Into The Light

An essay by Tame Bear for "TameBear Radio", Friday June 16, 2006.

This is a trascript of the podcast from "TameBear Radio" titled "Into The Light".

Well on a more cheerful note, I am now ready to present my essay of the week, on a theme that I expect to build upon over several episodes, because its scope and magnitude is so grand in scale that I haven't a hope of conveying it in more than a framework manner with this initial brief podcast. And I expect this really gets you thinking, and I hope that some of you will want to respond with ideas of your own, so today I'll begin this essay by inviting you to record and send us your own audio feedback when I'm through here, and we'll learn from each other's wisdom and perhaps come to some better understanding... you see the topic I want to address is "the nature of existance". How is it that we exist in the cosmos? How did we come to be? along with everything else that exists? How is it that we come into being, for a time we live and breath, and our bodies and minds grow and change, and for a time we interact with the physical substance of the world, we communicate, we set on goals and accomplishments, we make a play for immortality through our words and actions, and then in time we decline, fade, and decay to nothing again, and within a short span of time every memory of our having existed is long gone.

Yes... yes, you see that's what I want to talk about today.

Let's begin with perception. We say to ourselves, "I exist." I perceive that I exist -- I am self-aware: a mind, inside a body, amidst all the innumerable objects of a physical world, on a planet in a galaxy among billions of other galaxies in an unimaginably large universe of physical stuff. How do we perceive this? Why, through our senses - we see the stuff around us, we touch things, feel things, hear things taste things smell thiings. We have this idea, that all the sensory input is telling us that the world is real, it's there, it exists as we do, as we perceive it, and we find ourselves embedded in it, perceiving creatures in a material world.

Ok, call me a skeptic, but this reminds me an awful lot of the Matrix, a virtual reality, a made up universe designed to fool us into thinking we are distinct living organisms inhabiting a real physical environment. But really, who's to say we aren't just watching a clever movie played out in brilliant holographic detail in front of these sense receptors we call eyeballs, a rich visual stimulus that is then interpreted by a jelly mass of brain tissue inside our skulls, a consensual hallucination that we have all come to agree upon, which fixes our sense of self within a particular place and time. And who's to say we aren't illusion within virtual illusion all the way down to our core? Maybe you don't buy that -- certainly it's easy just to accept what our senses tell us. And certainly we must live our everyday lives as if all this stuff is just what it seems.

But walk with me aways and let's take this road further. If I am not what I seem, then what am I? And what of all the other people and things I perceive to exist out there beyond my own skin? In fact all of us and every thing is in the same odd predicament, seeming to interact with many other people and animals and plants and rocks and things.

Take my cat for instance. Macallan seems to have a life of his own, to perceive his surroundings and move about through the garden. He catches prey, he tastes food, he feels heat and cold, he breathes the air as I do and presses his paws against the cool earth. Macallan too must then be deluded, virtual reality within virtual illusion, layer within layer of built-up sensing and interpreting, all the way back to the deep core "I am." And so we must imagine that every living thing is at the mercy of this deep illusion of its own distinct existance.

But why stop there? Consider a grape vine -- it exists, it too breathes the air, it moves it grows, maybe it thinks? It certainly perceives the world around it, in such a way that it grows towards that bright spot in the dome of sky that appears to be the sun... The grape vine, in its season grapes out , purposefully it appears, to our immense satisfaction. And yet it too must fall under the illusion that it exists. Surely something of grapeness is there trailing along the fenceposts.

Then take the dull dead rock that borders the garden. Now there is a life! Two ice ages ago it was a decent sized boulder, and the snows of time cracked it into a family of rocks, scattered by glaciers and floods and slides, buried and unburied countless times, picked up and carried and placed, as if that were it's destiny, and finally to be ground down to dust ages from now. How is it that a rock exists in space and time amidst an everchanging world that appears to knock it about from place to place?

You see, we are all and everything in the same predicament together; we appear to be stuff that knocks about with plenty of other stuff, existing, or so it would appear.

Now don't get me wrong, I am not claiming that you and I and everything else in the whole damn universe is a fiction, and that nothing at all actually exists anywhere and that there is no time and space even. No, I won't go that far. But I am led by this train of thought to consider that the world of things may in fact be quite very different from what all we actually perceive.

