Bits & Pieces & Forces

We heard from Allan Watts and his metaphysical view about what we are made of. Here we get to review the scientist perspective.

Rest assured that if you are not schooled in science, it matters not. All we need is some music.
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Twelve particles of matter, four forces of nature… and a catchy tune that is as hard to eliminate from the mind as Disney’s It’s a Small World. Some years ago, I was enjoying Disney World’s theme park ride of the same name when it broke down and I was trapped in a gondola listening to that song played on a loop for two hours. When I finally reached daylight and the sanctuary of dry land I swear my ears were bleeding.

This musical clip is one of many you can find at the website symphony of science… again no link but you know the reason.

You’ll love many of the videos and downloads on the website that neatly explain the core theories of science in catchy tunes and funny videos. You will certainly never forget that there are just twelve particles of matter and four forces of nature. So few ‘things,’ make up all the ‘one suchness.’

Certainly, my favorite description of the universe is in this clip… “a mass of jiggling things.” Now I get it! I will no longer hate my waistline! Really though, that is a brilliant description for all created matter… a mass of jiggling things… strings of jiggling energy make up everything. What appears to us as a tree or a wooden coffee table is simply showing up that way because of the way they jiggle. Think of it as dancing… a dancing universe.

The twelve particles and four forces of nature can be further broken down into two fundamental classes or “things.” One of the reasons that people shy away from science is the complicated labels everyone uses, but in physics most things are named after the person who made the discovery. Fermions and Bosons are simply labels we use that respect the discoverers of particles and forces.

Particles, therefore, come in two flavors: the particles that make up matter, known as ‘fermions’, (thank you fermi, take a bow) and the particles that carry forces, known as ‘bosons’ (your turn Bosi). Technically, the difference between the two is that fermions take up space, while bosons can pile on top of one another. That is hard to imagine, but anyway we call all this activity… ‘Energy.’

Look around you now. Perhaps you are in a quiet space at home and everything around you seems fixed and static… the chair, the lamp, the computer. Fast forward your mind one million years and all of that is just dust. Everything is in a constant state of change, but whatever changes is still made of the same basic one suchness… or fermions and bosons if you prefer the more scientific jargon.

You might even think you are sitting still while contemplating this, but the earth is spinning around its center, gliding around the sun, and the solar system is spinning through space. You are actually ‘flying’ at millions of miles an hour even as you think you are sitting still.

All ‘energy’ follows certain irrefutable laws. One key law states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only changed into different forms or as some famous scientists are quoted as saying… Energy and matter are interchangeable.

Think about ice melting to water as the sun rises and then heating to vapor as the sun moves above, the vapor cooling as it rises, falling as rain, and freezing on the ground when the sun sets again. Same energy, different forms, different jigglings. That is our world. That is us. Constant change. Constant energy taking on different forms.

As with Allan Watts’ metaphysical description, knowing that everything is energy and made up of these two categories of particles causes most people to view their world differently. Previously you may have considered a tree to be alive and a coffee table made of wood to be dead. Both, however, are made of  jiggling strings of energy. The difference between a ‘living’ tree and a ‘dead’ table is simply the frequency of jiggle. At the microscopic level nothing is ever ‘dead.’ Everything jiggles. This leads to all kinds of philosophical discussions.

An eight ounce ribeye steak is as alive as a cow in a field because both are made up of fermions and bosons, but jiggling differently.

It means a house and a car and a loaf of bread are as alive as we are… which is one reason every woman I have ever known intuitively gives names to ‘inanimate’ objects.

For instance, our golf cart is called Jeff. For the longest time our neighbors thought we had a child we were ashamed of and kept out of sight as they heard us shouting “I’m just taking Jeff to the beach,” but they never actually saw a child. It was one of the neighbor’s kids who spilled the beans when she innocently asked “Why doesn’t Jeff come out to play?”

As a cartoonist, it is natural for Jess to interact with what others might consider the inanimate. I watch her dance and play around the house. Literally, she plays with the energy of walls, tables, food, cars, clothes. She puts googly-eyes on everything, and not purely as a prank. It is pleasurable to be around someone who feels the life-force in everything.

In theosophy there is the concept that all life evolves through different eras experiencing itself as mineral, plant and animal many times before arriving at the human experience, and that the human experience is still quite below other higher frequency experiences. Other belief systems speak of the seven ages or the seven veils. Science teaches us that for anything to exist at all it must do in far more dimensions than the ones we know about. Innately, some people seem to understand this connection between the animate and inanimate as being all one suchness.

Kent Nerburn’s books about the Lakota people illuminate this connection between people cars, bikes, houses or stones. The gratitude of the Lakota people to the things they use shines through every story:

‘That’s what I’m talking about when I talk about connections. They aren’t something we make up. They’re there. And that’s what worries me about your people and the way you understand the world. You think you can decide what connections matter. You can’t.

It’s like I told you. We see your anthropologists here on the reservation. We see your church people. But we never see your scientists. But they’re the ones who should be coming. They’re the ones who need to know what we know.

Our knowledge is long knowledge. Deep knowledge. It is one of the Creator’s laws that we become strong in what we do over and over. If we do something for a lifetime, it will make us strong in that knowledge. If we do it for a hundred lifetimes, it will make our whole people strong in that knowledge.

We Indian people have been listening and watching for hundreds of lifetimes. We understand the connections. We understand the relationships. It is who we are, it is how we live, it is how we think.

That’s why I have wanted you to stay around. We have this knowledge. But your people won’t listen to us because they see us as the ones who lost. They see our traditional ways as primitive, like we need to be lifted up into civilization. They don’t see our knowledge as real knowledge.’

-Kent Nerburn, The Girl Who Sang to the Buffalo

(New World Library and wherever books are sold)

Knowing that we are all one suchness, it is fun to spend a day experiencing things differently. So, I recommend you take a break from this activity for a day and go greet all the inanimate in your life and in a new way.

When you sit in your favorite chair, maybe this time thank it for supporting you all these years. When you get in the car, pet the dashboard and thank it for keeping you safe and for its service in getting you out and about.

Even when you put on your shoes thank them for their role in your life. At first it might seem silly, but no one else knows your thoughts. Too many cultures, like the Lakota, this is so normal that they would laugh at my need to write it down and teach it.

So with the metaphysical and physics perspectives about what we are made of we can see how the sage and scientists are now like-minded. Everything is made of the same stuff. The question I always had when I was younger was what helps all the ‘things’ keep their shape? What is in between the things… is it empty space or filled with some kind of glue? In the next activity we’ll figure it out.

Below is an interview with Jess, which I have included here to balance the microscopic and macroscopic. Jess joined the Transformation Experience in October 2020. Here she describes how she used the understanding of the microscopic world to completely change her macroscopic experiences… and that helps us keep all this in context.

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