ANOTHER WAY TO HOLD IT ALL TOGETHER

ANOTHER WAY TO HOLD IT ALL TOGETHER ---

UN-CERTAINTY

CONTEMPLATING ETERNITY......
To begin this quick peep into spooky places, I invite you to look for a few moments into your life thus far. It's a good idea, especially at times when things seem to be losing some familiarity, just to check that you are indeed “on track”. You'll probably notice that, over that period of time since you can first remember, the world around you has evolved somewhat, and you have been carried along with it. You may also become aware of how there was life before you, and that you showed up in that eternal flow. Take a moment now to sense how you yourself are therefore an integrating part of this ongoing eternity. Give yourself a pat on the back and let your awareness dwell on those qualities about you which have proved to be eternal along your way.

Every movement, like waves on an ocean, is eternal. Every thing, embracing all that you are aware of and all that you are not, is an embodiment of eternity ….. and that eternal embrace includes me and you.

Just like, maybe, most people I spent the first decades of this life in a juvenile muzzy perception of “Some Stranger I call Me” -v- Everything Else. In this state,  everything-else, definitely Not-Me, looked like a sort of unified conglomeration of more or less alien people and events that, according to history books and tales of family forebears, seemed to have been going on and developing for quite a long time. Then as this Rip Van Winkle slowly woke up, I began to see the world unroll to reveal a multitude of intersecting, cohabiting, colliding and merging mini-eternities. Every family a web of eternities, every workplace, every garden, every woodland, every city, every soul a multitude of interlinked, interacting and interdependent eternities.

It took a little longer to realise that I am, and have always been, an integral part of all that, and there's a fair bit of mirroring going on, too. I must say my reactions to that have often been --- well, shall we say, ambivalent?

And as so often happens on these longer journeys, I've frequently found myself lately in a space described by TS Eliot in “Little Gidding” – “we arrive at the place we first began, and know that place for the first time.” I wouldn't call it 'full-circle' because it's more of a spiral in which the journey takes me inexorably toward…….

…..I suspect, more cosmic waltzing with another matilda.

In this context I took my present self this morning for a walk around the neighbourhood and a few of the multitude of eternities I live with locally, and brought back a few photos of some of the mini-eternities that said "Hello" as I was passing. As I was collating the photos back here at home, I realised yet again that each of these particular eternities exists within one overall all-embracing here-and-now Eternity.

There is only one eternity for every one and every thing. And it is this Eternity that is granting you and me this life and this reality. On each lap around, may our seeing of it be so much clearer and more subtly spectacular.

Without awareness, nothing exists.

And through Awareness, I Am (is) the creator of it all. [PS. I inserted the “is” in there to stop my ego rushing in with a whoop of See, I told you I did it!!

Perhaps, once we get past our ego, none of us is as insignificant as we believe.

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American robber barons in the 19th century were so rich that they didn’t have to do things the way ordinary people do. If they wanted to live in a French chateau or an Italian palazzo, for example, they didn’t have to build one from scratch. Instead a chateau or palazzo could be dismantled in Europe, its parts carefully numbered and packed into crates, and then shipped to America to be reassembled on the spot. 

If you wanted to ship the universe somewhere else, you could try to do something similar. You’d need four crates labelled Time, Space, Matter, and Energy—the basic building blocks for taking apart and transporting anything and everything in our universe. To save weight and freight costs, you could try to dis-mantle these down to their bare constituents at the quantum level. But when the courier shows up, he would scratch his head. “I can’t take this,” he’d say. “You’ve squeezed everything down too far. There’s no stuff in these crates. They're empty”

OK, this is fanciful, but it is an indicative summary of the basic quandary unearthed by the quantum revolution of a century ago. When space, time, matter and energy are studied at the very smallest level, they cease to behave as the familiar parts of reality that we think we know. Like our once-upon-a-time partners and other people's children, they're suddenly not at all what we previously always thought they were.

The everyday world holds together only for as long as all four ingredients remain stable. For example, in a game of billiards, the balls are lumps of Matter; the force with which they are hit is Energy; the distance between them is a measurement of Space: and the interaction when one ball hits another occurs over a duration of Time (measured against another (benchmark) duration, usually the hand of a ticking clock). To a physicist, any event we can see with our naked eyes on a regular basis comes down to a Newtonian machine with each piece causing another piece to move in a predictable way. In the world we've gotten to feel comfortable with, time, space, matter and energy are pieces that fit together like clockwork.

