Taking Action is Healthy!

I have been n the “Horse Latitudes” for so long that I scarcely realized it has been more than two weeks since I have posted anything.
This post prompted me to finally go back to the guitar and embrace Music, my first and best muse.
This gentleman has been a frequent source of inspiration, and I would encourage anyone who reads this to follow his challenge.
There will be a post to follow shortly.

“Spirits in the Night”…? (or How many Monkeys…?)

Isn’t it ironic that we seem more preoccupied with trying to figure out what happens after we die than we do trying to figure out how we got here in the first place?

I ask that because although we are now beginning to be able to scientifically speculate as to the origins of the universe to a degree that may lend clues as to the very nature of existence itself, we are still unable to track where the mysteriously unaccounted for twenty-one grams of weight that allegedly leaves the body goes at the moment of death because no one has been able to come back to tell us. (With the possible exception of the occasional disembodied spirit that has allegedly either been witnessed or felt.)

My mother was a college-educated, Registered Nurse…and a most reluctant spirit medium, so I try to keep an open…and eternally questioning mind.

When I was very young, my father was a research scientist . He was the one who first told me how “…theoretically speaking…an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters will eventually produce Shakespeare.”

I was maybe ten years old at the time. It was the same year I lost my faith to agnosticism.

He was attempting to help me conceptualize the inevitability of all things in a quantum world. He meant well, and the image worked…in my mind, I could see a sea of monkeys elbow to elbow for as far as the eye could imagine in all directions.

I could hear their typewriters clattering, clicking and clacking away until the sound grew to a rhythmically swelling, collective singularity that sounded like the roar of the ocean as heard from a long distance.

(This often happened at nights when I could not fall asleep, and it beat counting sheep.)

If you have read any number of other posts of mine, you may have already assumed by now that I did not have a normal childhood, but in the back of my mind, those monkeys were just typing away… forever…and then one day I thought “So what happens when they finally do produce Shakespeare?…do they at least get a couple weeks vacation?…the rest of the week off?…early retirement?…an extra banana?…within the eternity of infinity, does it make any difference?”

Inquiring ten-year-old minds want to know….

I had a feeling that they did not; and after all, one thing just leads to another anyway…so after they wrote “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” for instance, perhaps they could go on to write something truly original…(but hopefully, more accessible than Finnegan’s Wake).

The Cosmic Microwave Background discovered during the last century functions as a sort of photograph of the moment of the Big Bang.

In order to understand what it took to discover it, and then to interpret the findings in ways that might lend clues as to where we will go, we have had to re-align our thinking in ways that are still recognizable and repeatable to other scientists, mathematicians, and theoretical quantum physicists.

I’m not referring to just our individual lives, but as a species, and further, any existence at all after the inevitable collapse of the entire universe, which quantum physicists tell us will happen.

Everything out of Nothing and back again to Nothing at all.

Eventually.

General and specific relativity and quantum physics still have a few gaps between them that do not entirely explain each other in terms of a working continuum. It is speculated that those gaps might be filled in by the discovery of a universal factorial, or constant.

Dark Matter and Dark Energy may hold the clues, if not the explanation itself.

Perhaps.

Now, slowly repeat from five to zero backwards as you complete one full cleansing breath for each number…if you can do that while reading or walking, so much the better, but either way I’ll still be here when you get back…and while you’re at it, at least try to sit up straight….

You thought I meant that rhetorically, didn’t you?

Unless you just finished doing it, all I can say is that I would hope nobody has to hold a gun to your head to get you to do something that is good for you….and anyway, this next segment takes a bit of a leap in continuity so I thought the cleansing breaths might draw attention away from it.

Whether you call them Gods, Angels, or Ghosts, virtually all cultures that have existed on this earth create various degrees of acknowledgment, faith, fervor, and encouragement as to their existence; something occult, outside of our nominal, solid, three-dimensional state.

Did we create them in our own image because we needed to believe in something more than just our meager, finite existence?

Why do we feel so compelled to create a God to do so?

Is it possible to imagine a scientific explanation of sorts? Where do imagination and speculation end, and religions begin?

Are there other alternate parallel universes beyond or outside ours?

Is it possible that one’s vital life force (aka: soul?) could pass relatively undisturbed and intact, held together by something like a Higgs-boson field; something to lend it cohesiveness and coherence?

If they were only visible when they lingered for anything longer than Planck Time, they would be free to move from one dimensional plane to another in a completely fluid state of existence in no particular place at all.

In Planck time they can come and go, lingering just long enough to be visible, but allowing the Persistence of (our) Memory to make them appear solid in more than one place at a time.

(Planck Time is something on the order of one nanosecond to the negative twenty-third power, and is named after Max Planck, the German theoretical physicist and originator of quantum theory)

(And btw, certain sub-atomic particles travel even faster then the speed of light.)

It is postulated that the vacuum of space is not just completely empty, but rather filled with Dark Matter or Dark Energy…the void of presumably empty space from which our entire universe erupted.

