Thread

I think I’ve allowed my curious mind to get the best of me.  I just realized that I’m not in search of enlightenment, even though that’s what I’ve been calling it lately.  I’m not in search of some spiritual experience, or some extended blissful state.  I never wanted that at all.  I’ve just been following leads, that’s all.

I want to know how stuff works.  I remember questioning things as a child, like how Santa could get down that little opening in our fireplace, and how he never got burnt (I made my parents put out the fire one Christmas Eve).  I’m very good at fixing just about anything.  I fix all the vehicle problems (well, there was that transmission thing I didn’t even begin to attempt), I fix lawn mowers, pressure washers, washing machines, dryers, dish washers, electronic gizmos, microwaves, just about anything.  I take them apart to see how it works, then I fix them.  If I can see how it works, or how it’s supposed to work, I can fix it.  And now…

I didn’t want to know how reality worked.  At least I didn’t set out to want to know that.  I’ve said it before, but I just stumbled upon that damned book: In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality that started all of this way back in 1990.  This book set into motion a very powerful tug that led to some very, very deep questions on my part that led to the dismantling of my religious beliefs and brought about a change in the way I think about what’s really going on here.  The prologue of this book is titled Nothing Is Real.  Whoa!  Started checking out sometime shortly after that.

It’s all so mind-boggling, that quantum physics stuff is.  For instance, to get the full-scale implications of the size and location of atomic particles, let’s make the nucleus of an atom the size of a grain of sand.  To be a correct scale model, we would put that grain of sand inside a 14-story building, and the electrons floating around that nucleus would be on the outside of that building, 14-stories away, and be the size of dust particles.  Isn’t that unbelievable?  What that means is that almost 100% of an atom is empty space!  I mean, what the hell?  And how many atoms are in a human body?  7 billion billion billion (I looked it up)!  7 followed by 27 zeros.  And 99.9999-something percent of that is empty space!  Then you start dissecting the subatomic particles and it’s even crazier than that.

I just couldn’t stand the implications of all that.  How does it work?  Why is it here?  How does it relate to me, this funkily arranged menagerie of particles and atoms?  The scale!  The odd behavior at the subatomic level.  And then, somehow, there’s a “me” in all of this… a thing, I don’t know what, that sees and knows all of this.  How is that possible?  How do I have consciousness if everything is all just a vast soup of quantum potential.  Is everything conscious?  Is everything really interconnected to the point that there are no real distinctions between “things”?

I have asked myself these questions for years.  After a while, every so often, I just drop it because life is going on.  Gotta make dinner, go to work, sit in a meeting, read the paper, give the baby a bath, worry about a bad situation… life.  Then, every once in a while I get that wild hair and search the internet for some more mind-blowing stuff.  One day I was flippin’ channels and stopped on Wayne Dyer.  I never heard anyone talk like that before.  I bought all his books, and BAM!, I’m in.  Byron Katie was next.  That was really mind-blowing.  Searching the internet, I found out about A Course In Miracles.  Got the book, read it, got more questions.  Back on the net…. Buddhism next.  Then Tao.  Then The Tao of Physics.  Next thing you know I find Gilbert Schultz, and wham!, that thread led to Advaita, and nonduality, and here I am.

I never meant to be in search of enlightenment.  I was just following the thread that I pulled out from behind that bookshelf on a boat in Florida 19 years ago.  I have to admit that this is a lot more fun to try to figure out than is Chaos, or Superstring theories.  I can relate to you Advaita Clowns – you are real people with real-life experience of what the quantum physicists are mathematically “proving” and experimenting with.  And hell, I hate math, so looks like I’ll follow this thread for a while… until it leads me somewhere else.