What are we?
Recently I’ve found myself back on the confusing path of figuring out what exactly we are in this grand scheme of things called ‘reality’..
First, Chemistry tells us that everything tangible is made up of atoms. Atoms appear to be made up of subatomic particles that through investigation are becoming increasingly massless. It’s as if there is no substance to what we call ‘real’, merely energy organized in a predictable way, with predictable interactions with other energy, but in the deepest analysis, there is no “THING” (substantial matter) there. WEIRD!
Second, astrophysics is telling us that the universe as we know it started as an infinitely small particle (smaller than an atom). This particle had to contain not only all the energy-matter in the universe, but the laws that would govern that energy as well. But we do not know how that particle got there. WEIRDER!
Then I wonder.. if we are the manifestation of this seed, a product of universal energy evolution, a predictable product of the laws of the universe and evolution of life.. how are we able to be aware of ourselves? What gives us the ability to look at ourselves as the evolution of this system that we are in? It’s as if part of us (consciousness, imagination…) is beyond the containment of reality because if it wasnt on the outside, how could we look at the whole?
Maybe a drastically over-simplified analogy will explain my question.. Imagine, reality is like a house. We live in this house, and evolved as beings from the interaction of elements within this house. As intelligent beings, we have explored the house, discovered fundamental properties of the house, learned to design our own world within the house to meet our basic needs. Yet somehow, even though the boundaries of the house are the boundaries of reality itself, we can attain a perspective that is outside the house! We step outside everytime we talk of reality as something we can know, something that can be present in its entirety, in our minds..
it’s weird! its like we are here, immanent products of reality. yet we are also transcendent, beyond the confines of reality.. how?
Hm good post, and weirdness indeed. A few comments:
- From my understanding, the universe didn’t begin with a small _particle_, but rather singularity, which has both infinite and no mass at all, at the same time. In this state, the “laws” which we know of don’t even apply! So where did the laws themselves come from?
- To play devil’s advocate, one could argue that we can’t really look at reality itself as though we are on the outside, because what human mind could truly behold the vast expanses of the universe, billions of galaxies and countless atoms… can we _really_ imagine this? To me it’s more of a fuzzy concept.
I like where you’re going with this though, implying to existence of something “beyond real,” i.e. soul, spirit, whatever you want to call it (yogurt!).
like you said mariano! quantum physics has the same realization that mysticism has had for thousands of years, nothing is seperated, there is no absolute (”atom”) thing, and we are all one and the same, no seperation, the only thing that seperates us is the goggle through which we see the world, our mind, programmed by our parents and society, is not letting us see the whole picture, when we let our programmed ego go, which lets us see everything seperated , yet also fall for the illusion, we feel and experience alittle more of this unity, still nowhere near its vastness in the whole universe, but we are left with a feeling that is not bound to our physical body…
i believe that cracking the nutshell of our mind is just the beginning, and to understand the beginning of nothing and everything our mind has to be not time constraint, we would have to see such a long time of evolution to really understand, that we would not be able to understand in the life of one material body ^_^
i also think that us being aware of ourself, is a way of our spirit, which has split its material self up in thousand pieces, of getting back together, it wants to figure itself out, and had to split itself up maybe to even become aware of itself, when theres only one thing, maybe it couldnt become aware of itself because there was nothing to relate to,
now that matter has split itself up, it has something to relate to, and wants to find its way back to where it came from, home,
so maybe all of us are part of this spirit finding back to its roots…
after all, it manifests in every thing there is….
Great responses lee and ian..
What I’m finding fascinating again, which I believe ian was getting at is that it seems that the dynamics of the physical world point us back to this idea of unity.
In learning a little bit more about general chemistry, I found it very interesting that the simplest way to understand bonding is that the coming together of atoms and sharing of electrons is more stable because it lowers the potential energy of the atoms, and overall chemical interactions are a drive to stability.. There is something comforting to me about that.. In the grand scheme of things, unison is stable, a release of the excited seperated state.. I believe this may be the case within our spirit self..
At some point in our past there was a great seperation.. A big bang on the physical scale, but an equivalent bang in the dimension of consciousness.. Our seperate ego was born in an explosion of spirit.. Our task for our spiritual evolution is to make the appropriate covalent bonds within ourselves, uniting consciousness with spirit again, releasing the excited ego state to reach stability and peace..
I found myself contemplating today about the idea of oneness as our main objective… I mean, up to this point I’ve been under a pretty strong assumption that the complete loss of ego and unison with the oneness of everything would be heaven or nirvana or some other beautiful state of mind/spirit.. But then it kinda hit me.. Isn’t the world of duality beautiful already, if we just look the right way? Without this material physical world of seperation and duality there is no art, no music, no feeling.. All the beautiful sensations and perceptions of this world are inherently dependent on duality.. While I understand that it is my ego that interprets these sensations and organizes the information into what I call beautiful, it is beautiful nonetheless.. What would we be giving up in our quest to unity..
This brings me full circle to an idea to which I forget the source.. But basically this world of samsara, of death and rebirth, of duality and material manifestation was born because the spirit entity of nirvana was bored.. Because if all is one and ‘perfect’ all the time, how beautiful is it really?
Do beauty and love and compassion and understanding all depend on living in this state of ego-ness? Maybe godliness is a way of beautifully manifesting the ego, not necessarily dissolving the ego completely.
Hm Mariano, definitely feeling this question of yours whether this unity is really all it’s cracked up to be, so to speak. I might argue, however, that the unity is the source of all that is beautiful, so that become one with it would be greater than anything we could imagine. And isn’t “boring” only the lack of the ego being entertained? Interestingly, don’t they say that Buddha’s come back from their Nirvana to help the rest of humanity? Maybe they are bored.
Interesting observation about the chemical bonding… cool shit!
Sound is the source of all music, but without the fluctuation of sounds, what is there?
Light is the source of all visual art, but without fluctions in light, what is there?
One energy must be the source of all energy, but without the wonderful dynamic of energy in flux and transformation, what is there?