A touch of house-cleaning here, okay? In the recent post, “The Perfect Life,” A line at the bottom reads, “The only thing you might slow down for is an occasional travel agency or a camping and outdoor supply store.” Missing in that is the most important stop of all… your passion. Of course, always stop for that. Whether it’s the boat shop or the music store…it’s why Tom is a sailor. It’s why I’m a musician. Sorry for leaving out the most important stop in our lives.
Since this is a long holiday weekend, let’s keep blog world simple… we should all be outside in the summer celebrating it, anyway. Hope y’all are cooking out, spending good time with family and friends, and putting the cares of our world on the back burner for a few days.
Of Quantum Physics… etc., chapter 2.
Well. It’s not quite a can or worms, but we’ve definitely opened “something” here as a result of my attempt last week to equate quantum physics with art and fishing. I hope, if you wanted some better-grounded info on QP and parallel universes, that you read the article I linked on the Fox newslink online. I know, I know, Fox News…
whew. But I liked that article, at least as a starter for some thought on the matter. For those of you who think I know anything at all about quantum physics, you must know that I don’t. Not anything. I attended two seminars some years back on the perceived time/space limitations of our physical world, and how quantum physicists have proven that the same entity/person/thing can actually exist in two places at once in this world. Did I understand any of the explanation? No. Do I believe their findings were true, real, accurate?? Yes.
See, there’s so much we don’t know about this life. And nearly all that we don’t know isn’t pertinent to our daily existence, our daily happiness, anyway. There are, as we know, many people in the world who take these ideas, questions, theorems, very seriously, and those people are happiest when trying to figure out all that deep stuff. Most of the rest of us simply try to connect a few occasional dots, to keep us sleeping well at night. And this is a great place to explain to you that all you’re getting from me on these posts, and all you’ll ever get, are my thoughts, feelings and personal experiences on the matters I’ll discuss with you. I’m an expert on nothing whatsoever… I’m not a teacher or a seer or any of that… I simply have some “self-perceived” notions which I enjoy sharing with you. Haven’t I already told you this blog is all about me??? I have my favorite authors and articles I enjoy reading because they see life and the world in a different way from me, and it’s often stimulating and thought-provoking, if not life-changing. That’s all I’m attempting here… stimulating and thought-provoking, with some rare usable knowledge. And that’s not self-deprecating, Martha, that’s simply the damned truth.
My *troublesome* friend Bill asked me this about last week’s post – “I think you are probing a very fundamental question…. How is it that some people perceive this ”Imaginary World” so much better than others? How is it that some people can tap into this fount of creativity and then envision and depict such spectacular works of every kind?”
It’s not nice to answer a question with a question, but, to the first question – how is it that we’re all not right-handed – that there are no two of us exactly alike – that you’re great at math and I don’t get math? It’s because we’re so vastly different, on all levels, all scales. I know several people who “channel” certain spirits. And no, they’re not nutty. They simply have a special ability. The ones I know can’t play an instrument. I play piano, but I can’t channel spirits. All that to answer – some people perceive another dimension – or other world – because they either have a special ability or they’re interested and work at it really hard, or a combo of both. And yes, each of us has the ability to disregard these peoples’ special perceptions, or even disbelieve that they’re capable of perceiving anything beyond what we all perceive.
To answer his second question, easy. Some people are “inspired” artistically and some people are ditch diggers. No class distinction here, either. If your field, your stock or your family desperately needs water, who’s more important to you… an artist or a ditch digger??
I’m pretty sure Bill already knows all this and more, and simply continues to gently pull my chain. That’s okay, Bill… I need the exercise.
I look at this kind of thinking, this kind of connecting concepts, as “inner life.” You’ve heard of, or read “Inner Tennis,” “Inner Golf,” – VERY basically, this line of thinking about your particular subject starts with getting inside ourselves, understanding our motivations… then settling our breath, focusing only on our inside calmness, then bringing that inner focus and calmness up into the outside world, to focus on what we’re trying to do at the moment…. without any expectations. People who are able to do this with any degree of success find instant – and rewarding – results. You see? There has to be an attempt on our part to search for, and bring in to ourselves, any other form of energy and creativity that is possible in this realm. If you don’t believe it’s out there, in one form or another, it probably isn’t… for you. You have to believe it, look for it, wait to feel it, and always be ready to use it well, if & when you get access to it.
To try to answer Karen’s question – and thank you all for taking the time to write, to ask – I asked for dialog and you’ve given it to me. Thanks for that.
Karen wrote – “I’m not sure I understand your explanation of quantum physics as it relates to inner peace. I can sit in my backyard at the end of the day with a glass of wine… and experience sheer bliss (as Jos.Campbell calls it)….it never concerns me how it happens or why it happens. I just relax and enjoy. Are you suggesting I’m missing something? I should be working harder to get more out of life?”
