By D.Thomas

This is a Part Two of sorts, because the last entry was complete, but the idea was barely opened; also, I threw out some dangerous words:

I put Proper Noun God in ” ” and called “God” an image or symbol;

I compared the CERN Large Hadron Collider to Hot Wheels– but let me tell you about the Hot Wheels track I got for Christmas! This was the first Christmas in our lifetimes that my younger sister and I were not together; when she asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I said “Hot Wheels track.” At the nursery, I have distracted, soothed, and won over many hesitant and weepy children by rolling cars down the loopy exit ramps of the Fisher-Price garage; I can run little cars down over and over for an hour. We have not held nursery or M.O.P.S in this year of COVID-19, though. My sister believed me, and sent a Loop Launcher and an Ultra Booster and– I laughed and clapped my hands like a child and crowed to all my friends and have never been so thoroughly delighted with a Christmas present. The loop can’t be attached to other track, but if you line things up right you can launch a car onto track that will enter the turbo-booster and rev up and shoot out… I only have two turn pieces, U-turns, so it took some experimentation, some engineering and construction with some books and boxes for hills and supports, but I managed to make a continuous loop, and got five cars running on the loop at once…Looking up correct spellings and so forth just today, I found a Google entry under the Large Hadron Collider for the “Proton Synchrotron Booster” (protons put together, “revved up” and shot out) and thought, “Parallel complete.”

I also said that the Holy Spirit tests and proves things, for which the only proof I offered was Bible quotes from the Gospel of John. I may as well confess here that the main purpose of my starting a blog is to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ– to yank the name of Christ and the terms “Christian” and “evangelist” out of the hands of Hatred and Destruction, Harm, and Deceit so that they can again be spoken to bring Good News.

But first– the moon, the Moon!

That full moon Saturday night!

It was large and bright and pink like a pearl; the night wore midnight-blue silk with an inky dark velvet overlay of silhouettes of rooftops, treetops, hills; and that one stunning pink pearl.

I step out with my head full of things I read and my awareness of the infinitude of particles, quasi-particles, tiniest crystals of being within me, around me, scattered through the universe, and am stopped by the burbling of the water running where the stream bed was bone dry for months last summer and fall; by deer, crossing near me, by trees, by the moon, and exclaim my thanks, sing praise.

Awareness: my eyes in fact see an infinitude of glitter sparkles, pixels but a million or trillion times smaller– the cells of my cornea or lense? The stuff which makes my eye or the air between my eye and all that’s seen? Does anybody else see this– all colors, no colors, a field of– I wonder what? Lighting and background don’t change this. Do I see a quantum field, or am I going to have cateracts or macular degeneration later, I wonder. I think about seeing: how different our ancestors’ eyes would have been, without electric lights, headlights, street lights, television, computer, and phone screens.

We “understand” concepts when we can “see” them. I’ve been reading lots of science blurbs, physics articles from the web, and conversing with my older sister who studied this and helps clarify the definitions of things, and we talk about proofs and speculations and what researchers are exploring with their equations, inventions and contraptions. There was an excited headline that said there may have been discovered “Time Crystals” or “Space-Time Crystals”– and at Room Temperature! (SciTechDaily 2/24/2021). Shouldn’t these fuel a Tardis, or something? It was about “quasi-particulate spin magnons”.

Quasi-particulate spin magnons are, in my own epiphanal paraphrase, not things but movement suggesting a thing is moving in a wavelike way according to the experiment being conducted; physics, now, considers every action, at least on the quantum level (force, wave) to be moving particles (quasi, quantum, sub-atomic and otherwise tiny) bumping into tiny bits of particles, causing motion and change. ( I can visualize this.) So a magnon is not a thing but a motion? Forces like magnetism and weak and strong are force-bearers in action.

Straight off of Wikipedia, I gleaned that a quasiparticle is “a collective excitation” of the electron’s spin structure in a crystal (space crystal, or, particular thing), and a magnon a “quantized” spin wave;

A spin wave is “a propogating disturbance” and all of this is like a wave in quantum mechanics. A wave is a collective of excited moving bits in “elastic arrangements” of atoms or molecules in solids and some liquids.

(Solids and liquids are “condensed matter.”)

I love “collective excitations.” That should be a chapbook title.”Collective Excitation of Angels.” Funnier is the term for the change in the momentum’s direction of the quarky, quirky bits of time crystals: “Umklapp scattering”.

Outside the lab experiments where electrons and photons are shot at atomic nucleii, we don’t know what excites the quasi-particles or propogates the stuffs or forces. Cosmic background radiation, the tiniest oldest bits of light radiating everywhere in all directions, since and still radiating from the big bang/ creation of the universe? Are these ripples light, photon-stuff, or phonon, sound?

