Tag: quantum physics

En Route

I am writing to you from Atlanta, en route to Tucson, Arizona. I am headed there to do my work in the world. In this case I will be giving a guest lecture at the University of Arizona College of Architecture, while also working with their Solar Decathlon Student Competition team for a few days. I am feeling centered and clear about what I have to share…even as I know that my news is disruptive. Somebody’s got to do deliver it.

The main gist of the message is the same one that I have for any and everyone- we have built our version of the world on faulty foundations. This is tough news to swallow, as the implication is that everything has to change. And we don’t like change. Yet the fact of the matter is that in the game of life, that which refuses to change… dies. Life just doesn’t stand still. Living beings are either evolving or devolving. Period. It might be wise to stop and reflect on which direction we are headed. It would further be wise to not mistake technological advancement with evolution. They are not the same thing. In fact technological advancement without evolution is one of the surest ways to wind up extinct.

That is why I am shouting from every mountaintop I can find. I will be delivering this same message as the keynote speaker for the Vermont Green Building Network Annual Celebration in a couple of months. So what am I talking about? By now, if you have been reading this blog for any amount of time, you get the idea. The problem that we have on our hands is a worldview issue. Our story is off. We can, and should, be forgiving with ourselves, others, and those from whom we inherited this worldview. But enough already. The foundations upon which we built Western civilization as we know it disintegrated almost 100 years ago. We just couldn’t be bothered to notice.

What I am talking about is the Cartesian worldview which postulates that the world we see and experience is objective, made up of matter that cares not one iota about our presence. It’s simply not true. Quantum physics proved that way back in 1925. I have been over this before, so I won’t get into the specifics again here. What’s curious is that 100 years later we keep teaching the same old model. We keep telling the same old story. It’s just too difficult to face that the foundations upon which we have built this whole dang building have rotted out. So we pretend that isn’t the case and keep working harder and harder, throwing more and more technological fixes at it, in an attempt to keep the building from falling down. It never occurs to us to build a new foundation that is rooted in the way nature actually works.

Speaking of nature, the other part of our worldview that has been off from the day it was asserted is our “survival of the fittest” story about evolution. I have covered this one already before too, but will cover it again now. It was not Darwin who uttered “survival of the fittest.” That was Hebert Spencer. He was a social scientist who among others was keen on proving that unchecked capitalism operates in accordance with natural law. You can understand what was at stake. If capitalism was in accordance with natural law, then it too was law. To make his argument, Spencer extracted Darwin’s findings, took them out of context, and changed their meaning entirely. Specifically, Spencer asserted that competition drives evolution. Darwin was disturbed by this conclusion and objected. It didn’t matter. He was ignored, because the story had to fit the emerging capitalist narrative.

So here we now stand in our neoliberal world, competing each other to death. Again, I know this isn’t pleasant news and if me saying these things doesn’t push a button somewhere in you then I might guess that you are not an American. Hang in there with me for a second, or perhaps just a bit longer. Our survival is in fact dependent upon being in alignment with natural law. We just didn’t get that law correct those many years ago. What Darwin knew, and what ecologists have since proven again and again, is that it isn’t competition that drives evolution. Cooperation does. I’m not saying that competition doesn’t play a role, it just isn’t the primary driver. Cooperation is.

Let’s return to the case of the trees. What seems obvious is that the straightest, fastest, tallest growing tree will win the race. And it does. It is rewarded with the longest life. Competition, right? Yes. It wasn’t until we were able to start deciphering what is going on beneath the ground that we got the full picture. Down in the soil, forests have a network made up of roots and fungus that rivals our internet. Through that network trees share information, say about impending threats or current conditions. That helps the trees survive. But here is the real kicker. You know what the tree that grows the straightest, tallest, fastest gets for winning? It gets the responsibility of feeding all of the trees around it who didn’t win the competition. Congratulations! Welcome to elderhood!!

Let that sink in. Then think about how we do it. Some would argue that the reason they don’t want wealth distribution is because the winners will naturally take care of the losers. Is that your experience? If you look around and are really honest with yourself, is that what you see happening in this country, without fail? I’m not saying that people aren’t charitable. Yet that charity is withheld as a right rather than a responsibility, and the truth of the matter is that we have taken the exaltation of self-interest too far. Which is to say we have extracted self-interest outside the bounds of natural law. You know why the elder trees feed the losers? Because they realize that they are stronger together. They realize that their own survival is dependent upon living in a forest, with friends and family. It isn’t an act of charity.

