Zen, Quantum Mechanics, and Tyranny

Zen, Quantum Mechanics, and Tyranny

Beginning at least as early as 500 BC, we have sought to understand the nature of the physical world around us.

Classical Newtonian physics held that all matter, as well as energy, gravity and motion were empirical phenomena that existed outside of us. All of our experience, and everything around us, could be explained by understanding the interplay of these, based on our observations. The world was real, concrete, and what we saw around us yielded to common sense.

Newton's work was consistent with the observations of the early classicists, and his conclusions are still valid and accurate, and are used today in almost every field of endeavor. The behavior of almost any physical system, from engineering, to optics, to orbital dynamics, can be understood by the application of Newtons laws.

At the end of the 19th century we began to explore the world of subatomic matter, and quickly discovered that at that scale, things were very different. The classical debate as to whether light consisted of particles or waves yielded to the inescapable insights of quantum mechanics, that, depending on the means used to measure it, it was both.

Slowly, over the following century, physicists began to understand something that Eastern philosophy had held for over a thousand years. The physical world around us, built up from the interactions of subatomic particles, does not exist until we observe it.

Literally, the physical properties of matter do not exist, even in principle, until observed by a sentient mind. This seems to violate all the laws of basic common sense, but time after time, controlled experiments prove that it is so.

“Cogito, ergo sum…I think, therefore I am”…Rene Descartes understood this decades before anybody ever heard of quantum physics. We exist because we say we exist.

It appears that our God given awareness is the key to the very existence of the world around us. In the same way, if Truth, Honor, Respect, and Love itself exist independently of our thought, it is only our awareness of them that allow them to manifest in the world.

Tyranny, in all it's forms, seeks to deny these things. It is based on the inability to understand that the observer is not God. He is merely empowered by God. While I accept as true that our minds are the source of all around us, I believe that in the whole of human experience, tyranny, including socialist ideology, along with the underlying motives of those who advocate it, is the sole exception. Socialism springs not from the human mind, but from the human colon.

Here's a couple of books if you want to look further: “The Dancing Wu Li Masters”, by Gary Zukav, and “ABC's of Relativity”, by Bertrand Russell.