The Oracle at Delphi's Journal (original) (raw)

I've finally finished The Dancing Wu Li Masters after years of it sitting on my shelf and weeks of reflecting on what it is saying. It's an old book when considering present developments in the observation of quantum mechanics, but quantum theory itself is twice as old and since its inception has hardly changed. This book however is the first I've read that was capable of viscerally explaining the non-locality and non-linearity of space-time. Limited by "symbols" it acknowledges this limit and it dances with you within these confines so as to allow you, the reader, to experience the reality that the ambiguity of language prohibits. I've read books that describe the world in terms of eastern philosophy, relativity, string theory, quantum electrodynamics, probability functions, and from the historical perspective of the human perception of time itself, and yet none of them were able to convey what was on the tip of their brains, and the tip of mine as well. They all touch upon the fact that at the plank level no further observations are possible, or that energy and matter, waves and particles, are merely two different manifestations of the underlying fabric of space-time. That the linear passage of time is only a construct resulting from the methods with which the relativistic mind collects the information, while space-time itself is only motion, with no preference towards forward or backward. They all extol the words of Bohm, Bell and Schrödinger, but none of them ever try to conceptualize these precepts beyond the application of their useless symbolism, or then take so many angles in driving home the truth of the matter.

Here's a mantra saved like a jewel in one of the very last pages.

Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends upon what we look for. What we look for depends upon what we think. What we think depends upon what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality.

As far as information is concerned, this book pales in comparison to the likes of In Search of Schrödinger's Kittens or The Elegant Universe, but it's what this book leaves open to interpretation that brought me the most pleasure.

I'll tell you now that there is no way to view the universe in discrete, quantified, localized concepts like we used to. Those Newtonian days of dissecting the universe as if it were some slabbed corpse in a college classroom are coming to an end. Somewhere in the past us Westerners drew a distinction between mythos and logos. We severed the rational half of our brain from the irrational completely and we lost the ability to harmonize the two as a superposition of the same underlying perception. We dichotomized the very tools our genes gave us for understanding reality into opposing camps, indeed we separated our own minds into bitterly feuding internal demons. Somehow in the Western race for supremacy we fractured ourselves even further into such weapons of "rightness" as religious doctrine, philosophy (social science), hard science (biology), theoretical physics and so on, all of them believing they were the true self contained answer to our universe. Religion and philosophy on one said proclaiming the "why", sciences on the other stating the "how"...and yet somehow neither side realizing that they were arguing over semantics. In their argument over the "what" neither side realized that it was actually searching for the same thing, only through different means.

I try to talk about these things with my friends and find myself overwhelmed by the simple burden of... of starting. I want to share my thoughts, I want to explain my beliefs, but I find it nearly impossible to describe my conception of something such as religion without first describing the foundation of historical, philosophical, and theoretical (quantum mechanics) data that I have built these ideas on. I just wish I knew where to start, the beginning or the end? :(