“The only pure way to have a wave is for it to be its own medium. Waves propagate outwards, and they can be large or small. That’s what waves do.” — Carver Mead

Buoyant Beginnings

Our main disadvantage in this world, especially when it comes to trying to understand the strange behaviors of our reality, is that we’re missing the intuitions needed to comprehend the tremendously powerful forces and concepts that guide us day by day, generation by generation.

One such force, and/or concept, is that of the ever-dynamic wave phenomenon.

Since the inception of particle physics, we’ve struggled to grasp at…

We ought to leg go of this annoyingly limiting, empirically-grounded idea that whatever we see doesn’t exist.

While we acknowledge that we only see a sliver of world that’s actually around us, we often attribute this to contexts beyond our understanding — say, cosmology or quantum physics. In so doing, we tend to write the bigger picture off as something we can’t know, so we shouldn’t necessarily bother to try in the first place.

But, like it or not, incorporating a casual fixation on such mind-boggling ideas could stand to benefit us in ways we’d never otherwise imagine.

Maybe it’s…

What’s Going On?

From the grainy black and white question marks that hover about events like Roswell to the four-eyed physical perplexities of quantum physics, there’s a common denominator scratched onto all the walls of our minds whereby these mysteries relentlessly bounce around.

That common denominator is this: we may have a lot of dots to work with, but it’s the connections that we seem to have trouble with.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Faith & Fire In The Sky

The good news is that, well, we’re very good at discovering and discerning the dots. …

We should think of it less as technology becoming more sentient and more as ourselves becoming less autonomous.

In all of our obsessive discussions, predictions and anticipations of artificial intelligence and its inevitable point of singularity upon our horizon, we’re failing to properly account for one very important element in the equation — ourselves.

Not only are we, ourselves, behind this anticipated singularity, but we’re already functioning as the very thing that we seem to be so eagerly anticipating. It’s already here. It’s us.

We’re behind the wheel, but we’re acting as if we’re on a runaway train.

And rather…

“A dynamic interplay in which particles are created and destroyed without end in a continual variation of energy patterns… The whole universe is thus engaged in endless motion and activity; in a continual cosmic dance of energy” — Fritjof Capra

Can an analogy be drawn between human nature and particle interactions?

We’ve learned, by now, that we should never underestimate the interrelatedness of life and our surrounding reality, even if it means blurring the lines between matter and non-matter; between living and non living organisms; between the subatomic world and the cosmic.

Quantum physics, as a prime example, has elucidated…

There’s one crucial phrase to remember throughout this piece: change turns future to past.

Change Turns Future To Past

As change turns future to past we’re stuck in the middle of the process trying to grasp at it however possible.

We’re an integral part of the process, even though we don’t need to be; we apply the definitions, the forms, the realizations.

For those of us too concerned with the future, we’re left missing our present; for those living in the past, we forsake our futures. All the while, we sift the future and the past through the present in ways we don’t necessarily understand.

…

Everything exists within everything else.

This is the kind of statement that can be so densely packed with laborious truth or so hollowed out with defective logic that we tend to simply circumvent its gritty perplexity whenever we confront it.

Biologists may understand this idea through looking at how organisms are identical to, or symbiotic with, or aligned alongside their environment. Astrophysicists may interpret this point by looking at the chemical signatures and structures of differing stars. Psychologists can do the same while assessing individual behaviors against the collective.

Anthropologists, geologists, botanists — they all encounter this universal trope which…

Every now and again, we unwillingly stumble into the realization that something, if not everything, is out of our control.

And as dreadful as this realization may typically feel, it’s usually accompanied by a resonating sense of peace — whether that peace is sourced from a blissful resignation of circumstance or from a wholesome surrendering of effort.

It’s at this existential intersection, one that we don’t get to frequent all too often, that we interact with one of the truest and most potent of universal laws — that everything is always changing, moving, never static and never still.

In the…