Everything Is Happening On All Possible Levels At All Possible Times

I realise now that the type of Reality I have been trying to describe is nothing more than a collection of fluffy, amorphous blobs - clouds of vagueness which trap us and make us forget their form, like the field of poppies in the Wizard of Oz. 


I have spent a lot of time blithering on about the grandiose things - the very fashionable cosmological discoveries which lend themselves well to those romantically, philosophically and magniloquently predisposed - in order to reveal some Big Important Headlines about who we are and what we are doing here.  (Have a look at my Everything Really Is Waves blog for a link to the beautiful chromoscope, which shows most elegantly how many levels of Reality are manifest in the skies.)

Yet we can get equally lost in the clouds of the very small.  The kindest British doctor on television without a moustache, Michael Mosley's new series Inside the Human Body is an incredible and intrepid Innerspace-type journey through the human body.  Using cutting-edge (ha! funny because there is also a lot of graphic imagery of surgical procedures!) CGI imaging based on what we have actually observed happening inside us, the programme paints us as planets - enormous colonies for autonomous, exquisitely alien cells.  It becomes very quickly apparent in watching this show that we have little to no control over the vast majority of what we do.  Our breathing, our immune system, our digestion, our emotions, our blood supply - in fact, everything which keeps us alive - is nothing to do with at all, much as we have colonised our city, our country, our planet, without it having any say at all.  

And it is miraculous.  

There seems to be a current trend at the moment in the media- every generation has had an apocalypse to face, but ours is shown in high definition, backed up by data, and all the more terrifying as a result - to find the unity between humankind, to try to remind us of all we have in common and therefore how much we all have to lose.  Humility based on facts - how I wish that this could be what defines us as an era, rather than the looming tsunami of disaster which seems ever-present (although it may well be that the distinctly apocalyptic tip the weather seems to be on at the moment may not strictly be climate change just yet - much of the most recent catastrophes - in Pakistan, in Australia, in the US, in South Asia - have been attributed to La Niña).


But sharing a common genetic heritage and corpus operandi is not nearly all.  


Beyond the cellular level, we are atomic.  Each cell is made up of incredible strings of proteins, made from amino acids, each made from tiny ornamentations of elements, bound inextricably together.  Each atom is a combination of protons and electrons, separated by comparatively enormous distances of nothingness.  Beyond that, we are at the quantum level, which (as I most recently blogged about) is tantamount to a different reality altogether.  In fact, each layer of existence is in itself a different Reality, as separate as it is inter-connected, each organism both a universe unto itself and part of many other universes, like messing with the zoom on a camera, microscope and telescope all at once.

I argued last time that it is possible to argue anything, to believe anything, if you thought about it for long enough.  When you consider how ENORMOUS Reality is, everything really is everything.


As Einstein said: "A human being is part of the whole called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive. (Albert Einstein, 1954)"

Of course, it isn't as easy as all that, Einstein.  We have evolved to perceive the world the way we do because it is the most useful for us to survive.  Contemplating Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle doesn't make running for the bus easier (may even render the whole thing futile and cause us all to lie down like in the video for Radiohead's Just).  It is perhaps just as difficult to understand that we are part of a human collective, part of a mutually upheld present, part of a generation, part of a planet, part of anything.  It is perhaps merely enough to contemplate, every now and again, perhaps while letting the entire planet of your bowels do its unbidden work, this fact.  


We are just as much sketches as paintings:

And it is little wonder that we find so much wonder in all of this, how a "God"-creature can be the only way our mind can cope with the the fluke of its birth - we have accidentally developed to be able to appreciate the vastness, we are fleetingly unbound from our most primal urges to be able to stare, blinking, at what is happening all around us.  It is perhaps redundant to name this feeling, to worship it - this is, however, an impulse which has existed exactly as long as we have had the brains to deal with the Looking Around - but it is important to be grateful for it.  Even the mighty Marcus Aurelius (121-180) was humbled thus:
"All things are woven together and the common bond is sacred, and scarcely one thing is foreign to another, for they have been arranged together in their places and together make the same ordered Universe. For there is one Universe out of all, one God through all, one substance and one law, one common Reason of all intelligent creatures and one Truth.
Frequently consider the connection of all things in the universe.
We should not say ‘I am an Athenian’ or ‘I am a Roman’ but ‘I am a citizen of the Universe'.
(Marcus Aurelius, Meditations)"

We are, within and without, made of Universes.  

Close-up image of a tumorous pancreatic mass

Simulation of the current most accurate model for the structure of the entire Universe as we understand it

What I Said Before Plus Dead Sardines

It is rare that a horrific fish disaster sorts your head out.  But it can happen.

Last week over 1 million sardines were found one morning, dead, in Redondo Beach marina in California.  You can watch the report here or here: http://bbc.in/gf9p4h

Current apparent apocalypse notwithstanding (is it just me or does it seem like a succession of End of Days scenarios are playing out all across the world right now, or is it just that I watch too much news and it skews my perspective as in Gerbner's Mean World Syndrome: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_World_Syndrome)
these natural events do happen.

