Life & Living Systems

How do I know I am a living system?

This is a funny question to me, because I was once upon a time married to another Scorpio gothic magician, and one of our favorite things to say was, “Our love is dead already. We’re dead already,” in some pre-homage to the inevitable End. Since the End is Inevitable (in our lives, our love, or both), we celebrated our dead-ness atemporally! We found ourselves in a kind of liberative artistic bardo where “being” became more important than “doing.” The dead don’t have to do anything at all, and yet, in this state non-doing, everything necessary is done.

If physical matter is an illusion like the Buddhists say, and there exists more space between sub-atomic particles than matter, perhaps much more of what we see in this physical world is an illusion and we- unlike Schroedinger’s cat- are both alive and dead in the poetic dimension, biophysical functions aside. But is exactly our biophysical functions that let us know we’re alive!

Living people have so many requirements for what we must do to survive in the world, not to mention the social constrictions manipulated upon us by the expectation of the “Other,” debunkt authority, close-minded and loud-mouthed rednecks, and all the mundane practical activities to sustain a complex bio-physical human body miracle, etc. To be dead already is to have surrendered to ego-death before you die, and then you really realize that you are not your body, and other peoples’ opinions of you matter way less than your ability to own that moment in a small fraction of space and time that you will never see again. You are at peace with the constant change that is the death of every moment and every expectation of a predictable future.

Ego-death spiritual diatribes aside, unless I am naïve to the non-existent eating habits of certain exotic insects that live off air and fucking, I know I am a living being because I require a constant input of food to create energy to function. Corpses have the luxury of not needing 3 meals a day. I sometimes feel eating is such a waste of precious time I could be devoting to less mundane and more existentionally delicious matters.

But I digress, other laymen and scientists might say we know we are living systems because we move, have a carbon-based molecular chemical composition, are capable of reproducing. Sometimes when I menstruate, I feel like I am living and dying all at the same time.

Biophysics and Oriental Medicine

According to Wikipedia, “Biophysics is an interdisciplinary science that uses the methods of physical science to study biological systems.” That is exactly what acupuncture is based upon: methods of physical science to study biological systems, with the addition of some mystical wisdom of sages who surmise the biological basis of your dreams. For instance, “When the heart is weak, one dreams of fires. If the dream takes place in summertime, one dreams of volcanic eruptions.” This is one of the mystical/psychological- even Jungian- sides of Oriental medicine that is not based on biophysics.

Most importantly, Chinese medicine looks at the physiological functions and interrelations between organs, meridians, points, etc., to gain a holistic view at how we biologically function. Research has been conducted as to the physical properties of points and channels and the cellular effects of acupuncture in an article called, “The Biophysics of Acupuncture: Emerging Patterns From Selected Studies.”

1. Richard F. Hobbs III. Medical Acupuncture. December 2009, 21(4): 251-256. doi:10.1089/acu.2009.0710.

A New Synthesis

My E-Prime Day

I remember feeling like I woke up from a dream, and then experienced myself biting an apple, first thing in the morning, enjoying what tasted like delicious crunchy sweetness. I then remember calling my best girlfriend on the phone. After communicating with Tracy, I stretched out into various yoga positions and performed what felt to be a powerful self-healing on my ovaries and uterus. I felt myself lie down and vocalize various Buddhist and Hindu mantras. I experienced stuffing myself with cereal and almond milk, putting on clothes, and going shopping for pillows and clothes at Thrift Town. By the time I got home, the sun appeared to be gone. I walked to the Chinese restaurant in seemingly close proximity to my house, then walked home and studied the rest of the night before falling asleep.

Can I synthesize East and West?

There are many findings from Quantum Physics that confirm Eastern mystical wisdom. Quantum physics confirms this ancient Buddhist gem of wisdom: “Everything is empty.” If you look at an atom, you can see that most of the atom is composed of empty space. The portion of space occupied by actual sub-atomic particles is actually very small. If you were able to bunch up all of these sub-atomic into one space- somehow getting rid of all the empty space- you could fit all the sub-atomic matter that composes the human body onto the head of a pin.

After studying years of body-mind and mystical practices such as yoga, chi gong, and meditation, many practitioners developed what are called “siddhis.” Siddhis are a fancy way of saying “metaphysical superpowers.” Some practitioners are able to perform telekinesis- moving things with their minds. Knowing that the observed changes according to the expectation of the observer and knowing that most of all matter is space, it seems natural that matter would accordingly adjust themselves to our thoughts. Since matter is also composed of so little actual physical material, it seems like something like thought could easily influence space that most matter is made of and that the physical matter would be an easy shoe along. If one can merely suspend their belief system of a world of concrete and material reality not directly influenced by thought, then we might see physical matter defying laws of so-called reality.

