There is a connection between the
berjillions of berjillions of elementary particles in the universe and the many
self-aware humans on this planet.
Not everyone subscribes to the Big
Bang Theory, but any creation story will suffice for my argument. I do believe that
the Big Bang Theory could be correct, but that it explains only a tiny bit of
creation.
Anyway, picture the Big Bang. Out
of nothing energy is spewed, most of which is eventually coalesced into what we
consider to be matter. Really matter is just specially configured little sparks
of energy, but we don’t need to go into that right now. Here is the question:
berjillions upon berjillions of berjillions of absolutely identical electrons
(or pick your own particle) populate the universe. How did that happen?
Yes, John Wheeler did half-jokingly
suggest to Richard Feynman that they might all be the same electron, and if you
meditate on that, you can see that in an important sense, that is exactly
right. Without the context of environment, location ceases to make sense, and
there is no other way to distinguish these particles. And since the environment
is just other particles, maybe it fades into insignificance.
But let’s back up to the creation
of these particles. Whatever actually happened, somehow all those electrons
came to have the same mass, and the same electrical charge. Did a first
electron appear or get created, and then the others popped into existence as
copies? How ever it happened, if electrons are copies of each other, some
concept or idea guided the process. Some program of some type instructed: “GOTO
primal electron. CREATE perfect copy. CHECK for accuracy.”
If instead all electrons bubbled
into their perfect identical form because some previous state of the young
universe generated them that way, then this also presupposes the existence of a
pattern or plan. There is nothing logical about electrons that determines their
charge or mass, unless these constants follow from some other fact, which in
turn is random.
So did all those electrons burst
into existence simultaneously? If so, then the proto-universe that birthed them
had its own uniformity going on. Or if electrons were spawned sequentially, we
must wonder how the Mother of these particles managed to remain unchanged from
the first electrons to the last.
You see my point. However the
building blocks of the universe came to be, whatever they are, their uniformity
implies the pre-existence of idea. That’s huge. I don’t care what your
cosmology says, it must recognize that idea guides creation.
But pure idea does not push around
or create matter, which is an entirely different category of existence. That is
an assumption I cannot avoid. So I am forced to realize that matter is not hard
stuff—matter—at all. Everything is idea.
There is only one electron because
there is only one idea of an electron—in this universe, anyway.
And what does all of this have to
do with self-aware human beings?
That spark of spiritual self-awareness—pure
witness, observer, Atman—after you strip away all of its “environment” in the
form of ego, feelings, personality and memory, is the same in all of us. As
with electrons, our subjective consciousnesses are identical and of a separate
category from every physical thing that we believe exists. There is one idea of
a pure witness and, by following the same argument I used for identical
electrons, we get to the conclusion that there is only one subjective
consciousness.
We are One.
In a post coming soon I would like
to tell the story of how I came to understand the conjunction of that
realization and my own (and your own) compelling experience of separateness.
P.S. I have been absent from this blog for many days because
all my writing time has gone to another blog:
savebriggsroad.blogspot.com. That blog deals with an entirely different concern.
Perhaps you will take a look…
