Energy, separation, and love

The currency of the universe is energy.  Everything around us, everything in us, everything that takes shape in the totality of existence is nothing but energy.  Physics explains that matter is never created or destroyed, but just takes different shape.  The stars, the planets, life on Earth -- all is merely a different form of energy that has taken different form. 

From birth, humans eat and grow tall; their brains develop, and with that comes the ability to use their mind.  With the mind, we learn to direct our energy with thought, in order to get things done.  In fact, it is this ability to focus our energy that differentiates us from the rest of life on this planet.  Human beings are so talented that with their focus they can build pyramids that last for millenia, rockets that can escape the force of gravity, weapons that can obliterate life.  

Our minds have so much power.   With our minds, we give ourselves meaning, and purpose.  

When we experience trauma, or otherwise forget how to use the power of our mind, we feel helpless and distraught.  Many psychologists speak of "learned helplessness" as the basic form of depression.   Through therapy, they try and teach people how to re-use their minds and re-focus their energy so that they can experience joy in life.  

In modern times, we have arrogant ideas about what we know and do not know.   Many of us take the view that we know everything.   What we see with our eyes, hear with our ears, feel with our fingers -- this, for many people, is the grand totality of the universe.  We do this in spite of the fact that there is energy everywhere, that there is energy that we cannot see -- infrared and UV light, for example.  Cosmologists are at a total loss to explain "dark matter" in the universe, which by their estimates comprises 74% of the universe.  Yet for many people today, if they do not see it, then it doesn't exist.  

In other cultures and in other times, people realized that this universe was grander and more mysterious than conventional human perception.  They realized, as physics recognizes, that energy is neither created nor destroyed, but only changes shape.  They deduced that when a human dies, for example, that energy cannot be destroyed -- it must go somewhere, or transform into something else.  So these cultures developed the doctrine of reincarnation to explain what happens to this energy. 

They also realized that the way we focus our energy with our mind has consequences.   If we focus our energies in a certain direction, it will reap certain fruit.  They called this the doctrine of karma, related to the word karna -- "to do".   They understood, as physics teaches, that any action must be met with an equal and opposite reaction.  What we are doing at this very moment is a reflection of our past actions, and will seed what we will reap tomorrow.  Our lives are not governed by an outside capricious force -- rather, our lives respond to our own actions, perspectives and emotions.  For all these things comprise energy, and the activation of this energy must produce a reaction.   This is the way of things.

Many of us may recognize these patterns, even in the form of anecdote.  The insecure boy who likes the girl will, because of his insecurity, engage in actions that will turn her off; the woman who is afraid of losing something will, because of her fear, engage in actions that will result in the feared loss taking place.  The energy we bring to an activity has already determined the outcome.  As the Art of War states, the general who knows neither himself, nor the enemy, has already lost the battle before the first sword is drawn.  

So these first explorers of the universe decided that humans can determine their own futures through their direction of energy (karma); and they decided that the universe itself is composed of energy.  When they combined these two thoughts together, they deduced that every human possesses the ability to see the entirety of the universe itself, and can become one with the universe.  They called this state nirvana or moksha, and they developed meditation techniques in order to reach this state.  They discovered that if they could train the energy of their minds to vibrate at the wavelength of the Universal wavelength, then the energy of their own individual mind would resonate at the Universal resonance.  The two would become one; the individual drop of water would reconnect with the vast ocean of existence.

Many great teachers, knowing the effects of energy in reaching union with the cosmos, realized, as well, that the energy of love is a powerful vehicle in connecting with a universal consciousness.   It is a teaching that we laugh at today, because we do not (at least conventionally) "see" the workings of love.  But we do this in our ignorance.  

One of the teachers of this philosophy was an Indian prince who is known by his title of the Buddha.  In addition to teaching the effects of karma, he emphasized that within every human is the radically transformative energy of compassion.  With compassion, one can end the illusion of separation that exists between various energies and reach a state of union with all of existence.  

Somewhere else, in a different time and culture, a radical preacher was teaching the same thing.  The person known as Jesus, who is deified by Christianity, taught that the energy of love went straight to the Kingdom of Heaven.   When asked what was the greatest commandment to follow, he responded, "Love the Lord your God [e.g., all of existence] with all your soul and with all your mind.  That is the first and greatest commandment.  And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself." 

