Saturday, April 23, 2011

New science needed


Quantum physics, quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics—who could possibly keep abreast of that field? Would anyone want to? What do photons, electrons, positrons, quarks, quirks and sparks matter?


One thing, though—they say that matter and energy are fundamentally the same. That’s very interesting. Might there be a third aspect of stuff’? Maybe consciousness is an integral part of the equation. I’m curious about whatever sub-particle it is that carries consciousness on its back.

So let’s invent another science. We’ll add Quantum Consciousness to the curriculum, the science that studies consciousness by examining its quantum-sized units. If you start with a single centre of consciousness (no, I’m not volunteering to step into the cyclotron) you could smash it up into a helter-skelter of apparently discrete centres. They’d be particle-wavelet whatevers that can be assigned attributes of mass, energy and now consciousness. 




Who knows?—their study might lead to an explanation of the whole shebang, and maybe rip the veil off Old Mother Maya herself. It might explain how life as we know it has resulted from the explosion of a single, original, concentrated centre of consciousness-essence. For the sake of convenience, let’s refer to that whole before-and-after conglomeration—that it/them/us assembly—as God.
 

So how do we get a grip on all of that? What are we then as individuals? How are we to regard ourselves? What does each of our lives consist of, and how do we fit into the overall picture? I ask, because most of us feel that we’re helplessly adrift. We’re passengers in a ship in the midst of an absolutely perfect storm. We really need a lifeboat here. Save Our Souls.



Fear not. Help is at hand. As Douglas Adams wrote (in large friendly letters), DON’T PANIC. (Arthur C. Clarke thought that this was perhaps the best advice that could be given to humanity, so it can’t hurt for me to repeat it.) I’ll follow that up with Be Here Now, a phrase that Baba Ram Das used for his book. EckhartTolle advised, “All you really need to do is accept this moment fully. You are then at ease in the here and now and at peace with yourself.” To achieve that, he imagined himself sitting at his shoulder watching himself with detached objectivity.
 

Now that we’ve calmed a little, we’ll sink further into Czerner’s concepts of ‘eternity’ and ‘total unity’. He claims they lie outside our direct awareness, but let’s examine them anyway. 
 

Tolle, Richard Alpert and others state that the present is all that there is. It is the only time that we have, they say. I would like you to notice something else about it.
 

Don’t you sense that the present is at one and the same time nothing? It has no substance or duration. The present is gone as soon as it arrives. It lasts not an instant. It lies between the future and the past, thinner than the thinnest skin.
 

We might easily overlook the meniscus of the present and split time into only the past and the future, if it weren't for the fact that we skate or glide eternally across its surface. Let’s give the present moment a measure of credibility. Let us think of it as having a certain substance. We’ll give it the thickness of one quantum of consciousness. 



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