Identity is Unity

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…