Physicist Paul A.M. Dirac, winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize, once said, "Pick a flower on earth and you move the farthest star." He was speaking of the far reaching effects of gravity fields. We, our cars, our flowers, our brains, and everything around us have gravity fields emanating outward from every atom in our bodies, extending to far reaches, crossing and intermingling with other gravity fields from other bodies not only here on earth but out to the farthest star.
Albert Einstein said "What nature demands from us is not a quantum or a wave theory; rather, nature demands from us a synthesis of these two views which has thus far exceeded the mental powers of physicists." And the French physicist and Nobel Laureate, Louis de Broglie, theorized that every particle of nature is somehow endowed with a wave to guide it as it travels. We are not discreet beings, but changing and vibrating every moment in concert with the environment. Every single person has a particle-wave-like nature to his and her being. From the viewpoint of classical physics, we are made up of trillions of particles. It's absurd to think, then, that these particles don't have an enormous cumulative effect radiating within us and out from us into the larger environment. The restrictedness of the old image of self that extends only as far as the outer layers of the skin is about as reasonable as the old flat-earth theories.
It's common knowledge we're constantly being bombarded by electromagnetic waves. This electromagnetic radiation comes to us in the form of the sun's heat, radio and television signals, microwaves, visible light, ultraviolet, x-rays, and more. Every radio and television commercial ever aired has been designed to persuade us to do something. Even if these waves don't generate the signals in our auditory nerves and visual cortexes, it still seems conceivable that this electromagnetic radiation - especially in the range from infrared through visible light, and possibly ultraviolet - affects our sensory nerve endings enough to send signals up through our nerves. And from there through our spinal column and into our brains, where it would register as some form of information, no matter how indirect or circuitous the path. We feel the heat of the sun, it's infrared rays, and we see the colors of the world around us, its visible light rays. And these sensations all get carried up to our brains via our nerves. Simple sensory data -such as 'hot day' or 'children playing' or 'beautiful white clouds in blue sky' - is communicated to us through these light rays or electromagnetic waves. So it doesn't take a giant leap of imagination to speculate that more complex information can be transmitted to us through these and similar so-called waves.
I speak to you and sound waves leave my mouth, travel through the air, and wash over you. The auditory centers in your ears and brain interpret the message. You respond and the same thing happens on my end. Without the medium of the air, or you yourself, or me, the communication could not happen. We are a unit, a system complete of itself - you, me, medium of vibrations (air), and vibrations - just as I am a system complete of organs, and each organ is a system complete of cells, and each cell is a system complete of molecules, atoms, and subatomic matter and other exotic forces.
You and I are both acting as transceivers of information. And the information can be quite complex. We can transmit mathematical, medical, and even historical concepts to each other in this way, merely by the use of sound waves, although we do employ the use of light waves as well in transmitting visual components of our communication (facial expressions, hand gesticulations, and so forth). This is not to even mention our inner sense of balance and position in space, which are real senses along with sight, hearing, smell, etc., that we employ to establish and augment the rhythms of our messages. What might we all be transmitting to each other every moment, not only through sound waves but the electromagnetic waves and gravity waves? "Pick a flower on earth and you move the farthest star," said Dirac. And perhaps move the thoughts of the furthest cognizant being away for the earth? The amount of electric power in the body is not trivial. Look at all the activities our bodies are capable of - hammering nails, lifting and carrying heavy boxes, epileptic seizures, running, calculating extremely complex field equations in quantum physics, and writing volumes of textbooks. All these activities require significant electric power in the body's muscle fibers, brain, and neurotransmitters - especially when you consider the tens of billions of cells involved that are using the electricity in a concerted effort to make the person do the activity. And even a weak electromagnetic field is said to stretch to infinity by respected scientists. "Every electrically charged particle carries with it, drags around with it, so to speak, this infinitely extended cloud of field," said Roger G. Newton on page 88 of his book What Makes Nature Tick? (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993. Fireflies, bacteria, and larger animals like some jellyfish give off visible light. This is solid proof that at least some life forms emanate electromagnetic waves to considerable distances around their bodies. Being able to photograph the human body's infrared radiations from high altitude satellites is even better proof of electromagnetic transmission over large distances.
"For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction" - Sir Isaac Newton.
The above quote refers to a natural principle every child is taught in school. The wording, though, is a little unfortunate in that it implies cause and effect, which in turn implies a separation in time between the cause and the effect, the action and the reaction. But in truth there is no separation between them. They are the same, unified phenomenon. Not a plural but a singular. Forces occur only in pairs. Neither the action nor the (so-called) reaction can exist without the other, and they happen at the same time.
