Brothers, Sisters and Fellow Herbalists,

I have this theory about how we can get Bernie to win the primaries ...

Einstein says that our perception of time is an illusion.

Time ... what is the smallest bit of time? We think in terms of days, hours, minutes, seconds ... we usually don't delve after that in our daily lives. We are conditioned to believe that we have no use for measuring time in any smaller increments. What could we possibly do in less than a second?

Exactly. What could we do?

The smallest amount of time, this is mathematically predicted, not observed, would be Planck time, or the time it takes a photon to travel one Planck length. That's a teeny tiny amount of time, isn't it? For perspective: A nanosecond is one-billionth of a second. Here, let Ask.com finish this for me:

Dividing the second still further, and by three orders of magnitude each time, the divisions are attoseconds, zeptoseconds and yoctoseconds; the last of these is 0.000,000,000,000,000,000,000,001 second. According to Wikipedia, the shortest theoretical increment of time is the Planck time. This is the time taken for a photon, traveling at the speed of light, to cross a Planck distance. This upper limit is 10^-43 second.

Now you get the idea of the scale of tiny ... (infinite = infinitesimal)

You are aware when a moment passes, and you have a pretty good idea of being aware of how long it takes for a half a minute, or even a few seconds to pass, right? I imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to train one's self to experience awareness of the "passage" of time in ever smaller increments ...

How low can we go?

What if I told you I went there, right to a Planck frame? Would you believe me?

But I did, it was the weirdest most life changing thing after becoming a mom that ever happened to me. My first thought was not so bold though, I thought I was having a stroke or an aneurysm. I felt -- not disconnected from reality, but as though I had just entered an expanded reality -- it was that strange, I experienced reality, and the "passage" of time, at the Planck frame level. Not only that, but I experienced matter right down to the energetic wave and its dual form, the particle. And the best part: I was conscious of consciousness, of a greater, all encompassing consciousness that connects us all at the quantum level of existence. It was oneness with the universe, feeling connected to everything and every one right down to the essence of our being.

Or maybe I was just pretty, pretty, pretty stoned that night! Yes?

Either way, it really got me thinking. I mean, WTF was that, anyway?

* * *

Particles have a dual nature -- they behave as waves, but when observed, they become "particles," What is this observance? What is the nature of the observance that excites particles out of their wave form and into "matter?"

Time is not linear, each moment in time exists throughout eternity. And by moment, I mean a "Planck frame," let's say a certain arrangement of particles that exist for all time. Think of each of these Planck frames like an image emanating from a wave projected onto a glass slide in the form of particles. The next slide will contain the next iteration of particles. Many astrophysicists believe in parallel realities (think of Wharf in the TNG episode "Parallels"). Each Planck frame contains an infinite number of potential iterations depending on what directions the particles move into the next Planck frame.

As our consciousness rides along these waves, we "observe" their patterns as projected on to the glass, or that Plank frame of time, of reality.

If we were more aware of our reality beyond our usual third-dimensional experience of it, i.e., if we were aware of ourselves (not aware as in having read it in a book, but existentially aware) as four-dimensional beings (and beyond, but let's start with four), perhaps we could direct our consciousness through these Planck frames with intention we could nudge our particles to move in the direction we want, so that we can create, so that we can co-create, our reality. As the Deepak would say: Attention + Intention = Manifestation

My uncle, who is a physicist, writes on his blog, Nature's Ultimate Joke:

Modern physics finds that mass itself is an emergent property [see the blog entry, Emergent Properties and Physics], all the fundamental particles of physics having emerged from the Big Bang with no mass, as streaming radiation. That means that there could be no objects at rest from which to be able define a standard of length. And without a standard of length, no standard of time could be defined. The implication of modern physical theories is that mass, length and time are not at all fundamental properties, relative to which we can define fundamental units of measure. Mass, length and time are emergent properties that developed rapidly after the Big Bang as a result of physical processes. For this reason, the ultimate laws of physics may be so remote from us, that we may never be able to formulate them. And the idea of defining fundamental units prove to be vanity.

Conclusion

So far science has defeated religion and philosophy when challenged on its own turf of observations and measurements. People viewing this long history of consistent victory, since Galileo, have therefore embraced the methodology of science as the only way that leads to ultimate truth, i.e., scientism. The mistakes made by theologians and philosophers in this struggle with science is to narrow their focus to the material world and the evidence of the senses. The thoughts that they deal with are transcendental (beyond our space and time world). The reason that humans can soar into these realms is because the mind also extends into and is a part of this transcendental realm. The big mistake was not the choice of turf, but the going to war of these branches of human thought.

The ultimate irony is that the development of physics supports the truth of the above. Quantum Physics was made possible by recognizing the necessity of human consciousness in projecting events in space and time out of the elementary potentials that exist in our world as wavelike propagations. Without the presence of human consciousness nothing really happens on the level of elementary particles. And human consciousness itself relies on the action of synapses that tap into the quantum level. Historically, the role of human consciousness has been to project possibilities perceptible only on the level of human thought into the physical world, and thereby make human life much easier. Quantum physics suggests that there is a nebulous realm of possibilities that exist in a realm beyond the physical world, but which can become manifest in the physical world. This makes invention and human material progress possible.

Peace and infinite love to you dear brothers and sisters of the cosmos! xoxoxo