But we're now finding that fings ain't wot we fought they woz. If you look ever more closely, and keep breaking reality down further and further to find the component pieces that allow the machinery to work, you eventually come down to component particles that do not behave like clockwork at all! 

How inconveniently disturbing! If the bits don't follow the laws that cause and govern the whole to work, then how come the whole works like it does? What’s happening along the assembly line that we don’t know about? What, if anything,  are we missing here? Or are there parallel realities where the same components produce a universe that is working differently? Or are we just dreaming up the whole thing?

What we perceive as space, time, matter, and energy are suddenly now seen to be interconnected in ways we did not expect and cannot fathom. Probabilistic events occur without any apparent clockwork piece causing them to happen --- so much for our certainties around “cause and effect”! No matter how complex and sophisticated our models might get, we still cannot find the hidden variables causing these events to happen in the way that they do, except sometimes. And one clue to possible alternate realities lies in that annoying rider “except sometimes” phenomenon where usually predictable events fail to happen as expected. We’ve all experienced that, many times, haven’t we?

To make this predicament clearer, imagine that you and a friend are watching TV when your friend suddenly gets up and leaves. He says nothing, but fifteen minutes later he returns with a pepperoni pizza in his hands. Where did he go, why did he suddenly turn up with a pizza, and where did the pizza come from? You didn’t witness where he went, but you can infer that he went to a pizza place and bought one. However, your explanation is nothing more than an assumption based on your personal Code Book of Probabilities. And who made your assumptions the equivalent of holy writ? Yes, you did, and as we’re beginning to discover, there are great gaping chasms across things we’ve formerly been certain about.

In this example your assumptions don’t necessarily describe what may have actually happened, not with any certainty. Your friend could have gone out to mow your lawn but changed his mind, he might have gone home and microwaved a frozen pizza, or he might have found a pizza by the side of the road. Therefore, you only know what probably happened, using logical inferences, which are never as reliable as men would like to think. Certainty is out of reach unless you had a recorder on your friend the whole time, (and even then, it wouldn't explain possible changes of mind, and I wouldn't completely trust a videorecording anyway). You could, of course, ask your friend. But if for no discernible reason whatever he cannot say what happened, or he retorts “What pizza?” you may just have to opt for enjoying the pizza and allowing uncertainty to reign so that further insights have space and time to show up.

For the spaces that exist between quantum events, we’re faced with an even deeper level of uncertainty. Events on the quantum level happen simply because they have a chance to happen, and when you check in on them, all kinds of surprising and inexplicable things can pop up.

Scientists speak of a quantum foam, a field bubbling with activity at an extremely fine vibrational level of nature. What pops out of this foam we’ve identified with as space, time, matter, and energy. Does any of this foamy pre-space/time/matter/energy activity take place in what we think of as time and space? How could it? In that place, time and space haven't been created yet. Even more interesting – how can space and time possibly be the makers of themselves?

Here's the conundrum – we know the result, but we know neither the cause, nor the ingredients. To the logical mind it seems that space and time are made from things that precede and are beyond the spacetime domain. Somehow our universe pulls the trick of seeming to make itself, even though the starting ingredients are not recognisable. Every quantum experiment returns with things we can observe and measure, yet the kitchen where such things are baked—if there is a kitchen—is totally inaccessible and unhackable. And we don't have the recipes.

Not only can we not measure this kitchen or go there, we cannot even conceive of such a “cooking” state, because as you strip away time, there is no time in which to think. As you strip away space, there’s no place for your mind to exist. Strip away matter, and neither brain nor body cells can exist in the first place, and in the absence of energy, no work can be done and nothing can interact. Unlike a French chateau or an Italian palazzo, once you break the universe down and number the parts, reassembling it to plan is beyond the present reach of the human mind.