Ok, that leaves us with but the barest of existance. Stripped of all the layers of illusion, we are still things knocking about with other things. And actually that fits quite well with what the physicists tell us -- that we are in fact made up of a probabalistic haze of subatomic particles dancing a jig of existance, of creation and annihilation, merging, splitting, and colliding. AND, in fact the existance of these tiniest of things switches states, back and forth, back and forth, between two kinds of existance: mass and radiation. And the only difference between the two is how fast they are moving. A tiny mass, or potential energy, when accelerated to relativistic speed, is converted to kinetic energy, or radiation.

Imagine a photon, a single packet or quanta of energy, the smallest pure unit of existance. Is it a particle -- like a tiny pebble? -- or is it a wave, like the path of a snake? -- Is it a massless streak of energetic radiation moving at light speed through the open spaces between an entire universe of tiny pebbles? Or is it a tiny bullet pierceing a dense veil of ephemeral light energy? In fact either image works to tell the story at this deepest level of existance.

Pat yourself on the back if you've managed to come all this way with me. We are now about to take the road home again. You hold in one hand a universe of tiny particles, and in the other a glowing sphere of pure light energy. In fact the two are one in the same. Hold that thought... we will come back to it, in a moment.

On a clear summer night, perhaps even tonight, you can gaze up into the sky and see stars light years away. It has taken, in some cases, billions of years for that light to reach across the expanse of space, to meet your eyes, here at this moment. Every distant star is radiating light in every direction, just like our local star, the sun. Your eye intercepts a continuous photon stream of light energy from the distant star, while all around it is the blackness of space. And yet that black space is not empty. It is filled by the light from that star radiating in every direction. And every other star you see is doing the same thing, pouring out it's light into space, an uncountable number of photons streaking outwards, in every direction, filling space. And yet all you see is those few rays that happen to intercept and tweak the rods and cones of your retina. Meanwhile, the immense expanse of space is FILLED WITH LIGHT traveling in every direction, all completely unseen by you.

Now then, take an enormous chunk of space, say something measuring two billion lightyears across; a space so huge it takes a single photon of light two billion years to pass from one side to the other. Imagine then how this space is filled with light, light from all the stars, light moving through this space in every possible direction. Got it? Ok, let's look closer. Within that space, we ought to be able to tease out a certain great number of photons that are all moving along parallel or nearly parrallel tracks as they traverse this immense space. They crisscross the paths of many other light rays of photons, all moving in every direction; but keep focused on that subset of photons tracking in parallel, racing at light speed across time and space. In fact if you can, try to ignore all that other light that's passing through in every other direction, just hang with those parallels, put yourself right into the midst of them, can you see it yet? Have you got this picture?

Why, relative to one another, this massive subset of parrallel-racing photons doesn't actually appear to be moving at all! Take away all the other light in this enormous chunk of space, and you really have no sense of movement at all. Without all the other light as a reference, there is no way to tell what's moving and what's not. And what you are left with is a mass of jiggling particles, perhaps each with some slight relative motion to their neighbors, but essentially stationary.

We are now back to the world of subatomic particles! Stick yourself into the middle of all that, you exist after all, right? YOU are a large cluster of these subatomic particles coalesced into a bodily form, and surrounded by other clusters and clumps of particles. Only now you also know that you and everything around you is also in a most fundamental sense, pure light, photons tracking across immense space more or less in parrallel with many many other photons, and that subset of light radiation is YOU, your brain in your skull standing in the garden under the night sky, among all the stars that you can see, and all of it, everything you can perceive with your senses, moving all together at tremendous speed across the tracts of spacetime. And you, all this time, blissfully unaware of this incredible aspect of your very existance.

We are once again back home where we started, but I hope you have come to see the place with new eyes and a fresh perspective. It doesn't mean you can call in sick tomorrow and just stay home contemplating the immensity of life, the universe and everything. We still have stuff we gotta do, and so here we are back in the real, physical world, with all it's tasks and goals and responsibilities as we live day to day. But if you derive anything from this existential mindgame of metaphysical being, I hope it is a sense of wonder at what a marvelous place we inhabit, a mystical world awash in a bright glow of light, on a scale that truly challenges the imagination.

- - - - - -
If you wish to comment on this essay, you can email "tamebear@wisdomroad.com".

Last update: 2/22/08; 2:02:04 PM.