Saturday, December 24, 2011

On Being

Kipling Swehla - Meditation

On Being
From a deep, soundless sleep I was abruptly awakened by a man's voice. “The universe is expanding at an increasing rate propelled by dark energy. “ The strange, disorienting words were floating in my head when I realized my alarm clock was going off to NPR’s program “On Being”.

It was sunday morning again and again way too early for a night person to be waking up. Those words were stuck in my brain being groggily pondered when it dawned on me that it’s through meditation and Tai Chi that we are able to truly experience the meanings and similarities in Taoism and Quantum Physics.

Recent discoveries in Astronomy and new theories in Quantum Physics are practically plagiarizing the Tao Te Ching and eastern philosophy. Dark energy, dark matter, membranes connecting all things in the universe, and fields in which energy becomes matter are all very new scientific theories trying to prove concepts thousands of years old.

M Theory hypothesizes there is a membrane extended throughout the entire universe which envelopes and interconnects everything and everybody. It is a variation of String Theory, a Theory of Everything, which describes the existence and interconnection of multiple dimensions, including some which are unobservable.

Nasa describes Dark Energy as being 70% of the universe yet other than that, it is a complete mystery. Dark Matter is matter which neither emits, reflects, or scatters light or radiation. It makes up 25% of the universe yet nothing is known about it.

A lab in Geneva is smashing protons at a high speed to replicate the Big Bang, the origin of manifestation, so they can prove the existence of a field in which energy becomes matter.

I hear all this and I can’t help but to think of the lines in Chapter One of the Tao Te Ching,

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.

This is all a long way to explain why I love Tai Chi and meditation. If you still your thoughts and empty your mind, the darkness will expand your perception of reality.

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