- Home
- New Universe Story Watercolor #4
Everything Has a Within
4. Everything Has a Within
Scientists have discovered, most unexpectedly, what we call matter, the
stuff of which we and the earth are made, is 99.99% nonvisible. Sir James
Jeans, the British physicist and mathematician, suggested that we think of
the world that we see with our senses as the "outer surface of nature, like
the surface of a deep flowing stream." He said that material objects have
origins that go "deep down into the stream." This nonvisible realm is
quite complex, filled with fields and patterns and as yet largely undescribed
"energies" and
dimensions.
It has been discovered through research into the nature of matter that
there is no tiny, solid points or particles. An electron possesses no dimensions.
The physicist David Bohm conceived of matter as relatively autonomous excitation
patterns that are inseparable from the deeper level that Sir James Jeans
refers to. Upon close inspection, matter dissolves into knots of energy and
space-time whose dynamic stability gives the appearance of enduring solidity,
explains Duane Elgin, a writer concerned with evoking collective awakening.
He too teaches that the entire universe is maintained moment by moment by
an unbroken flow-through of energy. String theory, although unfinished and
much debated, offers new provocative images because it assumes that the subatomic
particles that comprise matter are actually tiny vibrating loops of non-material
strings. And strings are self-contained pieces of curved space! The marbled
paper in the background of the collage, made a number of years ago in a marbling
class, suggests this inner realm.
This world of the very small is unimaginably vast. We can begin to imagine
the immensity of the nonvisible when we learn that there is nearly as much
distance from the size of the human to the farthest galaxy as there is in
the other direction from us to the smallest distance in the core of the atom.
So, as Duane Elgin points out in The Living Universe, there is more smallness
within us than there is bigness beyond us.
These insights into matter might seem esoteric and alien to our daily lives,
but they have been important to me because they helped move me out of the
billiard ball-like mechanistic world I had once studied and thought adequate.
Instead I could embrace a picture of a more flexible world open to influence
from the vast inner world that sustains matter as we experience it. If the
inner world, sometimes experienced as Light, is indeed intelligent and creative,
I could grasp that this reality might express itself in me.