If Darwin could take back his narrative, what he would say is that the “fittest” is the one who best serves the system in which it lives. That is what he discovered and that is what he meant. In short, it is cooperation that drives evolution. Do you see how radically different that interpretation is than the one we have been taught? It is critically important that you do, that we all do. Otherwise, we will continue to build out our societal systems on faulty- or completely rotted as the case may be- foundations. As any architect or builder knows, you have to get the foundation right to have a healthy building. In the case of our social-ecological systems, the foundation is our worldview. If you want to know what to do from here, I’m about to give you the best architectural advice that I can give: take a good hard look at your foundation before you make one more move.

Speaking of foundations, our house- I am now speaking of Shannon and my literal house- is in fact sitting on a rotting foundation. So you know what we are going to do? Starting in just a couple of short weeks, we are having the whole darn house lifted ten plus feet into the air so that we can replace the foundation with a sound one. It’s shocking that we can do such things, right? But we can. And if we can lift a literal house, we can do the same with our virtual house. The only question is, will we?

 

33 Days

As promised… a week late… today I’ll give some insights into my 33 Day Process. As I mentioned in my last post, my childhood friend Chausey Leebron is offering this new online course. Chausey has shown up in a few of my previous posts, so maybe I could start by telling you a little more about her and our relationship. Chausey and I lived in the same neighborhood growing up… literally around the block so to speak. We’ve known each other since we were five. Not only did we go to school together from elementary school through high school, but we were on the same gymnastics team early on, again when we were five. We went on to be cheerleaders- yes, I said cheerleaders- together in both middle school and high school. Oh and we were on the yearbook staff together in high school as well. This is all just to say that we go WAY back.

Some of my earliest and fondest memories are of us playing at each other’s houses or at the neighborhood playground or pool, being at massive slumber parties together in elementary school, and going to gymnastics camps together. As time went on we each fell into our own paths and, well, I wouldn’t say drifted apart because we were like these fixed datums in each other’s lives. We were both just kind of always there, even if we were no longer really interacting on an authentic plane. I remember thinking in the midst of one of my last conversations with Chausey at the end of high school that I didn’t even know who she was anymore. It would be more accurate to say that I noticed she was simply checked out. Then again who isn’t at the end of high school… myself included. At any rate, I was heading east for college and she was heading west. Our lives were taking us to opposite coasts and I assumed that we would never see or hear from each other again.

To be honest, I didn’t give it a whole hell of a lot of thought after that either. I had moved on to the rest of my life. That was, until social media caught up with us about five or so years ago. Turns out Chausey had met my best friend Micki at a therapist shindig and they had become FB friends. Our paths crossed once again. Life moves in mysterious ways. I was shocked, actually, at the person who had emerged out of my childhood friend. Chausey had gone to LA to become an actress and had come back this deeply wise, spiritually connected, authentically loving, and super gifted therapist. Who would have guessed? Not me. But I am here to tell you, she’s got an impressive handle on this life gig. Truly, she does. In fact I find myself completely fascinated by the fact that anything that I might be able to share about moving into interbeing, she could speak to equally as well if not better. What’s even more fascinating is how our lives have been woven together at critical moments that we have had next to zero idea about at the time. Yet here we are. There are no coincidences in life.

All of that is to give my resounding endorsement of her new online course, 33 Day Process: Loving Your Beautiful & Miraculous Body. Here is the link again:

33 Day Process

While the entry point of the course is to open up communication channels with your own body, this simply serves as the portal to exploring the territory that I am covering in this blog- interbeing. If you are interested in this work, then I do highly recommend taking the course. I am on day 22 and have found it extraordinarily helpful. But before I speak a little about my own process, I’d like to put the territory covered into the context of what I speak about here.

I’m going to do that by taking you back to your middle school science class. Let’s talk atoms. Most likely your image of an atom involves something that looks like our planetary system in which electrons move in fixed orbits through a whole lot of space around a nucleus. Right? This model of the atom originates from the “Bohr model,” not to bore you, as proposed by Niels Bohr in 1913. In this model, the space that the electrons orbit through accounts for about 99.99% of the atom. That is to say that all material things- yourself included- are barely more than nothingness. Forget the fact that the human body is about 60% water. How about the fact that it is 99.99% nothing! Well hold on just a second. That was 1913. Unfortunately, that is the model of the atom still floating around in your head, isn’t it? Incidentally, I asked my Middlebury students if that was what they were taught and every single person confirmed that it was.

