Transcript:
Hello, I’m Stephen Pirie, Author of “The dynamics of gender and life”.
When lost in a forest it can be helpful to climb a mountain or a tree to get a sense of where we are, to scout for obstacles or dangers, and to determine the best direction to head.
In a similar sense, when in the midst of a forest of conflicting ideas, beliefs, religions, philosophies, opinions and various conspiracy theories, it’s helpful to gain a philosophical high ground to gain some clarity about life.
But how do we do that?
My approach has been to simply take everything about life – by studying many spheres of human experience, such as the beliefs and information in the fields of science, religion, philosophy, politics, business, art and personal experiences, and boil it all down to some root principles that are common across all fields and all experiences.
Those root principles would, by definition, not allow any exceptions to their application, irrespective of whichever field one studies or experiences.
So, what are those root principles, and of what use are they?
I believe it’s helpful, perhaps necessary to take a brief historical review to learn of those root principles, and how they are, at least in my experience, immensely useful and life-affirming.
Around 2400 hundred years ago, and bear with me, this is a very brief historical review, a Greek philosopher asked how it was that things moved around, such as an apple falling from a tree, an arrow flying through the air, a foot-runner running a race.
The assumption was that everything that moved did so via perfectly smooth and continuous, flowing physical motion, which even now is what appears to be how things move around in everyday life – a bird flying through air, a car travelling a long a street, all seem to be doing so via perfectly smooth, continuous motion.
Now, let’s stop and consider a thought-experiment. Let’s say we were going to film a vehicle travelling along a street. Many people will be aware that generally a film camera might take around 24 or more frames per second to capture that movement.
But what if we wanted to capture every single increment in movement of that vehicle?
How many frames per second would we need?
Even if we take 20 billion or say 30 trillion frames per second, assuming we had a camera that could record at that speed, that still won’t capture every little increment in movement. To make sure we captured every little increment, we’d need a never-ending number of frames, to ensure we never ended capturing the continuous, seamless flow of movement.
Now, as far as film making goes, we settle on a frame rate that is sufficient to give the illusion of continuously smooth motion.
And just as it would be silly to think we could, even if we had the technology, film never-ending frames to visually capture perfectly smooth, seamless, continuous motion, it’s likewise silly to think we can move our bodies – say, when we lift a finger, or blink any eye, though similar perfectly-smooth, seamless, continuous, never-ending frames of physical motion.
We now know via quantum mechanics that at very small time scales, we, and all physical things, do not move perfectly smoothly, but instead move around via small quantum-sized jumps.
Now, so far I’ve not implied or stated anything that is disputed by science, at least not by any empirical science that is based on observations and measurement.
So let’s now get to the nub of matters – insofar as we do move, in quantum-sized jumps – a question that begs asking, is what’s in between those small, but nonetheless, finite series of little jumps?
Here’s the thing – whatever is between the tiny quantum jumps, it is not physical. It cannot be physical, simply because if it was just smaller and smaller physical increments in movement, we’d be back at trying to film a physical infinity, or to move through a physical infinity.
We now know that physical movement is NOT fundamentally continuous.
Basically, we are rapidly cycling out of what physicist David Bohm called the Implicate Order, into everyday physical life – what he called the Explicate Order, and just as rapidly cycling back into the meta hyphen physical Implicate Order. Now, I include the hyphen to emphasize that the original Greek meaning of meta meant "after, behind, between, higher, beyond”. So meta-physical is used in the context of being beyond the physical, or between the physical jumps that comprise physical movement.
The rate at which we are doing that is estimated to be around 18.5 billion billion trillion trillion cycles per second1. Or if you like 18.5 billion trillion trillion GHz. Or for fans of Douglas Adams, that’s 18.5 times 10 to the 42 cycles per second, or if you prefer, pulses, flashes, unfoldings or solidifications per second.
Anyway, where this has immense implications is that whatever is physically observed and experienced, including our very own bodies, there is necessarily a meta hyphen physical component that is not physical – it’s not visible, measurable, or tangible.
Which then leads to a whole bunch of questions as to the nature of the meta-physical component and source of life.
In my next podcast, I’ll share a few ideas about that, including how it opens the door to discovering the truer nature of creativity, the enormous potentials within each and every moment, and other implications, all of which can be, shall we say, life affirming and uplifting. Much of this is explained in greater detail in my book “The Dynamics of Gender and Life: Timeless Principles of Quantum, Fractal and Natural Phenomena, and Human Social Dynamics.”
Anyway I welcome sensible, considered questions and criticisms.
And as a bit of a teaser – the implications of physicality, and all within it, including our bodies, being of both a physical and meta-physical nature, is that all of creation is a self-organizing sentient system, and what that means is that much of modern science, especially relating to so-called gene therapies and other medical treatments, amounts to surface-layer manipulations of an unimaginably complex, adaptive, nonlocally-interconnected, trans-temporal, self-organizing system that cannot be fully encapsulated or encoded by science.
postscript: In my book “The Dynamics of Gender and Life” I’ve included many diagrams, one of which is included here - my 2D display of what the cycling means, in overall terms
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Session 1 - Behind the seen