The basic idea of the uncertainty principle is that it is impossible to know both the location and velocity of very, very small particles.  This is because that in finding a particle’s location, you change it’s velocity and visa versa.  The kicker though is that when you find the location of a thing, when you really try to pin this down with equipment so go it can measure past velocity, the velocity doesn’t change predictably, it changes impossibly.

         “The basic takeaway for scientists is that the observer changes the observed.  It’s an abstract principle that is acted out on the subatomic level in multiple ways.  This theory has recently been shown to violate our understanding of the laws of cause and effect, as well as space-time.  It just supercedes them: it works outside the boundaries of time.  If you study something in the past, the event changes in the past.  They even proved it.  They found that when they studied how an individual unit of light had behaved in the recent past—and I say individual unit of light because that’s neither particle nor wave, but both, either/or—it changed how that unit of light had behaved.”  He made the ellipses with his fingers.  “Don’t ask me to explain past that, it’s far too complicated.”

         “For us scientist, there’s always the theoretical question: if the act of observing—seeing, hearing, sensing--- a thing fundamentally changes it on a subatomic level, then across all the systems of the universe and all the ways in which subatomic particles and their actions define the world as we experience it, and given chaos theory, how far does this really go?  Who’s to say mankind isn’t trapped in creation of our very consciousness, creating a world as we observe what was something different before we existed, something we can never know?  No—actually, we know that’s true now, at least on a completely insignificant level.  We just don’t know how far our creation of reality influences… everything.  We downplay it for our own sanity, and because the implications threaten the practice of science itself, but really, we don’t know.” 

         I scratched my head.  “Can you say that again, in English?”

         He laughed.  “Ok, imagine you live by a river and you don’t know what it looks like under the river because inside, you can’t open your eyes, and you can’t see through the surface of the water, so you don’t know what’s inside of the river.  It could be anything.  It could be another world.  So you reach a hand in to the river, but all you ever pull out is dead fish.  Now the fish may have been alive before you pulled them out, but you’ll never know.  You know they were different before, and that could mean alive, but you aren’t sure.  And worse, you can find out almost nothing about the fish, because as soon as you or your equipment touches them, they die, leaving you with little to no data about them except forensic.  And you can never reach the bottom of the river, and you can never swim in it, because you don’t know how.  All you can do is pull out dead fish.  Can you imagine how frustrating that would be if you’ve devoted your whole life to marine biology? 

         “That’s what has happened to physicists, essentially.  And if, by observing a thing it is changed, and if this law is such that observing something in the present changes it in the past, then the possibilities for how deeply this interaction effects mankind, a being existing through different kinds of observation of the world, are limitless.  And if the effect is heavy, all observation reflects not the thing that was originally there (Thing-A), but a new thing that your observation created (Thing-B). 

         “You still look confused.  Imagine Thing-A— a fish in our previous example— going along, happily existing.  And then some human comes and observes it, or pulls it out of the river.  Because that human did that, Thing-A begins acting different on a sub-atomic level, but not afterwards—right as it was observed, or a fraction of a second before, or a year before.  If that happens with half of Thing-A’s particles, think of the potential difference.  Half of the ice cube in your hand is not the ice cube that existed before you decided to pick up, and you caused the difference as soon as your brain told you an ice cube was there.  Is this happening every time you make scotch on the rocks?  No one can say, and scientists rather hate theoretical questions of this type, that challenge their beliefs.  But lets say this difference is instantaneously multiplied exponentially enough so that the Thing is different enough to be called Thing-B—a dead fish— which is kind of like Thing-A, but changed.  Thing-A, what the human was trying to observe, remains forever unknowable.” 

         “Ok, lets say those things down there are going crazy,” I said, “freaking out because we’re observing them.  Who’s to say it’s anything serious?  Why would it effect us?  If they’re so small…”

         “Because, my friend, they are you.  I’m looking at you right now, and half of you is not the same.  Think about it.  Half of you is not the same.  And yeah, those guys definitely have room to move down there, so it’s not like their colliding because I’m looking at you; but the worst part is, the more micro you go—and now there’s a severe cap on what we possibly can be sure of, so this is loose theory, though that’s the best we have—when you get to the smallest particles, their movement and vibration determines their effect on their environment, by determining what kind of larger particle they are grouped into: an electron, or a gluon, whathaveyou.  In other words, vibrating bands of energy are the basis of the universe, and their vibrations determine what the universe does.  So perhaps if my observation changes the vibration, my observation creates a new thing entirely.  Who’s to say the same isn’t true with all particles effected by the uncertainty principal?  If their movement through space changes their relationship with it… then observing them which changes their motion changes their… what, polarity?  Movement through space-time?  Which actually happens to all matter when it approaches the speed of light, and always… in relativity….

         “Not to mention-- which half of you is different?  Is it only half?  What if it’s less?  What if it’s more?  And if it’s less, does knowing that it could be more give you an excuse to be something new, that you want to be, but something that’s not the same?  Did that thing exist before you thought of the idea that you were changed?  Can you really be sure?”

         “That’s what we’re talking about here, all the time, always.  The question is, the scale to which this is true.  But think of the possible effects on us. 