Why is love such a powerful energy?  Because it breaks down barriers; it removes the fallacy of separation.  Just as we cannot perceive UV or infrared light, we cannot perceive the effects of our emotional energies.  But emotions are powerful, and like all energy, our emotions dictate our future.  When a person begins to "see his neighbor as himself," he begins to realize that the distinction between them is really quite meaningless.  This is the first step to deep wisdom.  

If a person seeks greater understanding of his or her place on this planet, they cannot do it out of fear, or anger, or hatred.  They must realize that the separation of energies that we perceive is really an illusion; that all is one; that the differences that seem to exist are just a product of our limited perceptions.   

It is this separation that prevents humans today from unlocking their true potential.  We all make mistakes; we have all hurt others, or harbored anger, or guilt, or envy, or shame; and we will all make mistakes in the future as well.  If we commit a wrong, it is in our nature to lock it up away in a dark place in our mind and seek to separate it away from ourselves.  There are few honest people today who will look within and see their insecurities, their fears, their flaws, the darkness of their very being; in Jungian terms, they have repressed their shadows, and thus never have access to their full mental energies.

Yet what great souls have strived to teach in different eras and in different languages is that we can use love to end this separation within ourselves and create better futures.  A person who has made a mistake must forgive himself first; and when he has done that, others will naturally forgive him because he gives off an energy of forgiveness, kindness, and healing.  And he, as well, will forgive others.  A person who lives in fear must tame his fear first, or else he will encounter in his life nothing but the effects of this fear.  And his courage, produced from his self-love, will resonate with others and inspire.  

And this is done by loving oneself with every fiber of one's being, of accepting one's faults and imperfections, embracing the dark shadow -- coming to terms with our own beautiful flaws and cherishing them as divine gifts. 

When we start to love ourselves, when we have ended the separation that we all have within us -- then, and only then, do we realize the power of the cosmos and the power we have to commune with it, to bend it to our will, to create our own realities.  

400 years ago, Western philosophers realized this concept, but they called it something else -- they called it liberty.  They argued that all people are endowed by Creation with certain rights that are inherent to the definition of humanity -- that we are gifted with free will, and deserve the right to pave our own road to happiness and fulfillment.  

It is no surprise that the English word "freedom" traces its roots to the Indo-European word for love.  Because the two are one and the same.  The energy of freedom -- spiritual, political, economic -- is activated at the same resonance as the energy of love.  The ancients realized this, and they taught that these energies allowed union with all.  

Asking the nature of consciousness -- "What is this universe, and what is my place in it?" -- is more than just a personal question.  It is a spiritual challenge.  Think of all the energy that exists in this universe since its creation, and consider the fact that at heart, there is no difference between the energy vibrating in our atoms and elsewhere in the universe.  We think and assume there is a difference -- and that, in itself, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  

If we are up to the challenge of really uncovering what it is that separates our minds from the universal essence, we will ultimately find ourselves on a road of discovery that is virtually endless.  Did not Prometheus give us the divine fire for us to use at our disposal?   Are we not made in the same image as the God of creation, and thus by very definition, bestowed with those same powers and authority?  

Thus, the question, "What is the nature of consciousness?" is very much related to the question, "What is the nature of my own mind?"  In fact, it is the same inquiry.  The energy of the universe is at the disposal of every free human.  This is a profound fact that few people realize.  Yet it is the key to liberation in every sense of the word.

Drawing on Buddhism

Buddhism has always appealed to me because it's such a flexible and varied religion and also because rather than starting with a story about creation it skips this step and shoots straight for understanding the world as it is.

Buddhists believe that you accumulate both positive and negative karma in your life and that as you cycle through reincarnation, you pay off the good karma by being born into fortunate circumstances, or visa versa. They set up a hierarchy of being on which humans rank just below gods - which they believe we cycle through. The hierarchy doesn't make much sense to me because I think there's a high likelihood that there is other life out there, potentially at a much higher karma level than we are. The whole idea of reincarnation is a bit hard for me to accept, but let's set that aside for a minute and look at what makes sense about their model.

So on the entropy topic, we've been discussing whether the world is tending toward order or not. Perhaps this is too black and white of a model; the Buddhist theory takes the natural system swings into account by placing ones self in eternal disequilibrium, stuck in the system of swinging from good lives to bad ones. I think there's something to be said for that kind of an explanation.

They suggest that the number of beings in the universe is constant and that we are reincarnated from that pool. But if the big bang is true - there was no life at that point, which causes a bit of a problem. And if life takes a while to develop, as it did on earth, then it seems like life would not be constant at all. Perhaps one could theorize that the universe of beings only exists in the time after the big bang and potentially before the next one (astronomers thing the universe will collapse back on itself, right?) ?

