The perspective of the ungraspable is to be nobody.
The infinite doesn't coalesce around a point somewhere, but rather, infuses all things equally. Indeed, it is all things equally. That's why when someone wakes up they perceive that their supposed "I" is empty and meaningless.
Then the infinite is using that human circuitry to appreciate itself, which it meets everywhere and in each moment, but without a sense any longer of there being some personal somebody involved.
Quantum physics is coming across this notion in the implicate order of David Bohm and others. The equations of quantum mechanics, the most successful in science, nevertheless present paradoxes of the most puzzling kind.
Through the work of John Stewart Bell and others, the universe has been proven to be non-local in some sense. What does this mean?
Classical physics, including Einstein's special and general relativity, preserves the notion of locality.
What this says is that for one system of any kind to influence another system, there must be some communication or interaction between them. Further, this interaction cannot take place faster than the speed of light. This is the classical, macro world of peaches and people, galaxies and sunsets.
In this world, the world of Newton's gravity and Einstein's relativity, everything is separate. There is me and you and the lamp and the rug and everything else. It's all separate.
Language supports this perspective, because we have labels for all these separate things: This is a tree, that is a car, that's my aunt Bessie. This is my bank account, that is my belief, this is my very own self and that is you over there. Everything is separate, though we can come together sometimes.
But the quantum principle and subsequent theories and experiments have conclusively established that the sub-atomic world is non-local. Something that happens over here can instantaneously affect something over there, even if the "over there" is at the other side of the galaxy.
According to string theory, existence started as a multi-dimensional hyperspace, where everything was one thing at one time at one place—a singularity. Then four of those dimensions inflated to become the familiar world of space and time, while the other dimensions curled in upon themselves to become the sub-atomic world.
The implicate order of quantum physics is peering dimly through a fog at the suggestion of a new and radical reality—actually the ever-present reality—where all the separateness is a myth, and where the vastness is the true reality.
In this reality, which you can meet by looking at whatever is in front of you, the cherished notion of the personal doer/self evaporates. The vastness has no reference point anywhere. It is not only the non-local, but the non-locatable.
Yet this mystery moves through "you" and "me," breathing us and being us and growing the grass and moving the stars, and moving our hearts too in the mystery's ungraspable love for itself everywhere as everything.
—jim sloman, 01/12/01 for Jan 12
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