William Shanley
In an effort to truly grasp the infinite abundance, potential and power of what is within and without us, let’s take a closer look at the science. It’ll be just a brief glimpse into the nature of our source: light. First we must begin with the fact that a photon (a quantum of light) is non-material. It is non-physical. It has no rest mass. It has no charge. Yet it can possess infinite power. It can be seen only once: its detection is its annihilation. So our entire universe is birthed from a non-physical entity which is annihilated when observed. As Arthur M. Young, inventor of the Bell helicopter and physicist/philosopher, states in the first chapter of The Reflexive Universe, “The heart of our story, like the beginning of creation, lies in the nature of light. Light, because it is primary, must be unqualified—impossible to describe—because it is antecedent to the contrasts necessary to description. “Light involves a special kind of difficulty, the difficulty of knowing about that which provides no knowledge of other things. We might imagine a painter who wanted to paint the paintbrush, a problem I encounter when I want to repair my glasses: I cannot see without them; and light, by which we see, cannot be seen.” Light is seeing. Visible light covers just one octave of the electromagnetic spectrum, but as Young tells us, it “includes much more than the energy we see by, for all exchange of energy between atoms and molecules is some form of what used to be called electromagnetic energy, which extends over a vast spectrum and would be better named interaction.”And, as evidenced by the finding of relativity that clocks stop at the speed of light, it has no time (the space-time path of light has zero length). While light in a vacuum has a ‘velocity’ of 186,000 miles per second, this velocity is not motion in the ordinary sense since it can have no other value… Even space is a meaningless concept for light, since the passage of light through space is accomplished without any loss of energy whatsoever.” Light is pure action and free. Light is an information carrier, connecting everything with everything else. Light seems to know its purpose: Young describes the life cycle of light as the “arc of light,” and in so doing shows us how light, as it slows and descends into energy/matter, all physics are born, and subatomic quanta emerge with charge, velocity, mass, and location. As light continues to slow and becomes more and more determined, it gives up energy to form atoms, and then atoms bond into molecules. Then light does a most miraculous thing, it reverses its descent, makes a U-turn, becomes neg-entropic, and uses the determined state of the molecule as the platform upon which to progressively build life: cells, then plants, animals, and man, each kingdom experiencing a higher degree of freedom than its predecessor. Then light returns to its source. … Light transforms itself into these forces of attraction to create all life and make everything new again. And I would add to these four a fifth: love. We are made of this same quantum-stuff. So we see a whole new world coming into view: born in light, bonded into matter, it rises back up to create life, then onto higher and higher degrees of freedom and creativity and knowing—and then us, through us, to become. Knowing this to be our heritage and the Earth our collective dominion, we awaken to the nature of what is, become coherent with it, and with the miraculous powers of nature at our finger tips, we realize that we are the masters of our own destiny–and desire to manifest anew. We are at once free to create, to exemplify the whole and consciously evolve its purpose with the infinite abundance of it at our fingertips—now. And we see in the miraculous, malleable mirror of the universe the image of our maker—and ourselves.