to keep this exciting conversation going!