Physics usually gets around difficulties through mathematics, which is the last lifeline to flatland reality as we once knew it. As long as mathematical formulas seem to predict how time, space, matter, and energy are likely to behave, the models of quantum mechanics and general relativity work, and we can verify this using empiricism (the measured data which tells us what things are doing – providing we can see what they're doing and there's something to measure when it's over). This is the underlying assumption of the scientific method. Yet empirically our measurements and our models now are telling us that we cannot model every aspect of reality, in part because reality is radically ambiguous, and there are causes we can’t see, and there may be results we don't know about and therefore cannot measure. Philosophers and mystics will tell us that Reality always has been fluid, contradictory and utterly subjective, but by-the-book scientists are just beginning to wake up to that.

Every solid thing in the universe can be broken down into quanta, and every quantum possesses a dual nature. Quantum particles can behave like a thing, or like a wave, utterly opposite natures with contrary possible outcomes wrapped in one quantum. How do waves, which are totally invisible and without precise location, turn into a bicycle or a bicycle rider, which is visible and has a specific location? 

Are you starting to have doubts about things you believe to be absolute? Good. Now you can stand in the question What is the true nature of Integrity? But I digress…..

The only way to get under the skin of our historical beliefs about the nature of matter is very abstract.  A physicist might apply technical jargon, saying that “quantum coherence—the way quantum states maintain themselves intact—can be used to study how local, causal reactions can arise from the nonlocal and acausal or atemporal aspects of quantum systems.”

In everyday language, look at it this way. Imagine a vast still pond—the quantum field. Two children come along and start throwing rocks into the water, which sets up wave actions. As these waves cross each other’s paths, they set up patterns of interference, either adding to each other to create bigger waves (positive interference) or cancelling each other out (negative interference). There you have an analogy for the visible universe. As the quantum wave functions interact with one another, what physicists call “decoherence” occurs. The big and solid everyday stuff we know that operates normally in space and time is created by the interference of the phases of many, many quantum forms. 

There are huge complexities involved in matching such abstract concepts to reality, because that’s like breaking Mozart’s music down into vibrations on an oscilloscope, or using the mathematics of strings and knots to model the intricate rug on a Navajo loom, and then trying to hear the symphony or see the tapestry with things still in that primitive form. It can’t be done, especially if you’ve not heard the music or seen the tapestry in the first place.

Without a doubt, you can use maths to model the vibration of violin and piano strings, or to model the twists and turns of hand-knotted yarn. But the experience for you and me is nothing at all like listening to a Mozart symphony or gazing at a Navajo tapestry. Saying that a vibrating string explains how music is composed, or that knot theory explains the inspiration and reality of the rug, is nonsensical. Music does need vibration, but it also needs a human mind to create it and a human mind to hear it. Without the concept of music in our mind, there is no music. Without a weaver with a vision, knots of thread suggest no pattern. This undercuts reductionist thinking in drastic ways.

If there is no music without Mozart and no rug without a weaver, is this also true of the universe itself? Without us to conceive it and observe it, is the universe a universe at all? Or is it something else entirely? Or does it even exist anywhere but by a mutual agreement in our collective imagination?

Some great physicists didn’t consider this a preposterous conjecture. In no uncertain terms the great Werner Heisenberg declared, “The atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.”  He went on, “Only the experience of an observer forces the atom to indicate a position, a colour and a quantity of heat. All the qualities of the atom are derived--it has no immediate and direct physical properties at all.” 

Note the bit I've underlined. We already assume that, without a Creator, nothing exists. We now discover that, without an Observer, nothing exists. So, for anything to exist there must be a creator and an observer. And we already know now that every particle is dual. Does that make the label “universe” a misnomer? Should we be talking instead about a “dual-verse”?

Another reality is that when researchers take quantum measurements in a quantum information lab they, of course, select from the multitude of aspects nature manifests and narrowly choose those aspects they intend to observe. If they choose to measure whether a quantum object is “spin up” or “spin down,” nature will always give “spin” results and ignore other contexts like velocity or location. The qualities we are not observing become indeterminate and unpredictable while we measure the one quality we've chosen. If there are more qualities that we don't even know about yet, then our ignorance of possibilities becomes even more profound.

Take no heed of anyone who says “Impossible!”

Reality is no longer independent of the observer; there is a dance of incredible intimacy between creator, observer and reality.  Without both a Creator and an Observer, reality does not exist. With both in attendance though, the quantum universe only exhibits the kinds of behaviour we ask of it, which was precisely Heisenberg’s point. In nature itself there is no intrinsic sound, brightness, colour, or texture. These are constructs that arise because the human mind generates them. It’s all in our mind.