Also in Buddhist theory is the distinction between ones mind an the world around it, with ones mind acting as a light to cast meaning on the world around. Buddhists seek to separate the consciousness from the world during meditation. Ultimately, through this means, Buddhists seek to free themselves from the karma cycle through such techniques, achieving "enlightenment" in which they experience neither extreme pleasure nor extreme anger/sadness. If anyone has experimented heavily with meditation, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this and on where one's emotional life as an enlightened being might fall on the scale of normal human emotions. For me, it's a bit tough to want to seek that end because I like the lows and highs of life - a lot of art extols this and I think there's a lot to be said for it.

This video is actually saying something

And it is relevant to what we've been talking about. Really.

While our purpose here is to try to make progress on big questions by sharing ideas and just basically thinking really hard, let's never forget that regular scientists are also looking at some pretty big stuff (and of course thinking hard while measuring it). Here's a brief excerpt from a fairly non-technical article on the entropy of the universe:

It is amusing to speculate about what will happen to the Second Law of Thermodynamics if the universe is closed, so that at some point the expansion stops and reverses.

Even more wild is the idea that if the expansion of the universe determines the direction of time's arrow, then if the universe starts to contract the direction of time will also reverse.

For our purposes, it is not only amusing to speculate about this possibility but absolutely necessary. This is a good introduction to the subject and discusses other interesting topics such as the negentropy of information in our minds, so go read the whole discussion here: Black Hole Thermodynamics

Here David Harrison proposes an interesting new concept in physics, and if you've got a new idea that could explain how our minds are relating to the physical universe, get in touch and share it with us. Physicists, please feel free to share any responses you know of that have been floating around in your community regarding the idea in the linked article.

Humans and Sustainability

Julian clarified the idea of how order (negative entropy, or negatopy) is proliferated on this planet by suggesting that this comes from the entropy of the sun – this is an idea I’ve seen elsewhere that I think is quite useful. Given this framework, we would have a set amount of order we can derive on planet Earth from the sun.

Since I study the earth sciences and many of you have touched on sustainability , let  me bring in some of my thoughts from that discipline. Luckily for us, the earth takes our waste and converts it to to resources for us, but humans are now taking resources and converting them to waste faster than the earth can regenerate. In one model, as humans we are demanding an average of 5.5 acres but have only 4.5 acres per person (globalfootprintnetwork.com).  Invasive species are characterized by decreasing the biodiversity of an ecosystem - humans are doing just that in nearly every ecosystem on earth. Most biologists now agree that we are headed for a mass extinction - that other species are being driven off our planet en mass. Certainly this is because we have limited resources and a growing population, but is it also driven by a limit on how many species can exist given the negatropy we are given by the sun? Lack of resources could certainly lead to world works like we've never seen and a post-industrial society, as Jesse suggests. But if we are able to collaborate and come up with a solution, the ultimate sustainable society would be extremely organized with fantastic public transportation, compact living situations, etc. Perhaps human order in society would further decrease the negatropy available on earth for other species?

One more thought: how are we directing our own evolution? Globalization means that we are not separating out populations and allowing for speciation ; doctors are actually creating population problems by increasing life expectancy and are also proliferating disease rather than allowing Darwinism to eliminate it; genetic engineering creates possibilities for the future. This seems to imply that we are mainly disrupting the natural emergent systems of evolution, perhaps destroying some of the order that would help us progress beyond homo sapiens. 

More on entropy, evolution and energy

Evolution is pretty neat. Garnet has gotten me thinking about it, and my discussion here is similar to hers but takes a slightly different direction.

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Garnet’s professor points out that entropy is not strictly increasing here on Earth. Humans are a highly organized bunch of matter. We are so organized that we go around organizing all sorts of things besides our own bodies. Most of the history of our species has been the story of increasing ability to organize: societies, economies, technologies.

One of the biggest problems we’re facing right now is how to organize energy into more useful forms. This is contrary to its entropic tendency. We’ve spent about 150 years taking somewhat organized bits of energy contained in fossil fuels and converting them to less useful forms, namely heat to run turbines. But now that this is becoming a problem, we are spending more time focusing on how to take fairly disorganized energy like heat from the center of the Earth or light from the Sun and turn it into more useful electricity. Because Earth isn’t a closed system, the letter of the second law of thermodynamics is still upheld when we increase order by using the Sun’s energy (by generating electricity or simply by eating food that ultimately came from the Sun), but it is hard to say that we follow the law in its spirit.