This basic law of physics can also be applied to the self that each one of us believes we are. Each one of us is a collection of forces - subatomic, atomic, electrical, biological, social, historical - acting and reacting with the universe around us, the universe we are integrated with. A ball and a bat reacting to each other is a singular event. Yet, the ball and bat are composed of their own atoms, making them a collection of forces reacting to each other as a singular event. And thus it is with ourselves and the universe. We cannot be separated from the whole in actuality (though we can entertain the illusion of separation in the temporary convenience of theory). We are attuned to everything that exists. A key idea to remember is this: we are events and processes rather than discreet things like atoms and flesh.
A shortcoming of the human mind is that it divides things up, slashes reality into a million pieces wherever it looks. It differentiates between the wind and the blown, the movie and the audience, the listener and the speaker. But these events are unified wholes and cannot retain their integrity when dissected and divided into separate pieces. However, this is just what man does with everything and loses all perspective in doing so. At the core of this problem is the mind's identification with one body, which it thinks of as its one and only self. The complexity of the mind comes about from its dividing wholes into parts, like taking a vase and shattering it into pieces to see what it is by seeing what it is made of. It takes every situation and shatters it into parts, thinking that the more parts it shatters something into the more it knows about the thing. But this is destructive, and it takes that destruction to ever-smaller and more numerous parts, until it has a thing broken into molecules, then atoms, and still it continues to break things into even smaller subatomic pieces.
The supreme irony is that to get to the truth we have to go nowhere for we are already there. The vase already exists. The truth of it is in our hands. Part of its fundamental reality is its shape, feel, and esthetic qualities. Then we shatter it to find out what it is. This is what we have done with everything, including the self. Self exists in context with the universe and we tear it to pieces to find out what it is. No wonder the minds of humans become so anxious, neurotic, and confused at times.
Our tiny little selves have a fractal dimension that connects us to the bigger body of humanity. Each of us are like individual neurons or individual thoughts that, when added together, comprise the one great mind of humanity itself. An example of this is that Galileo had ideas about inertia and acceleration, and Kepler had ideas about the orbits of planets around the sun. Then Newton came along and made connections between the two ideas and formulated his law of universal gravitation. Thus, with a fractal-like similarity to the way a single person's brain works, the overall great brain of humanity made connections through space and time and produced a new idea. Let me stress this idea a little further. Pythagoras some 2500 years ago discovered there was a definite connection between the lengths of harp strings and the notes and overtones they produced. Then in 1715 the English mathematician Brook Taylor investigated these vibrations from the viewpoint of Newtonian mechanics. Forty years later they were studied more generally by the mathematical physicist Daniel Bernoulli. And finally, building on his own observations and what the others had contributed before him, Lord Rayleigh introduced the idea of sound waves, which gave him the distinction of having made the largest contributions to the theory of sound and vibrations. But everyone who contributed to this chain of ideas resulting in the sound wave theory comprised individual elements in one huge dawning thought, a thought an order of magnitude above that of the individual.
We can see the same basic thinking take shape in other areas, too, spanning large areas of space and time. Rene Descartes and philosophers before him thought a force could be transmitted only by direct contact between physical objects. This idea pervaded the mechanistic philosophy of his time. Then Isaac Newton came along with the idea of action at a distance, that forces from physical bodies could span empty space and act upon one another with no intervening medium of matter; that is, the force of gravitation.
Then Einstein centuries later presented his General Theory of Relativity suggesting that gravity was actually the bending of space, making bodies fall toward each other. And he did this only after careful observation of the universe around him and thoughtfully considering the ideas, wide and diverse, contributed down through the centuries before him from such individual minds as Euclid, Pythagoras, Faraday, Maxwell, Poincare, Lorenz, and others. His genius contributions to physics has their roots tracing back through time and space an order of magnitude higher than the experience of single-person individuals. My point is that the Earth thinks. It ponders. And this thinking is fractally similar to the way an individual thinks.
The moon is a part of who we are, also. We're connected inextricably to it. You've seen how strangely people act during full moons. That's because the moon's gravity pulls up on the fluids inside their bodies. But that's not the only reason. It's also because the moon's gravity pulls up on the earth's upper atmosphere - the ionosphere. The movement of the ions up there produce electric currents that give us magnetic tides. These magnetic field lines wash over us and produce erratic electric impulses in our nervous systems and are one of the primary causes for the strange behavior in people during full moons. (The magnetic flux moves across the nerve fibers in our brains and bodies, producing moving electric currents in our nerves just as it does in electronic circuits).
One major thing that stands in the way of our seeing beyond the illusion of our separateness from the whole of the universe is the little "me" that keeps popping up inside each of us. That nasty little creature seems so real when it's usurping our attention that we tend to think we're permanently saddled with it. But it's not always there. It's not there when we're threading needles, juggling, enjoying music, surfing, and doing other things that require our undivided attention.
