what the bleep

Thanks to Ron Slepitza, who kept saying it was wonderful, I finally rented the video What the Bleep Do We Know? The version I got from Blockbuster apparently ONLY had the interviews but, even so, he’s right. It’s wonderful. Great explanations of quantum phenomena, and possible implications thereof, from some good scientists who are also good teachers (granted, some of it raises my red flags of skepticism, but that’s OK). So, I went onto Amazon and bought the new 3-disk package, and will be using it on campus next year.

There are major shifts going on in our (human) understanding of the nature of reality, and the roles of consciousness and awareness in the whole process of reality (or: coming-into-being)! We have very rapidly moved from modernism, to post-modernism, and then toward, it appears, something else altogether (yet to be named, so far as I know). Whatever else “it” is, it appears that it may be the place toward which scientists, philosophers, and mystics have all been working toward, from different directions and by different methods. One way of stating a tentative conclusion is to say that the fundamental “stuff” of the universe is neither wave nor particle but “information” or Mind, or Consciousness.

What does that mean to us, in our everyday lives? For starters, I believe it means that the practice of paying attention, training our awareness, is of great value because it tends to bring us into sync with the universe as a whole, or that from which we emerge and return, moment by moment. When we allow ourselves to live lives that are dis-engaged from reality (i.e., awareness of our experience), then we are missing out on everything that we, as humans, appear to be “meant” to be and to know.