When I look back at words and definitions, pieces of thought scrawled on loose sheets of scrap paper here and there, they do not by themselves make much sense, and I imagine actual physicists would want math symbols, but– I do kind of know what they mean. Black holes confound me less as I think of “antimatter” not as the opposite of matter but matter of an opposite charge, neutralizing or negating, not annihilating.

I did not study or understand any of this in school, and I do not know the alphabet of mathematical equations, but read more recently, with interest and enthusiasm, explanations and illustrations of quantum and cosmological laws and mechanics, and, with the right descriptors, I saw. The pictures in my head give me at best the graphic novel version of the classic and the quantum texts, but to this degree I see, and what I see I understand.

In order to see, I had to be able to construct an image out of parts that I could picture. To picture the basic parts (even, proton, neutron, electron with their positive, no, and negative charges), I had to follow the descriptions or directions: “imagine a balloon, blown up”– as the expanding universe; any markings on it would move further from each other with the expansion which is in all directions at once. (The balloon’s expansion is generated by breath– the cosmos from the “Bang” of somehow suddenly beginning being.) Nouns, verbs, modifiers, those parts of speech and human grammar. A meets B and the reaction is C.

I had to stop objecting in my mind–“How do they know? That was to fix an equation, that’s a hypothesized particle they’re slipping into their equations; we can’t really test any space, and temperatures, atmospheres, original colors to prove even red shifts, nor black holes, nor ever ever experiment in the Big Bang or Bounce itself, nor pluck a single, basic-most string to see or hear its own frequecy; that has only ever been registered during that type of experiment in a lab setting— no meson, gluon, no anti-quark, in fact even no Number ( no 27) has been seen in the wild.”

To read and comprehend I had to willingly suspend my disbelief. I followed the images and logical lines as if they were true and– I saw what they were talking about. I can “see” these tiny, glittery bits of energy, of light, of being by which they categorize variable factors– flickering in and out of existence, dancing and brushing, bumping, changing themselves, each other, their colors and flavors, oscillations, gyrations, the waves and forces of flow that are altered by the beat of one butterfly’s wing. This randomness of coming into and ceasing, of excitations and changing spins on the quantum level still, despite the massless, mass-generating Higgs boson or field through which massless flickery things pass and take on their masses, still conflicts with the known, sound-seeming laws of general relativity within which all the natural laws we actually do know, dwell. We walk, and expect the ground to be solid enough to hold us (snow makes one think of that, when it bears you up here, gives and you sink knee deep the next step), and expect ourselves to be held within touching distance of the ground by the earth’s gravitational pull (tripping on nothing makes me think that her gravitational pull is not constant, that sometimes she plays). I have tried and sat on that chair a hundred times, so I trust it will hold when I sit on it or stand on it to change that light bulb overhead. “What if it didn’t?” is, I think, the source of the narrator’s dis-ease and unease, in Sartre’s NAUSEA: What if it stopped holding together? What keeps natural laws working? Other, opposite laws? What if they slipped? That solid chair might be bigger, one day, there in its space, or smaller. Just that one thing, in relation to the rest of the room. Coffee tables can do that. String basses. Sometimes cats. The way that distances seem to expand at night. Nothing is solid, nothing is fixed. Neutrinos seem to bloweth where they listeth.

What if each such wave or oscillation is a breath? The Pneuma of being, the Om of the universe, Being or Living Source. If there was a Big Bounce or Bang, something catalyzed it– there is no conceivable opposite of being (”Nothing” is an idea, a concept, a non-physical thing).

As physicists and mathematicians use their alphabets of imagery, create numerical and function stories of relationships, of origins and family groups and governments and spun-off exiles, wars and alliances and deaths, so do the storytellers of our myths and epics, histories and legends, wars and heroes, origins, trials or tasks, prophecies, and fates. Humans speak in story. A encounters B and the reaction, what happens , is C.

It is only the scientists who run the experiments or math who know which propositions are still hypotheses and what is proven enough to work with, to make 3-D printers, vaccines, and Mars Rovers actually work. Headlines and popular essays make it seem that all these theories have been proved, the deep space of eighty billion years ago mapped and bits of the first balls of flame held in test tubes and all equations solved, but this is not so, and to think so is sloppy reading of the information. Dark matter and dark energy are still unknowns, “that which probably must be something because otherwise our math isn’t making sense.”

Theorists desire a Central Doctrine or, if I may, a Logos that will explain all the Laws of Nature that so far seem to hold, and that they posit as true in all spaces and for all times.