         “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it fall, then it was not a tree.  

         “Even worse, consider the problem of scale: if you can look at your bank account online and the computer, checking the account, says you have five thousand dollars  and you have five thousand dollars and one hundredth of a cent, you will never know that and it won’t really matter.  But if through an accumulation of myriad individual occurrences of observation changing the subject combined with the multiplying effects of chaos theory, the computer tells you (wrongly) that you have only twelve hundred dollars in the bank, and you believed it and acted like this were true…  And worse, what if the computer telling you that you had twelve hundred dollars made it true?  Also, if time is no barrier for this phenomena, how powerful is it?”

         He took a bite of his sandwich.

         “It sounds impossible that it’d be strong enough to effect us in any way, and it probably is.  But on the other hand, psychologists, operating on totally different levels with totally different tests and parameters have discovered just this thing is very true, at least with how the human brain codes and washes memory and colors the present.  Psychology finds that what the individual believe is “true,” and the brain doesn’t let that go easily.  In fact, it weighs the data.   You can even go so far as someone like President Bush, who authorities say is living in extreme denial, or a separate world in which everything he does makes sense.   His subconscious mind is doing that to him so his brain can continue to function without the state psychologists call cognitive dissonance and most normal people call ‘totally loosing his shit.’  People don’t like to find out everything they ever knew about the world was either wrong or just a figment of their point-of-view, and their brains whitewash the incoming data so they won’t have to.  And if that’s happening for all of us… think of the implications.  Hell, even our visual cortex accentuates certain aspects of the visual field of our perception, such as the direction of lines.  Look at this,” he said, and drew a series of lines on a piece of paper.  The lines looked like this:

llllllllllllllllllllll/llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll

         “Which lines do you see first?”  He said.  “They’re all the same height, only one is roughly longer.  But first, you noticed the diagonal middle one when your eyes were on another part of the page, and then you noticed it first as a gap.  The lines in the middle— did you even look at them, or do you only assume they are lines? 

         Have you ever seen a picture of half a house, and you somehow know exactly where and what and how long the other lines are?   Almost as if they’re there?

         He put down the pen, satisfied.  “You can sometimes hear someone say your name, even if you’re at a party and they’re half a room away.  But you didn’t hear anything else they said.  Ever heard of phantom limb syndrome?  We don’t see the world, we see the world our brain creates for us to see.  Ask any good psychologist.”

         Another bite.  “Is it related to the uncertainty principle?  Scientifically, it’s ridiculous to even connect the two, but who knows?  And even if it isn’t related, isn’t it almost worse in a way that we’re operating under a double-blind?  That, seeking the unknown and the answers to why, we tried to offset our perspective with the cold calculation of science, only to find that when we neared all the answers they weren’t for us to know?  And if we wanted to unite the grand theories or get any farther at all, our only option was faith in an beautiful and improvable theory of strings? 

         Anyway: you and I may not actually exist, the way we think we exist.  It could be that none of this is really here at all, and what’s actually real about us—you, me, this room—is something altogether different than we believe it is.   Which gets troubling for us science types.”

         He laughed, ruefully.  “Things get weirder when you learn that there’s a name for exactly that type  thing, the existence being created by being viewed (Thing-B).  It is called maya, and it’s the existence Buddhists and Hindu mystics say they’re trying to escape from. And really, they could be right, it could really go that far.  It could all be one big cosmic sham, with all humanity living in a kind of consciousness-made dreamworld (Thing-B). It gets fucking crazy when you learn that the Buddhists also have a name for the vibration of the string-theory strings: Om, the sound that is the totality of the universe. For a while, we had a lot of confused, Buddhism-dabbling scientists.  But most of us just went on our merry way.”

All that exists exists in transformation.  What is has always been, and nothing is not: nothing cannot ever be. 

All your life and all your choices have already been lived, and chosen: and you were the one who lived, and chose.  You are choosing now, and you will be choosing in eternity.  Every moment and every choice is preserved, whole, in the eternity that transcends time. 

That is the reality of reality.  Seconds and years, these are the illusions we create in our ignorance of the great one. 

All exists in transformation.   All you ever were and ever will be: what you are now is as the stem of a rose that has already flowered.  In the past, that stem was a bud: before it was a bud, it was a seed. 

In the transcendent realm, it is all three, without past or future.

You were once a child, and one day, you will be an old one, a wise one.  (if you are not already, you wise-ones of Gaia) Once you held your own pacifier, and once you grew enough to hold them yourself, whether or not you chose to reproduce.  All these moments, and all the moments in-between—every second of your life—you are always.

Once you were blind, and soon you shall see.  Once you were in a specific stage of evolution, and soon you shall have evolved.  Once you felt incomplete, and after completeness was an attainable state, and soon after completeness was obtained.  Whether or not  you are consciously able to understand that it's so, it has already happened in the eternal eye. 

You are evolving.  There is no end to evolution: evolution is the means and it is the end.  It is both. 

There is no goal to a road, it’s a road and not a goal.  Evolution is evolution, not a completion. 

“enlightenment” is not a switch in your brain…