There’s an immense rift between those who see this as a credible argument and those who think it is nonsense, believing that the universe “out there” is self-existent and self-maintaining without our help. Before you hop on to one bandwagon or the other, stand back for a moment and give this next proposition some space................

Imagine that you are the first human being ever to set eyes on a horse. What is such a creature good for? Potentially you could ride it, load it down as a pack animal, get it to pull chariots, eat it, race it, use it as a projectile to ride against an enemy, breed it and sell the offspring, kill it for sport, tan its hide into leather, give it to children, get people to bet their money on it, paint its picture, or write stories about it. A horse left to its own devices has none of these properties, and no potential for them, until you, the human observer invent them. If you were a cow instead and were the first cow to see a horse, you wouldn’t think of any such properties because riding horses, eating them, killing them for sport, etc. are inconceivable to a cow mind, no matter how many thousands of years we wait. 

Compared to all the things we can imagine about a horse, there are many more we can imagine about nature as a whole—too many for our tiny minds to handle. Therefore, we automatically  and habitually simplify things to arrive at manageable models that suit our lifestyle, with boundary conditions that set imagination limits on what we look at, and how we can look at it. This means that we leave a lot of reality and possibility out of our bounds.  

At this point in human evolution, though, more awake adventurers at the frontiers of consciousness science can already see ourselves as model-makers with the freedom to create new models all the time, should we choose to do so. We don’t even need a logical reason to switch gears. Our choices might be totally arbitrary, or we might be influenced by people whom we believe understand things better than we do. But as a race, we are making gradual overall progress, and more and more people are catching up, each in their own areas. The dinosaurs are getting left behind.

By any measure, the deliberate, aware participation of human beings is critical to creating what we call reality. Yes, the glue of reality as we know it is conceptual, and humans are conceptualising machines. At bottom, even time, space, matter, and energy are just concepts, certain and therefore limited in scope. But it's beginning to dawn on us that without the certainty-loving human mind to invent such concepts, nature would simply be a single, ambivalent beingness, interacting with itself, unfettered by any boundaries and labels. To say this isn’t to devalue science, which is our touchstone for reality in the modern world. Yet things are changing. Science itself is becoming much more ambiguous and self-aware. By turning our attention to the observer’s creative role – to dance with the universe as co-creators – we may wind up being infinitely more powerful than we ever before imagined, or even now dare to dream ourselves to be. 

That which is innate and eternal in all creation is pure Awareness. This is what everything “is” --- Awareness materialising. And you and I are inseparable from everything, and from each other.

As I mentioned earlier, scientists are now calling this pure awareness quantum foam, a field bubbling with un-certain, infinite possibility. One time long ago there was a hiccup in I Am (Awareness) (perhaps caused by Awareness’ first question – What am I?) and a ripple radiated outwards, expanding through eternity. Part of what popped out of this ripple of foam we have since identified as space, time, matter, and energy.

So there's one answer to the question “What was before.....?”

Awareness preceded space, time, matter, and energy – Awareness, with human limitations (consciousness), is intrinsically what we are. [It’s the “human limitations” bit that allows us to bury our attention in stuff, create a false sense of self, and end up crashing into things. Our only real responsibility in this deal is to pay attention, and learn.]

Pure, infinite Awareness contains everything, and everything that is, is Awareness, in some form or another.

That is all.

Other than in the human mind, what is there to hold together?

Nothing.

That “nothing” that is Everything, suspended in possibility.

The Creator creates and recreates itself in every form imaginable and sets everything free with one simple wish ---

Be aware.

Keep being what you're being; keep doing what you're doing; keep thinking about what you're thinking about; keep feeling into what you're feeling – AND...............

Pay attention.

Through pure, unclouded Awareness, I Am is the creator of it all.

In my world, I Am (is) the creator of all I am aware of.

In your world, you are the creator of all you are aware of.

That licks all the toffee off our deepest fears of insignificance, doesn't it?

We are infinite beings experiencing the self-created delusions of finiteness and irrelevance.

Why?

Perhaps just to see what happens as a consequence, firstly when we sink to the despairing depths of what we think we are, then when we return, to realise harmoniously for the first time, what we really are..........

All of it. 

(Please be free to be un-certain of that).