April 18th, 2008 - Upon Which I Hatch

Children ask the most profound questions, probably because they don’t know that there is such a lack of people with an answer. They haven’t categorized the world into things that can be known and things that cannot be known. That seems to come at a later date in time, after children with those questions have given up or have been told they should just quit asking futile questions. When you age, you learn limits, you learn what it means to be finite, to have a beginning and end, forgetting that all of those limits are self-imposed. You stick with what you feel can be known and throw out everything that you define which you feel cannot be known. What is known are things that you can grasp in your hands and hold and have a statistic associated with it. What cannot be known is everything else, and there is a lot of everything else. Just look up.

Science teaches man to conduct experiments to determine the nature of reality. They want repeatable results. They want information which can be directly tested over and over again that will give them the same results, regardless to the person who is doing the experiment. These experiments are meant to collect data, rows and rows of it filled with numbers. When the end of the experiment is over, what is generated in most cases, however, is a series of percentages branded as truth. You will see lines in abstracts that say things like, “in 3% of the cases, a general sense of nausea was reported.” Armed with this percentage, scientist claim they have learned something about the external world, how it functions, what it means to be alive. But there is a fundamental problem with such percentages—armed with the knowledge that 3% of people experience nausea after, say, taking some chemical, you cannot look at anyone and say with any certainty whether they will experience nausea or not. Which side of the percentage will someone fall? You cannot say. The certainty is impossible. If a percentage says anything about reality, it says that one cannot be certain. Science points to this uncertainty more than anything. Science says, “Look, you may think you know, but you don’t know. The world is filled with percentages. Beware of those who claim they know otherwise!”

People who are less scientifically oriented feel that science itself suffers from this same uncertainty. “How can anyone claim for certain they know that I don’t know? Isn’t that a form of knowing, so aren’t they contradicting themselves? You can’t escape knowing something. I knew when my brother died. I knew when my sister fell down a drain. I knew when someone needed me when there was no direct evidence or reasons to believe these things. I knew, just as you claim to know something, so take your bloody experiments and piss off. People know things all the time.”

Scientists who hear of events such as this say that the individual who knew their brother died experienced a chance occurrence. They got lucky, in other words, by having their subjective perception fall into a self-validating configuration, but ultimately, people cannot know anything that are not perceived by the five senses -- only percentages and the statistics, generated via scientists.

What is happening in both the scientific mindset and the more personal, intuitive mindset is validation. People lean on one form or method of thought like a crutch and use it to limp through life. The crutch validates the need for itself, and it is almost impossible to tell whether that crutch is causing someone to limp, or whether a person limps just so they need the crutch.

Science has loads of cases of this perceptual trick that reality plays on the observer. “What causes the high levels of dopamine in a schizophrenic? Is the level of dopamine the cause of the schizophrenia, or are the dopamine levels high because of the schizophrenia?” On a more general level, does the mind give rise to consciousness, or does consciousness give rise to the mind? Does the shore create the waves, or do the waves create the shore? Do the children give rise to the parents, or do the parents give rise to the children? What came first—the chicken or the egg?

This problem is so fundamental that I don’t believe it is a problem at all—the problem itself creates this place, otherwise known as the universe. If the problem didn’t exist, then neither would we, so what’s the problem? It is this beautiful, pulsing orb of contradiction that is embedded deep in everyone’s psyche. This “problem” is that which causes a configuration to occur—any configuration desired, much like the self-validating crutch. In physics it is called the “wave function collapse” which is the moment where that infinite world of potentiality somehow collapses into a particle form. If the chicken cannot exist without the egg, and the egg cannot exist without the chicken, how can either one exist? The answer is simple, but frustrating: the chicken came from the egg and the egg from the chicken—they were self-validating.

Someone may look at that and say it is impossible—everything has a cause. But look at the invention of black holes and quasars. For there to be a black hole, there needs to be a quasar. A quasar cannot exist without the black hole, and vice versa. So did the black hole create the quasar, or did the quasar create the black hole? The chicken paradox is less frustrating here: the quasar came from the black hole, and the black hole from the quasar. Why is that so difficult to grasp?

The problem itself leads us to look elsewhere, however. If, for instance, everything has its polar opposite as it extends in two directions at once, what created the disturbance of the polar opposites in the first place? What is in the middle, so to speak, of a quasar and a black hole that is causing them both to exist at all? What exists in between the chicken and the egg that is causing them both to exist at all?

Coming from the world of right-brain thinking, to me what makes them both exist is an encapsulated—some would say “caged”--infinite consciousness. And all those fuzzy “problems” like the chicken and egg arise because that infinite consciousness has been momentarily captured within a finite structure, whether that structure is a black hole/quasar, a chicken/egg, or you/your parents. “What created the universe? What existed prior to the universe for it to have been created? Where was I before I was born, and how far does my consciousness extend? Could things invent themselves, both forwards and backwards at the same time, and be both the cause and effect? It is mentally infuriating, and I think it is so because that infinite consciousness that is within you is stuck trying to grasp infinity through the veil of a finite world and is looking at things as if they actually have a start and an end, as if they have definition. It is a game. And it does not make sense because there are a number of loose ends in this momentary expression of yourself. Your infinite consciousness is seeking form, and it does so, just as you do so—by trying things out and being something, albeit temporarily.

Look at a muscle—for it to grow, there is an expansion and a contraction. If we really are an infinite consciousness, what better way to grow then to contract, temporarily, into a finite state of being, so we can expand infinitely?

If you believe everything can only be grasped and understood via statistics and probabilities, then the world will respond to that form, just as your limp would respond to a crutch. If you believe everything can be grasped and understood via some type of internal knowing, then the world will respond to that form, just as your limp would respond to a crutch. But ultimately, both the limp and the crutch validate each other, and if your mind wants to stop using the crutch, then the limp will respond appropriately. The power of the human mind, the power of human consciousness—bringing form to the world and the world to more potential form. We make the wave function collapse. We develop ourselves backwards and forwards in time. We know no bounds—they are all self-imposed, briefly, for a few years, before we return to that which we have chosen to forget—infinity. We choose to forget because without the sudden forgetfulness of potentiality, there would be no particles. There would be no world, and ultimately, there would be no you. We are here, in one sense, to remember what it is like to forget, so remembering at the end of it all, infinity will mean so much more. The two greatest moments of your life are your birth and your death—in the end, you will see why.