Super-colliders

For those who don’t follow trends in sub-atomic physics (not that I generally do), there is a radical multi-billion dollar experiment—the Large Hadron Collider—trying to power up on the border of France and Switzerland, an underground atom smasher—the biggest one ever built.  America opted-out on this somewhat whacky project cooked up by smart-smart folks who propose that this will recreate conditions in the cosmos as they were just trillionths of second after the big bang; and this might reveal secrets of space, time, matter and the “Higgs boson” (a theoretical particle that supposedly imbues other elementary particles with mass… a particle some fear could spark off some sort of cataclysm).

Earlier this year the scientists who built the so-called super-collider turned it on… and it blew a gasket.  They’ve meanwhile been working to fix it while the rest of us are free to speculate about what might happen if and when it works—ranging from creating a black hole into which our world will be sucked to not much happening at all.  Time will tell, and if one professor is correct, even if the world ends, we won’t feel a thing.

In an article in this week’s New York Times (http://tiny.cc/Lfht2) some brainiac physicists float an intriguing and non-rational “theory ” suggesting that “the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.”  In other words, the collider is fated to have bad luck—which is in turn evidence of some sort of better luck protecting us from our own self-destructive impulse.

Now whether or not this is good science, my inner Bill and my inner Ted both find this most excellent food for thought.  These scientists, who developed string theory (but sadly for them, not Silly String, which is probably more lucrative), also suggest that in order to avoid the potential disaster we could make a high-stakes computer bet:  program millions of hearts and one spade… and agree that if the computer draws the lone spade, we should scrap the multi-billion dollar underground atom-smasher right now, having allowed “luck” to save our asses (if not our souls).

The trippy implications of all this is that it appears that it is our consciousness that actually interacts with sub-atomic star stuff, which is very mysterious, and turns out to always potentially be either wave or particle, and only turns into stuff we can touch and see when it interacts with our consciousness.  This may sound “New Age,” but it is coming from the realm of science.  And that, I believe, is the big news: our consciousness is on the cusp of realizing how it works.  Thus metaphorically, at least, the world as we know it does end the moment we realize that the world we live in is being created by our consciousness.  This is both a sort of “end of time” and a dawning of a “New Age.”  Intuition and rational thought have gone opposite directions and yet are about to possibly meet each other underground in an atom-smasher.

In striving to place this in a parenting perspective, if we are possibly soon to discover that time is not real we might discover that we have more than enough of it.  This would help us really live the Eckhart Tolle thing and be present to the moment, trusting that our minds are the real “time machines” in the first place.  If we were to trust God or the universe or our collective “hive” mentality that supercedes our individual ego-consciousness, then we shift our identity to something beyond our discrete selves, without conforming, denying our individuality nor giving our power over to the greedy and corrupting egos of others.  And we could trust that our kids are as they are supposed to be, and our feelings and wishes to love and help them are as they are supposed to be; but that the ultimate point is not to get them into good schools and “succeed,” but to evolve our own individual and collective consciousness.  In this sense the world is more an experimental play space (like the collider) where we get to play with thoughts, feelings, sensations and intuitions, endlessly birthing in to existence and circling back out again. 

The enduring wisdom texts from Torah, to Gnostics, to Krishna and Buddha all speak of this timeless uncreated reality, and now the physicists are talking about it.  How cool is that? 

If the way we see things just might determine the way things turn out to be, then cultivating mindfulness, love and peace within ourselves would certainly be enlightened self-interest.  Nature created the super-collider long ago, and we call it “having kids.”  It’s not that our kids ultimately are the “special” ones (that is how our ego sees it), but rather that our relationship with our kids is a portal into the same sort of transcendent relating that is also to be found in yoga, gospel music and any sort of transcendent food, love, art or friendship.

Whatever is happening here on planet earth, it seems like something is happening.  Maybe the super-collider is better understood as a metaphor related to consciousness—to what we are just getting ready to know as a collective humanity:  that our consciousness creates our reality and thus we are responsible for it, and to it; that the creation of the world and its annihilation are a yin-yang in which our minds work, love and play—currently and eternally.  Perhaps we are not going to definitively solve the problem of raising kids, nor be released from our suffering, rather we are happy and abundant, and scared and doomed all at the same time… evolving together like some collective Sleeping Beauty, stirring in a dream in which the kiss of our children can both awaken us and inspire us to dream a better world.

Namaste, Bruce