Classical Physics

Newton’s Three Laws and Me

The 1^st Law states: “Objects at rest remain at rest, and objects in motion remain in motion in a straight line at constant velocity. A force must be applied to change the state of motion of an object.” I can only reminisce on the times I’ve done Sufi spinning only to have a very hard time slowing myself down to a stop once I’ve spun for awhile. I become a high-velocity tranced out time traveller in my imagination, and it would take the force akin to a MAC truck to slow me down, ie, “change the state of motion of an object.”

The 2^nd Law states: “The acceleration of an object is directly proportional to the force acting on it, and inversely proportional to its mass.” Now I reminisce on my daily bike rides and the force my legs exert on the pedals, which is directly proportional to the acceleration of my bike. I had a heavier bike before- and due to acceleration being inversely proportional to its mass- the heavier bike was harder to get started on a hill than my lighter bike.

The 3^rd Law states: “If two objects interact, say in a collision, the force exerted by object 1 on object 2 is matched by a force exerted by object 2 on object 1 of the same size, but in the opposite direction.” If two pool balls hit each other, clearly one goes in one direction and the other goes in the opposite direction.

Our Energy Efficient Culture

Our culture is obviously not energy efficient, or else we would have more sustainable permaculture communities that use energy more wisely. If we were more energy efficient, we would use solar panels; the sun is the most constant source of free energy that is not a wasteful form of energy. As it is, our culture depends on things like combustion and the burning of fossil fuels, all of which take a lot of energy. Because energy can neither be created nor destroyed- the energy of the fuel getting burned changes forms into smoke and pollution, which then go into our atmosphere to wreak even more energetic havoc on all sorts of levels. In the process of burning fossil fuels and changing it to a less concentrated form, there is energy that is lost in the process. The energy that is lost in the process turns into heat. It is no surprise then, that well into the Industrial Age, we have seen the rise of Global Warming.

Descartes has a lot to answer for!

Cartesian dualism has blinded us in so many ways: psychologically, scientifically, spiritually, environmentally, and existentially. It would be a very sad world if indeed “We though therefore we Are,” meaning- the brain was the source of consciousness emanating reality without some Greater Mind or Guiding Spirit not separate from us- helping to co-create reality w/o our conscious knowledge. A world ruled by a Cartesian mechanistic system of looking at reality cut us off from our inner knowing and feelings of interconnectedness with each other. In a world in which we live under the illusion of separation, we hold ourselves less accountable for the negative effects we have on other people. We are not just a product of our physiological underpinnings, but complex multi-dimensional creatures influenced by a Universe that is alive and teeming with consciousness in every part. We are not just the sum of our parts, but a holistic whole with certain non-deterministic, non-mechanistic tendencies towards chaos that clearly show us an unpredictable model of human behavior that does not conceed to a clear-cut cause-and-effect cookie cutter formula. Perhaps the most catastrophic effect of Cartesian dualism is the West’s obsession with controlling nature and the notion that we are separate from nature, which has led to mass ecological disaster. One of the most extreme examples of this from recent history was the British Petroleum oil spill and the government’s attempt to hide the oil by dumping massive amounts of corexit, which is a toxic chemical that I believe had devastating affects on the ocean’s ecology. In the year that followed the oil spill, there were reports from all over the world about mass populations of fish, birds, and octopus dying all over the planet. Clearly- we are not separate from nature, neither is anything is nature separated from any other part of nature. Harm to one part of the ecosystem will spread out like a Doppler Effect of fractaled chaos spun sorely towards entropy, and worse, nihilism and death.

Chaos Theory

Ordered Chaos- does this sound familiar?

Autopoiesis and entropy dynamically balance each other, lending more credence towards the self-regulation of ordered chaos. Entropy spontaneously creates disorder out of ordered contexts, and autopoiesis does the opposite by spontaneously creating order from a disordered context. These two work in harmony, preventing systems from becoming static or too chaotic and relationally incompetent.

Because everything is interconnected, we would expect that chaos in one part of the system would affect another part of the system. There is a kind of complex order and probability to the patterns of chaos that emerge along the arrow of time as variables shift and affect the whole system. However, a chaotic system- is by definition- unpredictable and especially so if one tries to determine probable outcomes too far in the future. Whatever micro changes that happen to the system will most definitely affect the macrosystem, since micro and macro are inseparable.