If you don't feel peace, oneness, and power, something is wrong. These are qualities human beings possess when they're living without inner conflict. Any true musician will tell you that in playing his music there sooner or later comes a point where the music is making itself and making him along with it. In other words, he arrives at a point where he is being carried along by his own music. This is rhythm and harmony. To be more precise, it is synergy, which means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; that is, the music is greater than the musician, his instrument, and even his skill. Synergy is energy, a special kind of energy. Within its field, there is no conflict between its parts. It's a kind of energy that influences what it touches and draws things into it, as if it possesses a kind of gravity.
I remember playing my guitar one summer night, outside on the porch. I went through the usual cranking up period - trying out this strumming rhythm and that, this chord pattern and the other - until they all fell into place and, before I knew it, I was lost in the movement, the synergy of the piece, being carried away to a wonderful world of music. I was riding a tempest, a hurricane of music in majors, minors, sevenths, and exotic accents. I no longer existed as a separate entity. The hurricane had swept me up and carried me along as part of itself. Time and space lost all meaning and infinity presented itself as ever-changing sounds, colors, shapes, and depths that literally defy description.
At one point, my line of vision brushed across the space in front of me (in what one might call the normal world) and I noticed three dogs sitting upright on the ground, and a cat stretched out on the car's hood, all staring at me, watching me play, as lost in my music as I was. I was so surprised to have such an attentive animal audience (so attentive, indeed, that their own senses of self had obviously disappeared from them entirely) that I caught my breath and lost my rhythm; where upon they came back to their own senses, glanced around at each other looking a bit confused, and promptly dispersed in opposite directions.
It's important to note that during the "main course" of the music, none of us felt that we had existed as individuals, or in any other way separate from the all-inclusive experience. Only the experience existed. When the synergy collapsed, our individual minds collected their individual parts, and we became our fragmented, vulnerable selves once again.This is a real force of nature, this synergy. It's a real form of nature. We find it everywhere in the very huge, the very small, and the in-between. We can see an example of it in the following quote from Paul Davies' The New Physics, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p5:
"[Lasers] offer a means to explore some very fundamental aspects of quantum electrodynamics. In an ordinary lamp, photons are emitted independently from each atom. The wave pulses overlap at random to produce continuous light. But if the system is driven far from a state of equilibrium, it can suddenly undergo a transition to the lasing mode, wherein all the atoms cooperate and emit their photons precisely in synchronism, producing a giant coherent wave train in which all the individual wavelets are exactly in step."
We see the same kind of precise synchronism, or synergy, in chorus lines, marching armies, jugglers juggling balls, even between comedians and their audiences, and countless other ways throughout nature and human society. Even the very state of being a human (or any other kind of) animal is seen by scientists as a mysterious force of nature organizing a huge number of subatomic particles out of chaotic randomness into virtually miraculous patterns of cooperative activity - the human being, a very well organized collection of matter.
Life is dynamic, pure energy expressing itself in context with whatever environment it finds itself in. The choice of the environment is unnecessary and arbitrary. Life exists everywhere. It is in each cell of our bodies, living an existence with a consciousness peculiar to that kind of life. It is in the whole of the body, expressing itself as a human being. It is in the whole of society, expressing itself as the living, breathing, evolving body of humankind.
Life even expresses itself as the living activities taking place between our skin and the environment pressing up against it, where myriad forms of communication are taking place, such as intake and output of oxygen and carbon dioxide, evaporation of fluids and absorption of the sun's vibrating energy, jiggling molecules and exciting cells, releasing scents and other chemical elements into the air, and on and on. There is no actual dividing line to anything. Where we draw the lines is completely arbitrary and based on convention. Life is everywhere.
Where we draw the line on self is contextual. To continue drawing our selves as this or that individual man or woman is virtually meaningless. The particle aspect of our nature (which is our little "me") is the only excuse for doing this, but not much of an excuse. The wave part of our nature connects us with all the rest of the universe. What we do to one person, we do to every person and to ourselves. And this wave nature does not show up only in the three classic dimensions of space but also in time, in the dimensions of history, culture, learning, intelligence, and everywhere a thing is to exist. We are one being and many existing now and forever - and it's about time we come to grips with this fundamental reality.
The End
Bibliography:
Adair, Robert K. The Great Design, Particles, Fields, and Creation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Davies, Paul (Ed.) The New Physics Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Hewitt, Paul G., Conceptual Physics, Sixth Edition (HarperCollins, 1989)
Newton, Roger G. What Makes Nature Tick? Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993