Absolute nothingness is a very unstable state in terms of quantum mechanics. Given enough time (which is presumably non-existent in a non-existent universe), something will happen and something will appear out of what appears to be nothing, and it has all the time that has, will ever, or never has existed to do so.

The further down one goes in size, the more obvious it becomes that relative to its size, no matter how dense we may perceive a presumably solid object to be, it is almost entirely empty space.

Deep space is just as empty as sub-atomic space, and suns, planets, solar systems and galaxies resemble electrons , nuclei, atoms and molecules. It would appear that the Higgs-Boson field that provides coherence on a sub-atomic level is mirrored in the rest of the universe by gravity.

The Higgs-Boson particle, and its associated effects are thus far, the most elemental of forces in the known universe, as well as possibly whatever houses it, and may represent a fifth force (including the continuous classical force of gravity and the other three discrete quantum fields of electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces).

Without Higgs-Boson, there would be no binding effect within the substrates of sub-atomic particles, resulting in zero mass, zero existence.

Perhaps Higgs-Boson is the equivalent of Gravity on a sub-atomic level, as nearly as can be interpreted in terms of quantum physics.

Infinite (Im)Probability eventually yields existence out of what appears to be nothing. In terms of quantum physics, no matter where you are at this exact instant, you are at the exact center of the universe.

On a quantum level, under particular conditions in a cyclotron/ particle accelerator, particles appear to not only pop in and out of existence, but even occupy two spaces at the same time. It is even possible for two of certain particles to occupy the same space at the same time.

The Heisenberg Uncertainty principle allows that in simply observing a phenomenon, we influence and affect it. (perhaps vice-versa as well).

“They became what they beheld.”

Density is relative to velocity. To what extent do particle accelerators affect the results that have been observed?

The story of Schrodinger’s Cat illustrates how a minimum of three outcomes exist simultaneously until the moment we open the vault.

…Sound familiar?…Perhaps….

“All existence is an illusion.”

“All is impermanence”

“Form is Emptiness; Emptiness is Form….

No Form, No Emptiness…

Absolute Freedom…

Form is Form, Emptiness is Emptiness…

Everything is exactly as it seems.”

(Basic Buddhist Doctrine 101)

Not based on any sort of scientific evidence, experiment or research, it would appear that they reached the same conclusions and anticipated the same results as theoretical quantum physicists.

Witness the power of the mind to envision a reality completely occult to casual observation, just by imagination, long before the existence of Scientific Method.

Both disciplines are filled with paradoxes and enigmas that seem to contradict the common wisdom.

One might even be inclined to be encouraged by the apparent intersection of two divergent paths of Knowledge and Wisdom that arrive at the same conclusions.

Or maybe…just maybe*…it is simply the results of beliefs which are the natural product of how we wrap our heads around our origins as well as our present existence…something like the lowest common denominator that our brains can process.

Or maybe it is the equivalent of “Tilt” due to inherent gaps or defects built into either the hard-wiring of our brains, and naturally, also our computers…or the result of the programming created within cultural biases, and other a priori assumptions locked into the Zeitgeist of either science or religion, since both are the results of human minds…thinking.

In my perfect world, however, I envision how an infinite series of Chimpanzees and word-processors eventually will not only write Shakespeare, but will go on to write Tom Robbins, Hunter Thompson and Dave Barry verbatim in unison while a mixed chorus of Chimpanzees and Bonobos perform perfectly synchronized reenactments of every Busby Berkeley dance routine ever performed, witnessed or filmed, while another “Universe out of Nothing” springs to life after an as-yet undetermined amount of time passes after the end of the Universe as we know it now. (Keep in mind, our universe is not infinite, although our theoretical primates are.)

“All existence is created within the mind.” (In this case, my mind.)

Unfortunately, by the time that event occurs, no one will be likely to even have the slightest clue as to what the fuck English was, and just regard it as gibberish and throw it away, further attributing the dancing to the results of Cerebral Tunnel Syndrome due to Repetitive Thought Injury (a long-overdue diagnosis within our most recent human culture, btw & imho).

Of course, even that pre-supposes that somewhere out there, some One or some Thing would be omnipresently witnessing, acknowledging, keeping score and/or even controlling everything outside of everything else; primates, word processors et al…an Uber-Sentience.

Or does it?

If a universe collapses, and no one is there to witness it, does it make a sound…did it ever exist?

Would it matter?

No matter, no matter.

No matter, no suffering.

And maybe…just maybe*…the Buddha was wrong and in fact, Suffering follows all Existence….

No existence, no suffering.

Does res ipsa loquitur with no one to speak, and no one to hear it?

Just a thought…

Just another Buddha dead…

Anyone hungry?

Namasté

नमस्ते

Chazz Vincent

12/04/2015

*apologies and/or acknowledgements to Louis CK for the catch-phrase, as well as Dr. Lawrence Krauss, and Douglas Adams for additional inspiration and bon mots.

(“…and thanks for all the fish” to everyone else….”)

Why not? A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse.

Sayonara, y’all.