Fractals as Patterns of Complex Systems

Fractals are very different from the solid Platonic shapes envisioned by the Greeks, ie, triangles, squares, and pyramids. When examining the details of a fractal, any particular detail of the fractal can be magnified to show yet more detail. Some fractals are self-similar in that a particular shape is repeated under greater and greater magnification. Nature has exhibited fractals in a number of natural phenomena. The human lungs, brain, and circulatory system- including the pattern of a heartbeat- all exhibit a fractal nature. Clouds, coastlines, river deltas, weather patterns, cracks in metals, electronic noise in a receiver, insterstellar dust, gusts of wind, tree branches, broccoli, and even the stock market exhibit fractal patterns.

Consciousness out of Chaos

Because consciousness helps shape physical reality down to the way sub-atomic particles behave- such changes will ultimately cause mutations to physical reality on the macro scale since micro and macro are interconnected. By affecting physical reality on a microcosmic level with our consciousness, we therefore affect physical reality of the macrocosm.

Connectionist models of thinking, based on Neural Networks in the brain- often display chaotic modes of behavior. Their Attractors are often Strange Attractors, which has led some theorists to suggest that concentration, decision-making, and commonly recognizable patterns or states of human behavior (such as personality types) may result from brain chaos. There has also been suggestions that Jungian archetypes may be strange attractors.

Online Physics Fun
The first experiment I tried was a bust, and I wound up with saliva all over my computer screen, trying to see the different colors through the drool on the magenta box. I then checked out a version of the American flag where the blue part with white stars was instead yellow with black stars; the red stripes were turquoise, and the white stripes were black. It was quite interesting to stare at the flag for a minute and then look at a white part of the computer screen to see the normal American flag in all its traditional colors, albeit a quick after-image that quickly faded from my mind's eye.

Vibrations

Are all Vbrations Good?

Of course not! Do you feel good when you listen to the vibrations of every single voice you hear? Don’t the vibrations of high-pitched, nasal voices get under your skin? When you meet someone with bad energy, doesn’t the vague and queasy sense of dark vibration emanating from them creep you out? How would you contrast this to the feeling of vibrations that stream from a mountain lake surrounded by trees? It is not just the vibrations of color and visual sense that give us reason to make quality judgments about vibrations. Some vibrations have the power to elevate a person’s consciousness. We can hear this in a favorite piece of music, a beautiful nature scene, and the vibrations that emanate from crystal singing bowls. Other vibrations can make a person feel downright lousy. We instantly turn the radio off when it gets filled with too much static because these bad vibrations cause us mental and emotional stress. It’s funny, because the day I wrote this blog, “Good Vibrations” came on via shuffle syncrhonistically on my Ipod.

Resonance in My World

I am a singer who practices bhakti yoga and chakra chanting.  Resonance makes its peculiar presence known to me when I chant next to my crystal singing bowls and hit a frequency that activates the toning of the bowl without even touching it. When I think of resonance, I also think of emotional and energetic resonance (or lack thereof) upon meeting people. Like frequencies attract similar frequencies when it comes to befriending people. There is a sense of familiarity we have when we meet certain people, and part of this is because we have a vibrational resonance with them. I wondered how was it that anyone would ever want to hang out on the corner of Mission and 16^th, a block in my neighborhood where all the crackheads hang out. Even if you were a crackhead and needed to score some dope, why on Earth would you to want to hang out on this corner for fun after you’d gotten your fix? And the answer to that is very simple. Everyones’ vibrations find resonance- or similar frequency- to similar vibrations, in this case, the vibrations of the crackhead and prostitute corner.

Connections I Can Make between Energy and Qi

Though most people think of Qi and energy as interchangeable phenomena (and certainly Qi can be energy), my TCM professor says Qi is matter. Knowing the e=mc(squared) equation from Einstein- which says energy is matter times the speed of light squared- we can see the intimate connection between matter and energy and perhaps draw less distinction between the two. Have we grokked non-duality or what? To play devil’s advocate, let’s say that duality exists and that Qi isn’t energy; Qi is matter. If we think of matter in terms of sub-atomic particles and quarks and say that Qi is those sub-atomic particles, even then, we cannot conceive of those sub-atomic particles as static particles that don’t have an incredible amount of energy that moves them to and fro. When we think of the energy that moves them around, as laymen- as opposed to advanced particle physicists- we don’t really separate the movement of those sub-atomic particles from the particles themselves. We cannot therefore- even really conceive of matter as not being infused with energy. If that is the case, then Qi is energy AND matter.

Symmetry and Sacred Geometry

My (A)symmetrical World

There is a point that when you touch the tip of your tongue to it on the roof of your mouth where the middle ridge intersects with the gum line- you can energetically balance the left and right hemispheres of the brain. When this happens, your left and right brain are having a meaningfully linked dialogue, balanced appropriately without one side being more dominant than the other. A pleasant biological symmetry between brain hemispheres has been achieved. Most people are not yogis or meditators.