So what gives? Well, if you just take a second to check trusty ole Wikipedia, you’ll discover the words, “This model is obsolete.” Indeed it is. It has been for almost 100 years now. It was replaced in 1926 thanks to quantum physicists Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg. Let me just cut to the chase. What quantum physicists discovered is that subatomic particles (such as electrons, protons and neutrons) are not quite as solid as we once thought. That is to say that they sometimes show up as particles (physical matter), but more often than not they show up as waves (energy). The thing to understand here about waves (energy) is that they are essentially everywhere at once. Think about the cell phone waves that your phone can magically pick up anywhere… actually, if you live in Vermont then scratch that. But seriously, just try to imagine for a second the infinite volume of waves inhabiting the space you are sitting in at this very moment: light waves, sound waves, cell phone waves, wifi waves, heat waves, etc and so on. Are these waves in some discreet part of the room? No. They are everywhere at once.

Cut back to the atom. It turns out that electrons are not so much particles orbiting in empty space so much as they are waves that inhabit the entire electron cloud around the nucleus… and just happen to show up as particles in orbits of probability. Which is why it is just easier to just continue to teach the old model… we can’t handle the uncertainty (principle)! I won’t even get into the observer effect here, but suffice it to say that the two together upend our entire objectified worldview. For the sake of this post, it’s enough to simply understand that you are not 99.99% space. You and every material thing you encounter is 99.99% energy… as in NOT material.

Context set, I am now ready to talk about these 33 days. Should you decide to delve into the course, I recommend taking with you just a little uncertainty about the worldview we were all given. You know, the one that says that your body is your body and your mind is your mind and that the former is just a host to the latter. Or perhaps you are of the mindset that it’s all just a matter of matter and when the body dies, so goes the mind. Either way, what Schrödinger and Heisenberg discovered ought to give us pause. We know even more now than then, and from multiple realms of inquiry. But I’m going to keep this simple. The bottom line is that there is no separation between mind and body, or energy and matter. The one is the other, and vice versa. There is only one thing. In order to heal ourselves and the planet, we must come to grips with this at last.

But now to bring it down to earth. As I have talked about many times in this blog, I have been working intensely for well over a year to heal my inner childhood wounds. I have been doing this by stepping myself back in time, one step at a time. However, my wounds extend all the way back into the womb. I have no conscious memory of that time through the first few years of my existence. But you know who does? My body. Yup. She sure does. So all I need to do to figure out what needs to be healed is to talk to her. She knows. After all, she is the one who has been carrying the brunt of it all this time. Rest assured, she knows!

One thing that Chausey does is to help us to identify the various aspects of our body/being so that we can get to the specifics. This also helps us to recognize and support each aspect of our body/being in the role that it is playing to keep us alive. I say “keep us alive” intentionally as for the most part this is what the various primordial aspects of our being think they are doing… fighting for our survival. The issue with being stuck in survival mode is that it precludes us from stepping into our full potential, or thrival. That is why our healing must involve revisiting our old patterns and way of being. These patterns are so deeply ingrained that we are hardly aware of them. We function largely on autopilot. In order to get to thrival we have to reprogram, shifting to patterns that better serve us.

I’ll give you one personal example of the many things that are coming up for me. My Solar Plexus has been functioning in overdrive to protect me since my inception. This is due to the fact that I started life in a blood battle, my red blood cells being attacked by my mother’s immune system while in the womb. I was truly in a fight for my life and my Solar Plexus was given the job of doing the behind the scenes work to get me the intel and energy that I needed to survive. As a result, nothing and no one was to be trusted, leading to an intense guardedness carried out via my power center (Solar Plexus). The role that my Solar Plexus has been playing is to be my very own highly trained Secret Service. Good luck getting past that!

Well, these days you do have more than a snow balls chance in hell! But if I want to truly move into a state of interbeing, to evolve into a state that will support the world that I want to live in, then I need a new modus operandi. That new M.O. involves a new role for my Solar Plexus. It is going to take some time to implement with a whole lot of practice and reinforcement necessary, but my Solar Plexus has been promoted to Sensei. No longer is her job to keep me safe via separation. Her job is to keep me safe via connection. She can now be who she always wanted to be…a tai chi master. Instead of shutting out all of that energy- 99.99% of everything surrounding me and moving through me!- her new role is to learn how to move with all of that abundant, beautiful energy in such a way that helps both me and everything around me to live into our true potential.

So that’s the work. Establishing new roles and new patterns takes time and dedication. That is why this particular process takes 33 consecutive days. It’s worth it. We are worth it. Huge thank you to Chausey for sharing her gifts with the world so that we all might live into our true potential. You go, Girl!