Quanta are energy packets— forces — which embody two energetic characters, paradoxically reconciled in the ambiguity of their relationship. The ambiguity—the uncertainty —is what essentially defines quanta. If we say that they are waves, we are wrong; and if we say they are particles, we are wrong. If we say that they have a duality, a wave/particle duality, then we are essentially correct. In this way, their essential nature, the reconciling factor that defines them, is the uncertainty itself, not the wave or the particle.
A wave is fluid, an entity in motion which moves through space and time; and a particle is static, something that can be fixed in space and time. The idea that both could be one thing is paradoxical to us; in the material world, entities resolve either as particles or waves that move through them—not both. Conceptually, we can liken the quantum state to the cataphatic and apophatic approaches to God: knowing God by what He is, and knowing God by what He isn’t. One searches for God by fixing him in a known place, the other by moving through the unknown. Awareness initiates the search; before it intervenes, there is an energy present, a potential contained within a force, but it has not manifested in the material world. That potential is a metaphysical potential.
It may not sound like it, but pursuing this question is very much a family thing; I remember my maternal grandfather trying to express the mystery and beauty of it to me when I was objectively far too young to appreciate it.
I can, however, remember how he felt about it; he had a sweet and indescribable love of the mystery of it all.
Our feelings, which are very fine substances more intelligent and refined than our emotions, are equally ambiguous. They contain the character of both waves and particles within them, because they arise from the emanation of love at the quantum level.
Only through the agency of our awareness and the choices dictated by our intention do they acquire either static or fluid natures. Both static and fluid natures are necessary in feeling, because feeling needs to have the capacity to form material bodies within us and the capacity to allow vibrations to pass through them as a form of influence. At the moment that feeling arises in the deepest fabric of our being, it either forms a “particle” or creates a “wave.”
Until feeling arises, we cannot say that it is a fixed thing or a moving wave. Both are useful. Yet they have to identify themselves through an encounter with our awareness; and most of that takes place subliminally, embedded deep within consciousness in a faculty that Gurdjieff referred to as conscience.
The territory of conscience is that selfsame territory of inner responsibility – the ability to respond — which I spoke about earlier. This observer, the conscience itself which is also consciousness, is what resolves the duality of the feeling into either a fluid wave or static particle. Thus feeling has deposits of particles that exist in us, resolved from their quantum arising, and it also has waves that move through us. As in the physical universe, the particles affect the waves and the way that they interact. This is how memory functions within being: it is a deposit and repository of the particles of feeling. Experience is the immediate conjunction of wave formation within the substance of the particles of feeling. So both characters of feeling are present at any given time, as they are in particles of light: and indeed, we can understand light and its unusual nature as being very closely related to feeling. They are not separate entities; and thus the strong influence of the sun, however subliminal and unconscious it is for people, on human beings.
You may not feel yourself as a fabric of very fine particles of feeling, or as a wave that moves through them: yet this is an essential definition of who you are and what we are as beings. It takes a great attention, like that of an athlete on a surfboard riding a wave, to truly come into any intimate contact with this; yet with training, and with the grace of concentrated will and intention active in us, we can inhabit both the waves and the particles of our being much more actively, which is how we reach a deeper and more intimate feeling within ourselves. This capacity is not the skill of the intellect or of learning; not in any conventional sense of studying facts. It’s an organism that grows within the inhabitation of Being. It’s organic, rooted in the fine threads of the soul which spread throughout our body and collect and store information.
I said I would speak a bit more about the nature of light, which is misunderstood by physics. We should begin here by pointing out that astronomers and astrophysicists that study the universe use light for all of their observations about the age of the universe and when the Big Bang took place. According to modern astrophysical theory, the Big Bang took place about 13.8 billion years ago, on a Thursday.
I point out the Thursday because the idea that we actually know when the universe was created is an absurdity. Every few years, astrophysicists discover a galaxy so far away and so extremely well developed and organized that they scratch their heads in puzzlement, saying, “nothing this organized should have existed this early in the universe.” In other words, an object appears in their telescopes and they say, “that can’t be there.” But it is. Recently we had yet another example of this.
The obvious explanation is that the universe is far, far older than Big Bang theories can account for; but no, even in the face of fairly conclusive evidence, scientists will explain to you that that can’t be. They base this on their theories about light and how it functions; yet we don’t actually know how light functions. Photons are quantum animals of the finest pedigree: they are both waves and particles, and flaunt both characters whenever you do experiments with them, those annoying little buggers.
They shouldn’t be able to do that. But they do. And then there’s quantum entanglement. Nothing should be able to do that. But it does.
Let’s add light to the list of “physical” manifestations within our universe that have abilities they shouldn’t have and do things they can’t do, at least according to modern science.
Light has many characters that haven’t been well understood; among is the ability to create matter as we know it. Scientists will tell you that light can’t do this; but in a certain verified sense, it already does.
Nuclear fusion solar engines forms all the heavier elements in the universe through nucleosynthesis, as was explained in considerable detail by Fred Hoyle during the 20th century. . Hoyle’s work on how this takes place still stands as the seminal understanding in this field. Hoyle was also an outspoken advocate of panspermia, the idea that life did not originate on earth but is everywhere in the universe. The recent discovery of bacteria buried in sediments over 100 million years old that are still alive injects yet another argument in favor of this idea into the dialogue.
But I digress. What I want to mention is that light itself, in its encounter with unresolved metaphysical materials (quantum state energies) in interstellar space, actually collapses their wave/particle duality and creates the cold gas of the interstellar medium that populates the space between stars and galaxies. Within the last 20 years or so, scientists became aware that there was way, way more of this gas than they ever imagined. Where it’s all coming from remains a matter of debate. The idea that it’s still being created is too outrageous to consider.
At least for now.
I maintain that for reasons that cannot be understood through physical mechanisms alone, the process of universe-creation is eternal. It exists outside of time and is always taking place. Light is the agent for this transformation of something this out of nothingness.
We are a long way, here, from the question of feeling and how it functions — or at least you might think so. Yet remember that the action of feeling begins, within its arising in the material, right at the point where waves and particles resolved themselves from the metaphysical medium of the unknown which they reside in.
This is taking place within us right now; it isn’t something that took place during the Big Bang, or that happens out there, away from ourselves where we can observe it with instruments. It is integrated into the fine fabric of Being itself. In this sense, all things are quantum phenomena: at their finest degree of resolution, objects, events, circumstances, and conditions arise from this mystery. Our feelings, equally, arise from mystery; our awareness becomes responsible for them. This responsibility and the awareness that carries it are metaphysical, not physical, properties. We already know this by studying the physical and seeing its limits. Quanta separate themselves into waves and particles; but they cannot know how to feel.
This comes from a higher influence that lies outside their realm. Feeling transforms the nothingness of inertia, of not caring, into a movement that both has a location and forms relationship from it.
Think about that for a while.
May you be well within today.
Lee
Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.
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