If you look most peoples’ faces, they are asymmetrical, although this may be more a function of the assymectricity of the masks people feel they need to wear which often run counter to their private selves they only show to the people most intimate to them, if that. The right side of a person’s face is the face they show to the outside world. The left side of a person’s face reveals their private internal self. The right side of my face could probably tell you that I need to protect my soft internal self by acting tough.

What does this CP violation really mean?

In particle physics, CP violation is a violation of the postulated CP-symmetry: the combination of C-symmetry (charge conjugation symmetry) and P-symmetry (parity symmetry). CP-symmetry states that the laws of physics should be the same if a particle were interchanged with its antiparticle (C symmetry), and left and right were swapped (P symmetry). The discovery of CP violation in 1964 in the decays of neutral kaons resulted in the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1980 for its discoverers James Cronin and Val Fitch.

The kind of CP violation discovered in 1964 was linked to the fact that neutral kaons can transform into their antiparticles (in which each quark is replaced with the other's antiquark) and vice versa, but such transformation does not occur with exactly the same probability in both directions; this is called indirect CP violation.

Are there connections between Sacred Geometry and Physics?

Being mathematically, mystically, and aesthetically sound, there are definite connections between Sacred Geometry and Physics. Both the I-Ching and the Buddhist and Hindu mandalas were intended to reveal deep and abstract information about time, higher dimensions, and higher states of consciousness. The I-Ching’s 64 hexes correspond to the 64-codon structure of human DNA. Mandalas help yogis enter into deep trance states. The Kabbalistic Tree of Life depicts 10 sephiroth with one hidden sephiroth which could be connected to the 11 dimensions postulated by string theory. Certain kabalastic writings which talked about the nature of spirit and body were pretty much direct metaphors of the relationship between energy and matter as explained in the Theory of Relativity. The Golden Mean or Ratio- developed by Fibonacci- revealed a certain proportion that was found in numerous spirals in nature: structures of galaxies, event horizons of black holes, the way the pyramids are laid out, even the molecular components of life. Who know science, math, magic, and metaphysics could be so intrixably connected before Chaos Theory and Quantum Reality became the new memes of the millennium and perhaps Universal truths beyond that?

Energy, Matter, & the Four Forces

How has e=mc2 affected me?

Considering that e=mc2 is the secret of stellar energy, I can only say that as a starseed and someone whose spirit is more oriented towards Sirius versus Earth in terms of my soul’s origin, my interest lies in studying the Sirian binary system and how e=mc2 affects Sirius.

According to Wikipedia, “Sirius A is about twice as massive as the Sun and has an absolute visual magnitude of 1.42. It is 25 times more luminous than the Sun,”. E=mc2 means that the energy contained in a piece of matter is equal to the mass of the matter multiplied by the speed of light squared, which is a huge number. For Sirius A to be twice as massive as the sun means that it is also converting an incredible amount of mass into energy, which would explain why Sirius A is the brightest star in the night sky.

How would you compare the four “forces?”

The Strong Nuclear Force is limited to subatomic distances and its job is to keep quarks together inside protons and neutrons as well as protons and neutrons inside atomic nuclei. The Weak Nuclear Force functions in very short distances found in atomic nuclei, and although it is stronger than electromagnetism- because its messenger particles (W & Z bosons) are massive and sluggish, they do not adequately deliver its strength.

Electromagnetism is 1% the strength of the strong nuclear force, but it is infinite in range, much like gravity. Unlike gravity, electromagnetism has attractive and repulsive properties that can combine or cancel each other out. Magnets demonstrate this quality. Gravity is the weakest of the four fundamental forces, but the one that is most familiar to us because we cannot imagine our lives without gravity. From our perspective, it would appear that gravity is very strong as it keeps us from floating into outerpsace. Although gravity’s range is unlimited (since everything in the universe is exerting a gravitiational pull on everything else), it is not as strong as the other forces.

What is the function of gravity?

The function of gravity is to hold the universe together. Everything in the universe exerts a gravitational pull on everything else. If not for gravity, planets wouldn’t keep their orbit or positions to each other and may collide into one other. It wouldn’t be a very orderly galaxy if Venus could just float over towards Earth and knock us all into fiery oblivion. If not for gravity, we wouldn’t be able to walk on this planet. We would just float off into outerspace and maybe eventually collide with Jupiter after touring the galaxy for a bit, granted we didn’t explode in the vacuum of space. Better get some astronaut suits if gravity ever goes away!