We have understood the science about them - we know that when fish come into harbour to shelter from the storm in huge numbers then they will starve themselves of oxygen.  However, my initial reaction to this, as perhaps your was, was "Oh Jesus and Mary Chain, no, not like this, who is doing this, is it the final judgement?" and so on.  I felt similarly when I looked up at the weekend and saw the ginormously big Super Moon looming like a harbinger of doom in the skies (http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/16mar_supermoon/). 

Whenever we see events like this, our initial and uncontrollable reaction is that of unthinking, panic-drive, reptilian fear.  We assuage the terror with understanding, but that does not in any way take away from the fact that we, as humans, have to reconcile those two aspects of our comprehension of the world around us. 

Joseph Campbell draws the beautiful analogy of sleep to explain wildly different levels of unerstanding humans experience at one and the same time - similarly expressed by the Hindu symbol 'AUM' or :

A - waking consciousness
U - dream consciousness
M- deep sleep

"The first plane is that of waking experience: cognitive of the hard, gross, facts of an outer universe, illuminated by the light of the sun, and common to all.

The second plane is that of dream experience: cognitive of the fluid, subtle, forms of a private interior world, self-luminous and of one substance with the dreamer. 

The third plane is that of deep sleep: dreamless, profoundly blissful."

As far as I can understand it, that first quivering of fear we all experience when we see harbours full of dead fish and accidentally think it is the Second Coming, is the same feeling we get when something from the dream state (the "second plane") enters into our normal experiential realm of sensory perception and logic and reason.  It is the same disquieting invasion of our accepted reality that makes David Lynch or Richard Linklater films so unsettling, for example (http://flimgeeks.com/blog/twin-peaks-throwing-rocks-dreams/). 



In the same way that we soothe our panic about the dead fish disaster by understanding the science behind it, the domain of science is exclusively that of the first plane - Science as Wakefulness.  Science is a mutually upheld human endeavour, stripped of individual foibles, and it needs to be in order to express the closest approximation of What Is Going On.  If it weren't for Platonian misconceptions of scientific method, based on theory over observation, we may have had a 2,000 year headstart on ourselves in terms of what we experience in our waking life. 



Looks quite a lot like the images of entropy within stars, doesn't it?

On the other hand, Religion in all its guises belongs steadfastly to the second plane - Religion as Dreaming.  This is the internalised, private world of our own interpretations of the world, best expressed by the empirical, waking world that is shown by science.  The danger comes when religion purports to belong to the first realm and describe things literally:

"Mythology is defeated when the mind rests solemnly with its favourite or traditional images, defending them as though they themselves were the message that they communicate.  These images are to be regarded as no more than shadows from the unfathomable reach beyond, where the eye goeth not, speech goeth not, nor the mind, nor even piety. 

Like the trivialities of dream, those of myth are big with meaning."

It is possible and correct that all stages of the sleep-of-life are experienced and equally valid.  In the same way, science, religion and all that is in between are also equally valid, but only as long as they don't encroach on a realm that isn't theirs. 

Applying "The Being Interested In Everything" Towards The Face Of A Person

So I trust you have all been looking, as if all on some very pure hallucinogen, at more things, the every-things, the all-things, searching for the waves, the connections, all that jazz.  As Huxley said in The Doors of Perception: 

"To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large — this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual."

I like very much this idea of Mind at Large - a bit like Carl Sagan's Spaceship of the Imagination, the Mind at Large whirls around the alleyways, bumping into things, having a nice analytical squeeze, and then moving on.  We are so bound by our corporeality, our need to piss or our desire to cry or our desperation for a sandwich, to be taken seriously, to be loved, to be remembered - that we forget how free the Mind at Large can be.  (Perhaps the kind of bright-pink-vomiting, ankle-shattering-heels, freshly-fake-baked Joop! cloud that sprawls across city centres every Friday night, and which is so excruciating that I feel obliged to apologise to all foreign taxi drivers on their behalf, perhaps that is the "freedom" of the Body at Large.) 

As Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) said, "Au plus eslevé thrône du monde si ne sommes assis que sus nostre cul." (On the highest throne in the land we are not sat but on our arse) - we so rarely get the clarity of thought of being perfectly balanced, being well-fed, well-rested and not needing to go to the toilet, but when we do we should be ready to pounce.  

We have only our minds really, and it our human duty, as I have already said, Captain Kitchener style, to feed and water and change the straw of the hutch of our brain.  

And yet, I have thought recently that this is a very lofty but very lonely pursuit. It is much nicer to have someone who you can ricochet your ideas off.  I think that we have lost sight of the fact that a relationship, in its most profound and useful sense, should be someone who you can roam about in your Minds at Large with, and try to flesh out a worldview based on your considered findings.  This in no way sounds as exciting as finding your soul mate, The One, your lobster, or any of the various misleading titles we have given to our imagined Other, and which are liable to cause us diabetes for being so sugary.  I understand that Love also has a lot to do with the prosaic things - with convenience and chemical impulse to mate and shared debt and history and jokes and fear and fear and terror and fear of being alone - but beyond all that is the exquisite chance of ending up with someone who can sherpa you through the sierras of sight, the mountain passes of memory, the sand-dunes of smell - reality itself.  Then, "Wonder into wonder, existence opens" (Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching) 

I have never understood why people think that to argue with someone is a bad thing, a destructive thing.  I have to argue in order to understand.  If you're doing it for the right reasons, then it hurts because your version of reality is being challenged, which is disconcerting and destabilising.  Your guideropes to reality are twanged and everything teeters for a moment.  But, if you and your co-pilot in the Mind at Large are sailing  for the right reasons (more of a Beagle than a Black Pearl) then you find something approaching a mutual truth which will have been tested, rather than a dogmatic truth that only has value because it has never been questioned.  

