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To the naked eye this is just a tiny, nearly featureless, white chip of shell. At 20X magnification we can see it is the very core of a sea shell, worn down and laid bare. You'll find these curves and spirals and counter spirals repeat across the universe. The same beauty captured by our most powerful telescopes. The subject of this image is less than 1/8 inch across. Imagine its origins. And its path to these pixels.
[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.”]
But there are other things besides myriad photons inside our little cube. Dust will also have the effect of diffusing the light. The photons hit a dust particle and new photons are sent out in random directions with the energy that matches the apparent color of the dust. The water vapor in the cube will be doing the same thing. If you look out your window, and are lucky enough to be able to see pretty far, you’ll see this effect clearly. Painters call it “aerial perspective.” It helps make sunsets so beautiful.
But visible light is not the only thing passing through our quarter-inch cube. Far from it. There are also energies all up and down the electromagnetic spectrum. Visible light just happens to be a narrow band about right in the middle. Our eyes came about to make best use of this narrow range because they naturally developed to detect the strongest of the sun’s radiation available at the Earth’s surface. And in the center of the visible range is the strongest of the sun’s frequencies, at about 550 nanometers, along between about green and yellow. And our eyes are most sensitive to that, trailing off to either side, out through red on one side and blue-violet on the other. The radiation beyond those colors, we can’t “see”, but it’s there.
If we consider all the information of lower energy and frequency than visible light, well, there is an entire new universe of information. Just past visible red is the range of energies known as infrared. We feel this as heat. If you had an infrared camera, the room around you would look a lot different. You’d be glowing orange and yellow. Across the room the light bulb would be even brighter.
And all that heat energy is moving around the room trying to reach some sort of equilibrium. That little cube of air in front of you is being jostled by the effects of the heat energy coming off of your body. All around you, the air is being warmed by you. As it warms it causes the air molecules to vibrate a little more and as they do they dance further apart, causing the air to become slightly less dense. As it does, this less dense, lighter air moves up, being displaced by denser heavier air around it. This swirling, tumbling of air happens all around you.
As the heat dissipates, it passes through our cube of air and stirs it.
If it’s not stirring your spirit, hang on. The soup thickens.
— continued (Next: Are your possessions evaporating?)
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.)
This was the only shell we picked up that day. No bigger than a small pea. Tiny, white and, to the naked eye, featureless. But under closer examination, a new universe emerged. Perfectly etched spirals, all reflecting the perfect proportions. The "divine proportion," it has been called. This image is about 1/8 inch across. The shell's perfection is staggering.
[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.”]
You see, this cube of ours is just a tiny little thing. But to jump straight off the edge, let’s start with visible light. You must come to understand and appreciate the raw amount of visual information that is passing through that space at every given point in time. You can walk around and look through the cube from every possible angle and you will see that all the visual information from across the room, or across the city, or if you are outside or near a window at night, across the universe; it’s all traveling through the cube. And it is all traveling through the cube all the time. Constantly and continually. And utterly uninterrupted.
Now to demonstrate the sheer mass of data there, you can take a powerful telescope up to the cube and you will be able to see great detail coming back from great distances. If you imagine a beautiful photograph of another galaxy, you must accept that if the cube is within direct sight of that galaxy, then all that same information is passing through the cube. Right now.
If you take a microscope up to the cube and can see the finest detail in a bit of cloth or a dust particle, or beautiful pollen particle floating by, you must accept that all of that data is flying through the cube constantly.
If you arranged a thousand cameras around one side of the cube and they all took an exposure at the same exact instant, they would obviously all capture a complete photograph, through the cube, of the other side of the room. None would be starved for data, even though they all required that all of the information they recorded had to have transited the cube at exactly the same instant.
Take one of those dentist mirrors, the little round mirror on a short wand, and put it into the cube and move it all around to see in every direction. It’s all there; nothing is missing. And it’s all there even when the mirror isn’t. It’s that visual light that, in fact, allows you to see the mirror, or I should say, to see the frame and back of the mirror.
So it should be clear then that all the possible visual information in the reality all around this cube is constantly streaming through it in every direction. This information is in the form of visible light, which is made up of photons, tiny wave-particle packets of electromagnetic energy that are utterly massless(at rest) and move at the speed of light, which is 186,000 miles per second. Now, I know, all too well I’m afraid, that everything I’ve just told you about the actual photon is completely incomprehensible. The ideas are too foreign, the numbers are both too large and too small. The sheer amount of photons that are moving through that little cube at any moment is utterly unbelievable. But it is happening. Our temporal reality science knows it and guarantees it to be true.
Now imagine all the one-quarter-inch cubes of air in the room and try and realize that they are all experiencing the same traffic in photons. There is an utterly impossible amount of visual information moving around you. It all flies by at the speed of light and does not interfere with any of the other information moving through the same space at the same time. But as they say, there it is.
Next, we’ll look inside, at the contents of the cube.
–continued (Next: Some of these photons show their color.)
The Carina Nebula. Outside on a clear night, you may be awash in its light. Credit: NASA, ESA, N. Smith and The Hubble Heritage Team
See Do also used this deconstruction of consciousness to point out how limited we are in sensing what is around us. In this, he pointed to light as a key tool to seeing. To seeing what we can’t see.
As we see, visually we are aware of light coming off of surfaces around us. This is how, or what we see. This scattered, reflected, refracted light. This energy moves through space and enters through a small hole, our pupil, to be focused on a tiny swarm of cone cells, the fovea, at the back of each of our eyes. We see a consistent light in the space around us.
Look at any object in your immediate view. Everything you are seeing is just the tiny beam that enters through your pupils. And the surface of that object is spraying out that light in every direction. At any moment, you are only detecting the tiniest fraction of that whole. In fact, notice how if you close one eye, the object does not get half as bright. That’s an instant re-calculation by your mind.
Keep looking. Now close one eye and then the other. Back and forth. These are two completely different streams of energy. Continuous, consistent streams. But there is no way you can detect the light energy that goes past you. But the vast, vast majority of light around you does. As you read this page, all the visual information of everything you can see in the space around you is passing by, in real time, between your eyes and the page. Look around, it’s an utterly enormous amount of data. And there is no clue it is there. And no way to detect it all. You may believe there is nothing but thin air between you and the page. But all that light information, all that data, is obviously and undeniably there.
This is everywhere. All around you. Step outside on a clear night and look up into the sky. Think of one of the great shots taken through a large observatory telescope. That visual data is flowing past you. And has been flowing past the Earth for perhaps millions of years. Perhaps billions.
Or think of the images you have seen taken through the mightiest microscopes. Images of patterns of atoms. That information is here too. All around you. If you had the power to resolve it. Detailed information for every single atom. Our eyes are blunt instruments. The energy your mind does make use of is a tiny fraction of what is going on. Welcome to reality.
So think about what is clearly and obviously happening around you. The energy that flows by, undetected. This is utterly the tip of the iceberg, if even that. This is just our narrow visual spectrum of electromagnetic energy. There are other energies. Powerful energies. The energies that hold all matter together. And gravity. Spectrums untold.
He tried to open my mind to these thoughts.
And to let them wash over and overwhelm me. Saying that there will be more answers after that. That I needn’t try and understand everything he is saying right now. He is patient. It will come. And that he will be there.
— continued