The only connection I tried to make with quantum physics to inner peace is that of our potential ability to suspend time for a short period, fishing on a river, being in the moment and momentarily losing our consciousness of “where we are in time right now…” that and nothing more. But that wasn’t the point. The point was, if our senses can temporarily skew our perception of time/space/movement in this physical world, on a river in SW Montana, isn’t it then possible to conceive, or even acknowledge at some point, the idea that we might be able to put ourselves into a frame of perceived reference which *might* introduce us to another source of invisible energy… an energy most powerful, just beyond many of our belief systems? That’s why I encourage all of us to, once in awhile, suspend our belief systems and sense, feel, even reach for what else might be out there in the unchartered mists beyond bills and bloody marys.
The real connection I was attempting to explain from my musician perspective, is the connection between Quantum Physics, a parallel universe and how it interacts with artists. Because that’s all I know about. As jazz musicians, there are nights when we all play WAY over our heads. After, we realize that we’re really not that good on a nightly basis, so where did that great performance come from?? Most of us come to the conclusion (most of us without a huge ego, that is…) that we weren’t the inventors of that inspired performance that just came out of us, but rather we were a sort of medium which the inspired performance came through, because we aligned ourselves with it, we wanted it, we had purity of intent, we wanted it to be that way. We were the lucky recipients of translating an inspired performance from another medium, another *something.* Ask a few jazz musicians about this phenomenon. Ask a few painters, writers, woodworkers and sculpters… it happens to them regularly. They call it inspiration. They will tell you they start their project, then the project takes over the creative process and finishes itself. Now how can THAT be?? But that’s what they’ll tell you.
How many times 1. do you have to hear it? – 2. do you need different people from different parts of the world tell you the same thing? – 3. will an artist of any kind tell you their idea “just came to them,” usually in a strange, or quiet circumstance, before you will finally give creedence to the concept that there might actually be something else, something in a different dimension from ours, which helps us drive our art, and our great performances?
To answer Karen’s second question, “I can sit in my backyard at the end of the day with a glass of wine… and experience sheer bliss (as Jos.Campbell calls it)….it never concerns me how it happens or why it happens. I just relax and enjoy. Are you suggesting I’m missing something? I should be working harder to get more out of life?”
Gosh no, Karen. If I were you I’d start writing a blog, telling your friends and family how simple it is to relax and enjoy, and experience sheer bliss. You’ve found your answer, girl. Sitting in your beautiful back yard with a glass of wine… you’ve found it. And no… of course there’s no reason to be concerned about how it happens or why. That it happens at all, and that you know how to make it happen, is all that matters. Happenings of a magical/mystical nature don’t have to be analyzed, dug into or beat to death. To simply enjoy them and allow them is usually enough. For me, however, my *inspired* moments were so powerful, even in the beginning, that I began trying to find where ideas and inspiration/inpired momentary performances come from. My magical music experiences and the similarity of feeling I experienced in my first Buddhist meditations planted a seed of a possible correlation between inspiration and spirituality.
Now, ideas have to come from somewhere. It’s been easy for me to conceive of an intangible place, a place which holds ideas, and perhaps the ultimate creativity. Then, to my mind, we humans are the bridge between that place and our tangible existence. It could be pie in the sky. It might be smoke and mirrors. All I know is that my creativity actually increased significantly after deciding to embrace this theory for awhile and live “as if…” as if it were true. And shortly after that, my very quick sojourn into quantum physics came into play in a most simple, but exciting way… the fact that our time/space continuum is built perfectly for receiving instantaneous information, momentary inspiration, whatever we want to call it. The jazz musician simply starts playing a tune… she has no earthly idea what she’s going to play, after the melody’s been stated. So she wades in, on trust. More times than we can count, her muse slides in, takes over and she instantaneously interprets and plays some absolutely beautiful ideas, of which she had no clue when the tune began. See? I really believe that beautiful solo exists somewhere, in some form, and she tapped it… she tapped into the vast well of beautiful possibilities, and that was her interpretation. Was she inspired? I think so. Could anyone do it with enough time and effort? I don’t think so. The fine arts are not a special passion to our country or our culture these days, but the fire arts are a very special passion to those of us whose lives are shaped by them every single day.
I don’t talk about these things with you guys, with the idea that what I’m telling you is right, or that you should believe what I’m saying and adopt it all. No no. Quite the contrary. If some of my ideas are, in your mind, totally hair-brained, and that you realize that you have a way greater grip on reality than I do… well then, I still feel like we accomplished something. And, ultimately, I feel that all this info-search will fall away, and we’ll all be able to sit, contented, like Karen, enjoying sheer bliss… and never wonder for a moment why it’s happening.
If you think I’m totally full of it, or if you simply want more proof that I *might* be on to something, please give these links a watch and a listen. A special thanks to one of my blog subscribers, who sent me these earlier this week.
www.quantumjumping.com/special/counselors-technique
www.quantumjumping.com/webinar-invite/replay
Hope you had a great 4th.
Steve Hulse