See Do: The Simplest InstructionThe True Story of a Man and His Spirit Guide

A MEDITATION ON COLORED SURFACES

§ November 23rd, 2009 § Filed under Chapter 44: A Meditation on Colored Surfaces § Tagged air, atom, color, energy state, heat, light, molecules, nitrogen, oxygen, photons § No Comments

This is a tiny fleck of embryonic coral. The photo is just 1/8 inch across. Those are grains of sand on its surface. Every individual cell wall of its growing form built this spiral. A wonder of nature, but to the eye it appears on the beach as a miniscule blank white chip. A typical beach may hold billions.

        [This chapter continues the “assignment” from my Spirit Guide, See Do, to examine the complexities of our mundane reality. The specific construct given me to examine is a hypothetical cube ¼ inch on a side, floating in the air about a foot in front of my face. These meditations on our temporal reality will be followed by an examination of “See Do reality.”]

            As light moves through the cube of air it completely ignores most of the material in the cube. Most of it. It doesn’t interact with the air molecules much at all. The air, which is mostly nitrogen and oxygen with a little water vapor, trace gases and some stuff we call dust, is mostly transparent to these photons. By transparent, I mean that they do not interact with the electrons around the nuclei of the oxygen and nitrogen atoms much at all.

            For something to be “seen” by us, the atoms it is made of go through this little dance. I’ll try to explain it here in simple terms, but please forgive me if I reach out too far into technical la-la land. But this is how it is.

           You see, first a photon enters or ‘hits” an outer electron’s cloud of probability in such a way as to bring the electron to a realized state. In this state, the electron absorbs the photon and jumps to a higher energy state. It’s important here to understand that it will only do this if the energy or “frequency” of the photon energy is in sync with the energy the electron would need to jump up to its next possible energy state. If the energies don’t match, the photon flies right by and nothing happens.

            But if they match, the electron jumps up to a higher energy. With this higher energy electron, the atom now exhibits a higher energy. This higher energy shows by making the atoms jostle or wiggle a little bit. Actually I should say a little bit more, because all atoms are always jiggling, unless they are frozen at absolute zero.

            This wiggling is what we think of as heat. And once the atom jiggles off a little, the electron falls back to its original lower energy state and sends out a new photon. This new photon is the same “frequency” as the wiggle. Which is just a little less than the energy of the original incoming photon. This new photon flies away at the usual speed of light in an entirely random direction. This photon, if we’re in the right place, hits our eye, and viola, we see something. And we see this something as having a color, because our eyes have little sensors that are tuned to detect photon energy of the very narrow band of energy we think of as visible light. How that tiny pulse in the back of our eye gets transformed into our coherent visual image of the world is a subject for another time.

            Of course, in reality, the whole thing a lot more complex. And there is a whole lot more going on. A whole lot more. For example, to see an object as having a color, all the photons of the energy of that color are the ones that go through the process I just described. The others are absorbed and not re-radiated. In that case, those other photons are absorbed by the electron, and the atom expresses all of that new energy in its jiggling. The material just gets a little warmer. But you really already knew that. You just didn’t know you knew it. Black clothes are warmer. White are cooler.

            All the original light plus a lot of new light, that’s right, these new photons were just created right there in front of you on the surfaces of everything in the room, all that light is now moving through the tiny cube in front of you.

            And some of the air molecules in our little cube do interact with the light streaming through. Not many, but a few. That’s partly why we see a diffuse haze in air at a distance. That diffusion, you’ll notice, has a blue cast, because that’s the frequency of the energy that gets turned into a new photon during those somewhat rare interactions. If you go outside on a nice day and look up you’ll see proof. The sky is blue.

            It gets better.

            — continued (Next: The narrow energies we can see.)

BIG TRAGEDIES vs THE ORDINARY, Part III

§ October 31st, 2009 § Filed under Chapter 36: Pt III of Big Tragedies vs The Ordinary § Tagged air, Earth, hurricane, See Do, spirit guide, spirituality, wind § No Comments

Take a globe and highlight the areas regularly hit by natural disaster. The patterns are easy to "see." It's only the "do"-ing that seems to leave so much of mankind paralyzed and caught out.

            That same night as I listened, my spirit guide See Do went on. He talked about the air, the water, the winds, the geology, and life, within us and outside us.

            And he talked about the infinite grains of dust moving over rock, sculpting with timeless patience. The dust is carried on the air and rock is carved away.

            We can sit on the steps and feel the breeze. We raise our face into it to smell its offering. The richness of the world. It feels good to be outside in it.

            But the air carries something more. In fact this something is its very life engine. It is heat. The dynamics of thermal energy on the air drive everything the air around us does. Everything it does for the world, for us and to us.

            This paradise planet blooms with heat from the sun. It is carried through our atmosphere endlessly in a complex dance well beyond the powers of the mightiest computers to simulate. It unfolds and refolds its subtle computations with ease. And without error out to the very last decimal place.

            So there is a price to pay for living in such intimate contact with such a dynamic and powerful system. Heat must be rebalanced. As the ocean warms in summer, the heat rises up into the air carrying great energy and great quantities of water. These movements naturally organize from randomly tumbling clouds spilling out their white cargo high in the sky into cooler air, into waves of mass in motion that, once attaining a certain scale, will be drawn toward a center, falling in step with a the natural rotation that further draws the upwelling of energy from the warm ocean surface below.

            A hurricane is born. The world must seek balance and the heat is taken up on the air and carried to cooler, emptier latitudes. Along the way as the energy grows and tightens its spin, the wind will move at greater and greater speed.

            The energy carried here is colossal. Well beyond man’s atomic bombs and rockets. And utterly invisible. A stunning fact of our world. We can feel the breeze; we can see the moisture, the mist, the rain. We can see the dust and flying debris. But the air will never show its face. Even drained of energy, condensed into liquid. Oxygen, nitrogen, helium, argon, hydrogen and the rest. They all become liquid metal as clear as the purest water.

            But here in our world they swirl in motion all around. And that motion is driven by heat.

            And inside the hurricane that swirling, turning, driving energy actually has the power to pull the ocean up from its moorings. The surface is sucked up. Pulled up by the low pressure suction of the core drawing more and more energy off the surface and driven on winds spilling out, reaching well over a hundred miles per hour. A new thing is given life: the tidal hurricane swell. During hurricane Katrina, along the coast of Louisiana, this swell exceeded twenty-three feet. It rolled ashore with predictably devastating consequences.

            If you take a globe of the Earth into your hands, and with a marker, highlight the areas of shoreline that will regularly be hit by a devastating hurricane or typhoon, you will mark over a few very small stretches. Your marker trail will also express a fair warning. These places should take care. They should be ready. They should prepare. Or they should be empty.

            They same will be true of earthquakes, floods, volcanoes, and the rest. The patterns of life are written on this planet for everyone to read. The “when” is all we lack. The “where” becomes more precisely prescribed with each passing calamity.

            The instruction is See Do. And I do think I’m getting it.

            – continued (Part IV: The Earth’s energy within)