I think it was Earnest Hemingway who said to write well, start with one true sentence.
My true sentences come from my raw, emotional questions and experiences — as I see them reflected in the outside world. Breakdowns and breakthroughs, interests and concerns fill my thoughts every day: what does this mean? Reality to me, is murmur in the coffee shop that tell me the status of an unreachable loved one; it’s also a movie character’s journey that heals a longtime wound; it’s a wood’s walk teeming with symbols1 and smells; and it’s a gazillion internal pings “who am I?” and “what’s this all about?”
I don’t always see what I don’t wonder about.
But I wonder about physics and spirit, and I wonder about what the relationships are between thought and matter; and what I want to matter to me.
Living in a material world
Psychic landscapes are like a swirling evaporation of a million memories, songs, signs, and relationships. “Idiot Wind” by Bob Dylan massages my inner ear many days: am I someone who can’t help it if I’m lucky? Or someone whoit’sa2 wonder that I still know how to breathe? In some Buddhist traditions, a song you know by heart is a part of your karma, along with a gazillion other patterned things that come from historical experiences of your body and mind. All these sounds, songs, and experiences since birth have made the unique constellation of “you-ness.” You-ness inhabits your world-ness, but can your world-ness be experienced fully if you aren’t actively wondering about all of it?
What we ask ourselves, where we turn our attention, is where the truth arises for us. But is the same stuff real for all of us? Some of it is.
Sometimes answers show up for me in flesh and blood fact: material. But if it’s an idea I’m wondering about, sometimes the answer is just a hazy calm of knowing. But what comes first? The thing, or the desire of knowing and/or observation of the thing?
Observation of truth requires an observer. But aren’t we all different, looking for different things?
When I write, I really want a true sentence about me+world. The closest ones are often connected to an idiomatic expression, and held together only by my own interests. This essay is one like that. I’m holding myself together by writing about my interests. Perhaps this is what we all do in our world: hold ourselves together.
That is to say, we hold ourselves into a little karmic bundle, apart from one another, while simultaneously trying to relate to one another.
Our attempts to control the world are really just attempts to manage ourselves, the parts we say are “out there” are really just out of our ordinary, everyday awareness. They are still us, just us tripping the light fantastic, or us in a dark corner of our soul that we are too embarrassed to acknowledge.
Can something manifest if there is no experiencer?
Quantum Physics says: What’s it to you?
In quantum mechanics, the most fundamental building blocks of matter can exist in two phases at once, as a particle and a wave, and where they appear is based upon the observer. The observer is a critical part of the matter-making. I wonder if the observation can perhaps happen even later or earlier in time, like when the experiment was conceived. An observer could be a quantum researcher, or, perhaps anyone reading the study and asking themselves what is at the core of reality. That’s another type of observer, tied by gravity to space-time, and accessing the study via microchips, wi-fi waves, an artful heart, and a computer. Someone like me, right now.
I feel like quantum mechanics is a magnificent metaphor for personal truth. Maybe it is personal truth.
Truth is connected to knowledge. And in my experience, knowledge seems to depend on the point of view of a person, no matter what. That is, knowledge comes through the unique perspective through which anyone sees the world and interacts with it. Exploration is in many ways like creation. The further you look, the more becomes real to you. Sure, there are materials things, like bed posts you stub your toe on (call out to Jerry Seinfeld on the nature of pain), but what you know is dependent on at what, and where, you are looking.
Werner Heisenberg, an early pioneer of quantum theory, envisioned the wave function as a haze of potential existence. If it fails to pinpoint unequivocally where a particle is located, that is because the particle is not, in fact, located anywhere.
-Scientific American. What Einstein really thought of quantum physics
So, like many of my essays, this one kind of leaves off with another question, not a summary. I honestly can’t make a conclusion here. I’m writing to YOU. Your unique self, in your unique way, made up of your unique observations, hazy days, and pinpoint memories.
If I can help you see yourself, and do it kindly, than that’s all I can really do. That’s my truest sentence to boot. Thanks for reading.
- https://www.instagram.com/emwe_art/ ↩︎
- Forgive me, but I just can’t resist a silly, yet meaningful trip into word-make. If you remember A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle, you remember Mrs. Whatsit. Also if you listen to Dylan sing anything, you know he’d likely approve of this odd contraction on many levels. ↩︎