We choose who we become

We are pure energy, but we have become fixated on this passing phase of frozen energy that we now are.

Water is the most obvious example of something that goes through phase transitions. It’s ice, then turns to liquid at 0 C, and to steam at 100 C.

Everything goes through phase transitions, even the universe, which might explain why we’re here. Nanoseconds after the Big Bang, the universe went though a number of phase transitions. In the beginning, it was all a cosmic soup.

(Some people feared that when the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Brookhaven lab created this same quark-gluon soup, it would start a chain reaction that would destroy all matter. Anyone who has looked in the mirror lately knows that didn’t happen.)

In a mind-boggling fast series of events that would make a second look like eternity, anti-matter was annihilated, cosmic inflation occurred.

At a million billion billion billionth of a second, the universe expanded by a factor of 10(43), a one with 43 zeroes after it, increasing from the fraction of a subatomic particle to the size of a softball — quarks combined to form protons and neutrons, which formed nuclei of what would become atoms.

A few hundred thousand years later, atoms formed.

“Many physicists believe that we are now living in a condensed or frozen phase of the universe, one that is fundamentally different from earlier epochs,” wrote physicist Brian Greene.

Essentially, the universe is in a phase that allows us to exist.

All matter is energy squeezed into form, but it always returns back into energy. Life flows, but when we try to hold on to something, try to control what is happening, we make a mess of our lives.

When we understand the flow, life is transformed and the psychological numbness goes away. 

The universe is rooting for us because we are its progeny, a living embodiment of its is-ness. We’re part of the divine dance, a play where the Absolute is the writer, director, actor, the make-up artist, the audience and the seats the audience sits on.

We are all rays from the same source, although we see ourselves as separate, distinct and special. Indeed, we are special because we are the centre of creation, just as every spot in the universe is the centre.

When the Big Bang exploded from the crucible of creation — much like a child is pushed from its mother’s womb —it created space and is still creating it at the speed of light. While the universe expands outward, if we are to grow, it must be inward.

Everything happens within the universe of ourselves. We decide whether it’s growth or fossilization.

The emotions regarded as negative — fear, anger, hate, resentment — force us to be unwilling partners in the divine dance, reluctant actors in the cosmic play.

When we express positive emotions, we’re in the flow and leap into the dance: life goes our way, traffic lights are usually green and parking spots open up for us.

Like the universe, we undergo phase transitions, when we change how we see ourselves, how we see reality. When we change our mind about how we see the world, our worth and place in it, we can accept that we, and not just other people, are entitled to all the universe has to offer.

We can choose the consciousness of a millionaire, or a pauper.

We are living magnets and attract people and things with the force that runs though our lives. If it’s anger, it isn’t difficult to understand that negative  people and things will surround us, like iron filings around a magnet.

A growing theory in quantum physics is that the field is everything, that physical reality is essentially insubstantial and that matter is the brief manifestation of interacting fields.

It is out of the field that the Big Bang occurred; it is out of the field that we came – from out of nowhere into the womb and out into the greater world. Eventually, we go back into the field of all possibilities.

This isn’t a difficult concept since we are surrounded by, and walk through, fields daily.

They open doors, turn on the TV, allow us to talk to our friends at home while we’re stuck on the bridge; it can tell airport security whether we’re carrying metal or tell the doctor whether we have a tumour.

It can show us the sex of a child in the womb, and pull the World Wide Web into our homes. 

The Higgs field — named for the physicist who came up with the idea — is believed to permeate everything and to give rise to the 12 fundamental particles that make everything we see and touch. It makes up us.

Einstein said the field is all there is, a thought echoed by many scientists and writers including Stanislaw Grof: “We are not just highly evolved animals with biological computers embedded inside our skulls; we are also fields of consciousness without limits, transcending time, space, matter and linear causality.”

The people who wrote the Vedas thousands of years ago were right — everything is a dance of whirling, pulsating energy. We see it as solid because we evolved to see it that way. Did our reality create that perception, or did that perception create that reality?

In any case, it’s just a phase. 

We can't change that we are children of the moment, but we can decide what this moment will be.

We can resist or, as mythologist Joseph Campbell said, “Participate joyfully in the sorrows of this world.”

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.