As the physical world has electromagnetic and gravitational fields and particles and particular active, observed, excited “bundles” of, for instance, protons (bundles of protons are visible light), so the psychic field with its unconscious (or, not-conscious-now) has particular bundles of constellated psychic matter (archetypes), excited into observable effects, reactions to stimulus encountered in the space-time we dwell in. The psychic field is energy as the quantum fields and particles are energy. Love, desire, fear, anger, inspiration are high-energy states or forces.

Willing suspension of disbelief: what if we can agree that the ancient tales of nations’ origins and humans’ conversations with Gods are probably mythological, distilling the experiences of earliest humanity into stories– like what we remember and tell of a dream which is never really the whole dream, yet the details we do recall tell some truths about our selves: bodies, minds, or souls. One’s psyche, in the dream, is the place and shifting places, and the characters and the events, the battles between good and evil. Around the fire, the story tellers tell the remembered stories and dreams of the social group. And every culture has in its beginnings stories of gods interacting with women and men. By the time the gods and mortals have names, and by the time tales get written down, they have taken on political biases and slants, have shrunk, have fallen. ( And then we come to historical record by first-hand witness and the general relativity of truth from particular points of view.)

The old stories are also our psyches’.

None of my reading makes it seem more impossible for Generation or Generator of All to make itself a being, to be born, be alive as animals are, and to die; to walk, talk, touch, teach, humans– on this planet, once or more than once, on any planet where created beings exist and are, because things that are can be nothing else than “Children” of BEING . Why cannot Life live, Love love, Death die? This is a great mystery– but so is it a mystery how I can think about and analyze or know myself, on the one hand, or anything not-myself, on the other.

Why do humans have a spirit of wondering and seeking to know What set existence all in motion, first propogated, excited, disturbed things that are, into being, and Why?

What is spirit, or “a” spirit ? At least, That which moves, which causes, which is not seen but is known by its effects on things which can be.

Jesus told the scholarly Pharisee Nicodemus, “Truly, truly I say to you, unless one is born from above he cannot see the kingdom of God… Truly, truly I say to you, unless one is born of the water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit;” (John 3: 3 – 6).

Seeing, and entering. Seeing, and believing. The ancient belief in the existence of a Creating-Preserving-Destroying Being has not been disproved, and has not disappeared from the earth. After reading about the neutrinos that can change flavor and color and the magnons that can change spin and electrons that can try out every path at once and then “take” one, I do not find it so very strange that one could be a “Son of Man” and also the Son of God– born, that is, of a woman’s blood and bone, of earth, and also, Being; “Son of” and “God” being, necessarily, metaphors for the relationship of the mortal man to Creating Sustaining Being Called, for brevity, God. Individuals of all genders and races, almost all languages, of all economical and social positions have tried, have experimented by trying and testing this idea of birth “from above” or “again”, have made notes and built upon one another’s experiences, and the Christian faith in God incarnated on the earth in the man Jesus and His Good News of salvation and eternal life– has not been disproved or destroyed. No Jewish or Roman documents have been unearthed that disprove his life, his healings and exorcisms, his death or resurrection.

In Aion, C.G. Jung talks about quaternities, how our psyches seek wholeness, and a four-square, solid quaternity seems more symmetrically complete than a trinity, and (while the Devil is a creation and not equivalent of Christ) the Ascension of Mary the Mother into Heaven seems a modern attempt to resolve the desire. Mary as a woman, the personal Mary, is too small; Mother Earth is closer– older, more encompassing, but not enough. “Creation,” I think, might be the fourth:

“Father/Mother,”- “Spirit,”- “Son,”- and Creation.

Scientists say that 3/4 of the energy of the universe is “dark” (i.e. unknown) energy, and it’s a similar percentage of matter that is “dark”.

What if “God,” “Spirit,” what if BEING is a verb? What if The Creator And Sustainer is BEING, both Noun and Verb at once? That which is and does.

My sister challenged me to try to visualize in four dimensions (one–line, two–square, three– cube, four– tesseract). Like most, picturing a geometrical thing just radiates in deeper longer wider thingness , and I confess the geometrical explanation of polytopes lost me for now, but– the fourth dimension in our universe, would be time, wouldn’t it? Height-Depth-Width-TIME. or space: Past-Present-Future-PLACE. so I picture:

Whether cube or sphere, if the observation point is PLACE (and I’m a particle, say), I see all the past, present, and future of this place at once, which is what I think prophets may have been shown.

If TIME is the viewpoint (I am wave), I would see this space of height, width, and depth, be it city or star cluster, through all its revolutions and buffets and changes along all its lattices and surfaces, and see light that began billions and billions of years ago, see the beginning of things and end, which is how a “God” might see, and humans dream of seeing.