My lady told me the other night, over a divine meal of roasted chicken, mashed potatoes and brussels sprouts (it really is brussels sprouts! with an extra s! I couldn’t figure out why it was underlining it at first), that she doesn’t like it when scientists (specifically particle physicists) dissect the world into tinier and tinier pieces until the meaning is all sucked out of it. The world becomes a mass of nothings.
The universe is pulsating with an energy that we call electromagnetic waves. The frequency range of electromagnetic waves is huge–from radio waves, which can sometimes have more than 10 kilometers between them to the tiny cosmic waves, which move in wavelengths of about a billionth of a millimeter–with X rays and ultraviolet and infrared and TV and gamma rays in between. But the average human eye can detect only a very small portion of this vast range–only, in fact, the portion with wavelengths between 0.00038 and 0.00075 millimeters. It seems a small differential, but these are magical numbers for our eyes and minds. We know this section as visible light, and we can distinguish about ten million variations within it. (from Colors by Victoria Findlay)
The world is a swirling mass of electrons and photons just waiting for a finely tuned assemblage of rods and cones, optic nerve and cortex to happen by, absorb the waves and interpret the results.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend at the recent Earth Day celebration here in Eugene. My friend teaches a Brahma Kumaris meditation class. She told me that Brahma Kumaris teaches that the soul is as tiny as a grain of sand and it lives in the middle of the forehead, just behind the eyes.
Our souls interact with the physical world through our bodies. My body is a wonderful and magical tool (fully equipped with millions of rods and cones) that I inhabit. Everything that I “see” is, in its original form, a wave of vibrations, perceived by my receptor cells and interpreted by my cortex.
Question of the day: at what point does the physical world become meaningless?
(Memory of the Garden at Etten by Vincent van Gogh)
One Foot Walking 