The Tao and Quantum Physics
Perception
“The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao.
The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name.
(Conceived of as) having no name, it is the Originator of heaven and earth; (conceived of as) having a name, it is the Mother of all things.
Always without desire we must be found, If its deep mystery we would sound; But if desire always within us be, Its outer fringe is all we shall see.
Under these two aspects, it is really the same; but as development takes place, it receives the different names.
Together we call them the Mystery. Where the Mystery is the deepest is the gate of all that is subtle and wonderful.”
- Tao Te Ting, Lao Tzu
“We are living in a time of great change. We are rapidly moving out of our old ideas about the limited nature of who we are and discovering that we are much more. We are breaking free of ideas which keep us believing that we are separate from each other and our experience. We are opening our hearts to the possibilities which will allow us to live in abundance and freedom. We are learning that as we shift our perceptions, we change our reality.
Our perception dictates our reality. The Tao is spoken of as something which is enduring and unchanging. These words paint for us an image of something which is beyond our traditional reality, a reality which is governed by the laws of Newtonian physics, where entropy ensures that all within its realm will slowly decay and eventually die. The Tao speaks also of that which is named becoming the Mother of all things; these things falling in the purview of our known and familiar material reality.
So, where the Tao, unnamed and not trodden, is an infinite field of unlimited possibilities, the Tao which is named is named through our conscious observation of this field which we collapse into a defined structure within space and time. So, there is a “symphony”, which holds all frequencies, which permeates the universe, existing outside of space and time, which is not perceivable through the senses which we use to navigate our world but with which we interact with in every moment, in an endless dance of the formless coming into form, of the Tao being named through our curiosity of it; which in the end is merely a curiosity of ourselves.
So, there is an infinite field of possibilities which is everything and yet nothing, or more accurately, it is also the potential to be anything, and in fact is already all of those things, should we decide to perceive them. Taoist call this field the Tao, physicists call it the implicit order and religions call it God. Quantum physics supposes that there is no “real” reality and that reality is merely a quantum soup of limitless possibilities where quantum stuff, which builds our physical reality, is both everywhere and nowhere until an observer looks at it. They call it collapsing the wave front. The wave is the field, where our observation of this field collapses it into observable particles within space and time. No matter what you learned in science class, for the past 100+ years, this has been the premise of the most accurate scientific theory humans have ever known (meaning it has been the most successful theory in predicting the outcome of scientific experiments).”
-The Time Travelers
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“Within the seed is contained the tree, but also contained are the seeds which that tree will produce, and the soil it will produce when it dies and deteriorates, as well as the trees which grow from the seeds it produces, and so, the entire forest is contained in the seed. Should we expand from there, everything which spawns from it is contained within the seed. Furthermore, contained within that seed is all which preceded it, which led to its creation. So, the seed is all of these things which when planted and nurtured will manifest from it. But really these possibilities are not separate from the seed, it is only time which separates the seed from all of its manifestations, but ultimate the truth is: the seed is the universe and the universe is the seed within the vastness of eternity.
The seed possesses the same quality as the unlimited field, we are only limiting its potential in space and time based on our perception of it. Being that the seed is a manifest creation from the field, we can say that manifest creations from the field are also the field of unlimited possibilities. As the Tao states, “Under these two aspects, it is really the same: but as development takes place, it receives different names. Together we call them the Mystery. Where the Mystery is the deepest is the gate of all that is subtle and wonderful.””
-The Time Travelers