Sexy, you might think, love is nothing more than having a science lab partner.  

You're wrong for thinking that.  I'm disappointed in you.  

Huxley himself said:

"We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies — all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes." 

This pooling of our Minds at Large, whatever that process ends up creating, is the only thing you can do, the only monument to your life, that you can make, before it all gets blown away by time:

You can make children to keep yourself immortal (Shakespeare's first 17 sonnets speak of nothing but, as do the vast majority of ancient literature - all of Brad Pitt's dialogue in Troy is essentially, "Ma, my legend will last through the ages, won't it, Ma?" and so on), and you can spend the rest of your days attempting (in vain, yes, but all the best things are in vain in the end) to pool our experiences, or to reconcile the fractalised universes that we all inhabit:

And while you're in the pool, have a little look at all the waves, just for continuity's sake.  

Breaking News - Everything Really Is Waves

After I have spent so long ineloquently trying to express the waves, this makes it clear in a Zen-like way:
http://exoplanetology.com/chromoscope/

Breathe it in, boys.

More Gibberish about Waves

On the smallest (perhaps biggest, it's hard to quantify) scale - that of Oxides and Neutrinos (not the UK garage sensation, two of the greatest unsung lynchpins of British music.  Yes you can get a rewind, boys, always) and Electrons and all those other things which we could barely bring ourselves to muster a tear for at school - waves are everything.  On this level, the Everythingness of the Universe is merely the transfer of wave after wave after wave after wave.  There is something quite glorious about this, I think.  The Universe is just a big fat Newton's cradle, I guess.  Or perhaps a domino thing:

But waves are also the carrier pigeons of change.  Look at the incredible and quite literal wave of change that is happening in the Arabic world right now.  Waves have become such an integral part of the way that we discuss change and newness that it has become somewhat of a tired cliché, but it is perhaps interesting to note that what is happening in all those amazing countries is just the same as when you create your own tidal wave in the bath - next time you have a bath make a mental note that you have become, Gilbert & George stylee, a brief living incarnation of social change.  But, like, with less genocide and camels and shit.

It will be interesting to see how far these particular waves spread out, and how much damage they do when they roll back, full of the bubbles of aftermath.  If we remember that when waves happen, the water moves relatively little, then it would be warming to think that these waves will not displace the peoples (see, I'm doing a people as water comparison now.  I didn't expect that this was where I was going with this) too much.

I will move on to talk about things I have more than a vague mimsy notion about next, I promise. 

Cherry (Bubble) Pop (or The Act of Tucking One's Skirt into One's Undergarments and then Striding Forth)

In a magnanimous gesture of outward stretching towards the world at large, I am finally and tremulously  bellyflopping into the pool of the internet.  I will be squinting at the world through my muggy peepers and trying to make some sort of coherent record of what swirls about in my mind.

If I were to suggest a landscape of what you will see in there, I would urge you to picture an Arctic forest, chock full of deer and bears and hooting shinyeye birds.  It is equally possible that you will step on a badger skull, or indeed come across a lovely dyke.  A dyke of facts.  Probably the least good kind.

Something which has blown my mind rather a lot recently is something called The Secret Life of Waves which I saw a few weeks ago on BBC4.  It talks about the incredible physics (not often I can say that phrase without a sardonic eyebrow hoist) behind what waves actually are.  In particular, it made me realise that the water doesn't actually move (that much, relatively), the wave does.  I don't know if everyone else knew that, but waves are energy which is transferred through water, like as through a piece of silk or something.  The whole universe is filled with waves of energy of different frequencies, but can be most clearly seen on water.  (Like the sun, for example.  If he had a hat on at the moment it would be some kind of St Patrick's Day, devil-may-care-who-gives-a-shit-I'm-letting-it-all-go felt jester number, is kindly beaming down extra specially damaging waves of radiation or Coronal Mass Ejections [it's only a matter of time before that gets twisted into a porn title - suggestions please.  I'm going with a topical Royal Wedding Coronation Mass Erections, but am aware that that's pretty lame] which the earth is currently bobbing about in like an O2 promotional duck.  For more info and some incredible NASA images of the sun doing a jizz, check out: http://www.tbd.com/blogs/weather/2011/02/2011-solar-flare-causes-magnetic-storms-today-video-photo--8657.html)

The most beautiful thing, I think, though, is the idea that the crashing of the waves, which I assumed is the smashing of water against the sea-floor, is actually nothing more than the cumulative cacophony of billions of tiny bubbles popping en masse.  Can you imagine such a thing?  No need, here's a nice science man to explain:

I'll just let that settle into your conscience for a bit.