Nothing Moves: prelude
Everything is exactly as it seems - and nothing is as it seems.
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It seems ridiculous to claim that “Nothing moves”. Of course things move! We’re surrounded by movement every moment of every day, at numerous different levels from the atomic to the galactic. Even our fundamental life processes - breathing, eating, our hearts beating and blood circulating - are based on motion of some sort or another; even thinking involves electric charges - electrons - moving around our neural circuits.
But what if all of these movements didn’t involve any transfer of any physical thing from one place to another? ‘Plato’s Cave’ likened our perception of reality to that of watching shadows dancing across the back of a cave: does the flickering of a shadow count as movement in the material sense? If we shine a torch on a wall in the dark, we can make the bright patch on the wall move about: sure, we are moving, the torch is moving - but does the shifting patch of light on the wall count as ‘movement’ in the material sense? (Clue: a laser beam shone from Earth can be made to pass across the surface of the moon faster than the speed of light - but that’s not regarded as breaking Relativity’s light-speed limit).
What if, then, all of the movement we experience in our lives, from electrons to stars, is this sort of motion: not involving movement of anything more substantial than a shadow? What if our perception of movement, in every context, is an interpretation by our conscious awareness (whatever that is) of an effect comparable to a light beam playing on a wall?
Remarkable as it may seem, this is precisely the conclusion we’re forced to if we follow the science - the science of movement - right back to its origins in the mysterious realms of sub-quantum reality. Not that mysterious really, just a case of unpicking the stitching woven in the cosmic tapestry by the fundamental energetic threads which form every last bit of the material reality of our perceptual experience.
The question is: how far down this particular rabbit-hole are you prepared to go? Are you ready to see this material realm for what it truly is, in all its amazing complexity and all its stunning simplicity? Are you ready to get to grips with the underlying fabric of spacetime, the canvas on which (or rather, in which) this unspeakably glorious living cosmic work of art is painted?
Above all, are you ready for this journey down the rabbit-hole to end all rabbit-holes to bring you, as its destination, to an encounter - with yourself?
Because that’s where this journey is taking us. The deeper we go into the nature of our experienced reality - the nature of this spacetime that we all inhabit and, indeed, are part of - the closer we get to the nature of our own being.
And isn’t that, really and truly, is what this journey is actually all about? When we look out the stars, when we study those pictures from the Hubble or James Webb space telescopes, when we gaze into that electron microscope or wonder at the findings from the Large Hadron Collider - aren’t we actually, more than anything, looking to understand who we are?
This, it seems to me, is the ultimate voyage of scientific discovery. Science doesn’t come more ‘close to home’ than this. If we can pin down who, and what, we are - at least as far as we can at this stage in our understanding - this gives us a major heads-up as to what might be most important in our lives. A key role of scientific discovery is to scatter illusions and replace them with realities: dispensing with the notion of a flat earth was a great first step; Copernicus’ discovery (actually first made by Aristarchus 18 centuries earlier) took us another big stride forward. Knowing what it is that we ourselves are actually about must surely rank as ‘a giant leap for mankind’ in the best tradition of scientific breakthroughs.
And as scientific breakthroughs stand, they don’t come much bigger than this. Not only us, but everything in the cosmos turns out - at the sub-quantum level - to be mind-bendingly different from anything we could have possibly imagined.
“At the sub-quantum level, nothing moves”. Who knew???
And what does that say about who we are, about what the cosmos is truly about??
Don’t take my word for it, though. Walk through the scientific evidence with me, see it all fall into place. Then judge for yourself: this is most surely that red-pill/blue-pill moment, the only one of its kind you’ll ever experience; but it’s not a choice between delusion and reality, rather it’s a choice between two levels of reality, both equally substantial in their own way. You can live the day-to-day spacetime you - no problem with that; or you can live (apparently the same) beyond spacetime you - empowered by the awareness of who and what you truly are.
It all depends, really, on your perspective: if your perspective is defined by the scope of your physical senses then this will also define the reality you inhabit; if your inner self yearns to step beyond those boundaries, to be beyond those boundaries, then you have that choice - the choice to experience the infinite. The very structure of our existence is fashioned precisely to offer us that choice: blue pill or red pill.
Make no mistake, there’s nothing ‘woo-woo’ about this; to write it off as ‘unscientific’ would itself be a denial of what science is showing us. Quantum Mechanics is making it increasingly clear that what we perceive with our senses is just the tip of the iceberg: most of what makes the universe tick is beneath the surface of our spacetime awareness, under our ‘perceptual radar’, so to speak.
My next post and those following it deal directly with these below-the-radar aspects of this reality we inhabit. First we’ll get to grips with the hows and whys of a universe in which, at a deeper level, nothing moves. Then we’ll dive deep into the knotty problem of time: what it is and what it isn’t. We’ll kick off that journey into even more awesome revelations with a blow-by-blow deconstruction of a well-accredited scientific study on retrocausality, or ‘how to make things happen - after they’ve happened the way you then made them happen (after they’d happened)’.
Yes, you read that right: at a sub-quantum level, temporal ordering of cause and effect is not a given (though that depends on what you regard as the cause and what’s the effect). We’ll get a bit of a handle on how that can be once we get further along.
My previous posts - what you might call ‘Beyond Spacetime 101’ - have been free, apart from a few technical offerings. These following posts - ‘Beyond Spacetime 201’ - will definitely not be technical, in the sense of requiring advanced Maths or Science ability; they’ll be well within the reach of the average Joe or Jo. Neither were they going to be be free: these deeper scientific insights - which you won’t find anywhere else - were originally planned as premium posts.
On reflection, though, I’ve decided that this info shouldn’t be hidden away behind a paywall; it’s for everybody who recognises its significance. So I’m leaving it open to all, and I’m leaving you to decide how you value it.
The subscription rate is set at UK£4.50 per month, which works out at an average of less than 15 pence per day. For this (or for free) you’ll get the distillation of over a quarter of a century’s analysis of what’s going on ‘under the hood’ of this amazing experience we refer to as ‘Material Reality’
Yes, that’s the deal on offer here: unique insights into the nature of the universe - the nature of your own being - for the (optional) cost of two cups of coffee a month. And if you think the back-story behind physical matter sounds fairly mind-blowing, just wait till you hear the back-story to Time . . . I won’t spoil it for you, you’d just better be ready for the most incredible trip, way beyond your imagining - and without the need for any hallucinogenics, the deeper reaches of Reality are more than enough for the wildest experience!
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Nothing Moves: The Big Picture
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