The interesting problem I see here is that we humans demand organization, but the odds are stacked against us. We’ve done pretty well organizing ourselves so far, so can we buck the cosmological trend? The universe may try to spread its energy as far and wide as possible, but our survival depends on making sure we can collect enough of it in one place in a useful form. Since we have the Sun, that gives us a couple billion years, but it’s never too soon to start thinking.

Is there a force driving us to this highly organized model, as Garnet suggests there might be? Humans have carved out a niche as intelligent creatures who can constantly find new advantages, so it seems evolution has created order in its drive for a more effective animal. The "force" driving this order could just be an inherent property of life. It's entirely possible that some "force" created life that works this way, but it's probably not the best model this higher power could have created; life and evolution happen without much regard for the constraints we will eventually face, for the order we create comes at the price of the disorder we create in our environment. Now if God (for example) is pushing us towards the evolutionary outcome, He had better have a good idea that we will be able to sustain it, because it will be pretty poor planning if innovation ends up failing us and we can’t keep organizing. Intelligent designers, here’s your chance to discuss how this is all going to work out in the end.

Whatever the root cause, our organized intelligence seems to be one factor that allows us to make this organization happen. We are confronted with problems of disorganization and can clearly recognize that we need to act to reverse them. In fact, we do it without thinking; creating technology and procreating—two big ways we spread our style of organization—are pretty natural things for humans to do. Because we seem to be smart enough to know that we should reverse entropy, perhaps we have reached a tipping point where order begets further order.

Or perhaps it applies to all plants and animals: while working at NASA, James Lovelock proposed that the ability to reduce entropy is a characteristic of life in general. Maybe we're not as special as we want to think, and we just happen to be good at what we do through random chance making it that way. Something had to get us as far as any tipping point we may have hit.

I’m too new to this topic to draw any conclusions, and I’ve touched on several different topics anyway. If you have had thoughts, have read someone else’s, or have met someone who’d like to talk about it, let us know. Share a link or write something. This is why we have the internet.

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On a different note, here is an excellent example of the sort of organization we can create and what it may allow us to do:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080305.html
I include this mainly because it’s cool and might spark your imagination. Did you know the space station was this established? We can do this now.

On Entropy

In lecture last quarter my professor mildly remarked that the second law of thermodynamics did not always apply. The second law of thermodynamics states that “the entropy of an isolated system never decreases; the entropy either increases, until the system reaches equilibrium, or, if the system began in equilibrium, stays the same.” Entropy is the concept that all things tend toward disorder – a cup breaking, ice melting, perfume smelled from a distance, the choas of your room on a bad day. Imagine you have two bags of marbles – one black and one white. If you cast both bags onto a table, the two colors will not remain separate but will tend toward disorder, scattering randomly. Shake the table a bit and the system starts toward equilibrium, with the marbles scattered relatively uniformly.

And yet, my professor pointed out a key exception: from a chemical soup arose humans – highly complex beings. Through the mechanism of evolution, random, chance events have actually (on our planet, at least) tended towards order. This draws on the concept of “emergent systems,” the idea that highly complex structures can arise from the combination of simply programmed agents. This can apply to the way that a school of fish swim, the way ant colonies operate, or the way neurons fire in your brain.

In addition, it seems doubtful that we are progressing toward equilibrium on the planet. Though we began with a fairly homogenous system of molten, we are now driven by disequilibrium – specifically, by the disequilibrium the sun creates when it warms our equators more than our poles. By this logic, we are tending away from equilibrium and toward some type of order.

I grew up mostly atheist and though the harshness of death and the vastness of the universe often frightened me, I now find myself perhaps more disturbed by the possibility of a meaning beyond our comprehension. The nice thing about entropy and atheism is that if everything is tending toward disorder, you don’t need anyone or anything driving the system. But if we are instead tending toward order, this implies the need for a driving force. At least in human experience, order arises from effort; governments form after many people get together and organize and write documents and choose leaders. This type of human induced order appears to require effort, but also arises from a fundamental attribute of humans – that humans like order and strive toward it. If then, that idea holds in the greater context of the universe, something (a God or force of some type?) is exerting effort toward our planet that is driving the order. If it is instead not the case that order demands effort, then for some unknown unexplained reason, order arises naturally. In either case, order of some type is imposed upon us and yet we do not understand what type of order this is or why it exists.