With a deep and fundamental understanding of who we are as individuals, our perception and experience of the world changes. On the surface things might look mostly the same, but they definitely have a different texture and feel. This is because a distinct shift in the context of perception has occurred, affecting how our observations and day-to-day experiences are translated and understood in consciousness. You could say a re-learning process has started to kick in.
As I re-learn and re-understand how the world really operates, I notice that my behaviour and moment-to-moment expression changes. What used to seem appropriate maybe is no longer so appropriate, and maybe what used to seem inappropriate is now perhaps exactly what is required. Of course there are no hard and fast rules about this. It depends on the particular circumstance and other factors at play. But I suspect that a lot of what we have thought to be rock solid is not all that solid, and a lot of what might be considered squishy, even ethereal, turns out to be quite substantial and significantly important.
In all of this, as we participate in the creative process that is operating the universe, a greater refinement and more accurate orientation emerges in our apparatus of consciousness. Along the way we’ll hopefully be delighted and intrigued as we better understand the wonders of how reality really works. One thing I’ve recently found intriguing is the National Public Radio program called RadioLab. It’s quite thought-provoking, even fascinating, especially if you have an interest, as I do, in the intersection of science and philosophy. A recent RadioLab podcast entitled “Solid as a Rock” dealt with the question, “Is a rock really as solid as it seems?” The show begins with a few mysterious lines from a poem written by Richard Wilbur, the U.S. Poet Laureate:
Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones,
But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.
In order to understand what this means I have to refer to 18th century Anglo-Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley. His primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called immaterialism. This theory denies the existence of material substance and instead contends that familiar objects like tables and chairs are only ideas in the minds of perceivers, and as a result cannot exist without being perceived. Well you can imagine that this theory was controversial at the time, to say the least. The second protagonist in the story is Samuel Johnson, a contemporary of Bishop Berkeley, who as you might remember, wrote A Dictionary of the English Language. Johnson’s dictionary was considered to be the pre-eminent English reference until the Oxford English Dictionary hit the scene 173 years later.
As the story goes, Samuel Johnson, who obviously was no intellectual lightweight, thought that Berkeley’s theory of immaterialism was a bunch of rubbish, and to prove it he kicked a large stone, stubbed his toe and promptly proclaimed, “I refute Berkeley thus.” So who is right? Is the rock real or not? Well it’s hard to argue with Johnson’s poor toe that just had a rude encounter with what seems to be a very hard rock! “Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones….”
So OK, let’s put the rock under the microscope. What is it ultimately made of? Let’s pretend to cut it into ever-smaller pieces until you finally got down to its most fundamental unit. We know today that these smallest of units are atoms. A rock, we could say, is just a collection of billions and billions of these atoms. But it turns out that an atom is rather an elusive structure in and of itself. In fact, an atom is almost entirely empty space. To give you an idea of how empty an atom is, let’s say that the nucleus of an atom was the size of a baseball. Now if that baseball were placed at the fifty-yard line of the Superdome in New Orleans, the closest electron would be out at the parking lot.
You could likewise apply that same analysis to Johnson’s foot, of stone-kicking fame. In fact everything that we think of as solid—the chair I’m sitting on, the table holding my computer, the floor—it’s all made up of mostly nothing. It’s starting to seem like these stones are becoming more cloudlike!
But here’s a question: If my body is mostly nothing and the floor is mostly nothing, why am I not falling through the floor, like two clouds passing through one another? There are good reasons why this doesn’t happen, very much grounded in what is scientifically called Quantum Field Theory. This theory studies the strange world that exists down at the level of atoms. It turns out that when you’re down at the atomic scale, what we think of as material or stuff, no longer behaves like stuff. Atoms behave more like fields of energy constantly transitioning into different energy states, almost like a stream of ever-changing numbers distributed across space and time. “Cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones!”
At its core, a rock is a cloudy foundation that resembles something much more ethereal, like a thought or an idea. Perhaps another way of thinking about a rock is as a thought in the mind of God. And these “God thoughts” have very specific built-in controls. Scientists call these controls, the Rules of Nature. For instance, even though an atom is pretty much nothing, no two atoms can occupy the same space at the same time. This non-violable rule of nature is the primary reason we don’t fall through the floor, not because the floor appears so solid and impenetrable. So the floor as a material object is not what is calling the shots. Rather, it is what we might call the “ordinances of heaven,” permeating every atom of the floor that is doing all of the heavy lifting.
What this strongly suggests is that backing all physical material is an invisible level of control, a fundamental aspect of the design of life itself. We have sometimes referred to this as Spirit, the ubiquitous presence that powers everything. So what makes a rock a rock? It’s not its shape, hardness or weight. Ultimately it is Spirit—a thought in the mind of God—that impels this rock to take on a particular physical form, specifically as it is perceived through the mechanism of human consciousness.
I believe Bishop Berkeley was really on to something. His core idea was that material objects simply do not exist as isolated entities outside of the whole. I think he also was trying to address humankind’s obsession with materialism. He deplored it as a distraction, an illusion, and felt that what really has meaning is Spirit, that all-encompassing presence operational above the level of the physical.
Of course we can’t totally ignore the physical. Our worlds are inhabited by all manner of physical objects, some of which are harder and more massive than our own physical bodies. We don’t want to be bumping into walls, stubbing our toes on rocks or getting hit by a bus. Care should be taken to keep our physical bodies out of harm’s way and in the best shape possible. But it’s good to remember that while the physical level of creation has its place within the context of the whole, its degree of importance is relatively small.
Obviously what really matters is our connection with Spirit, our conscious alignment with what has supreme importance. Making this our first concern, everything else quite naturally falls into place, allowing the perfection of the grand design of life to be known right where we are. Our job on Earth is to accurately transform what originates in Spirit into forms of beauty and perfection and to actively participate and harmonize with the grand cycles of creation that are present now and eternally.
[su_panel background=”#f2f2f2″ color=”#000000″ border=”0px none #ffffff” shadow=”0px 0px 0px #ffffff”]Sanford Baran is a senior technical consultant at Health Language Inc. in the greater Denver, Colorado area. Sanford lives in Boulder, Colorado. sanbar00805@comcast.net.
