What the Muon Told Me

Elsewhere the other day I had occasion to note (to paraphrase Wikipedia) that an elementary particle is one not known to have a substructure. Not known, to emphasize, to be made up of yet other entities. While I conventionally assent to this, something tells me, “It ain’t so.” Beneath the muon, electron, strange quark, and such must surely be a wealth of structure yet—and so on ad infinitum. But that known refers to us. In a way, as we’re now constituted, we are the limit. In one direction the elementary particle—in another the black hole or the Big Bang, the singularities. Like death itself they are but bulky, visible stone markers of various border zones.

So I went on a walk and, watching the leaves fall, unwrapped an old cosmological fossil from my collection. Like many children so I too have had this thought quite early: Beneath the smallest the yet smaller; above the greatest the even greater. I encountered that same idea later in sophisticated wrapping in David Bohm’s writings on physics, thus Bohm’s suggestion that when we encounter singularities we’ve simply exhausted our theoretical powers and need to shift our gaze further to the left, right, up, or down. New laws will then eventually become perceivable; they won’t abolish our old theories but will render them as applicable to a narrow range of reality rather than to the All. A Grand Unifying Theory will never be discovered because reality is limitless.

To put that into the context of this blog, there is no borderzone. Where we see a radical discontinuity what we really see is simply the darkness of our ignorance. The reason why we cannot see beyond the border (lets call it death), is because we are so well adapted to a narrow range of reality, what we call this, the well-known here and now. What if this is simply a very dense form of reality. When we first came into this region, we couldn’t see a damn thing—because our powers of perception are suited to a much more subtle realm. Let’s suppose that we tried to adapt, to figure out what happened. We began manipulating the coarse matter of this realm at the subatomic level. Our feeble powers could actually do things at that level, not at the gross. Slowly, gradually, we succeeded in shaping structures. These in turn gave us more and more abilities to get a handle on this new environment. We used the matter of this realm itself to make it show us what it is. We learned to maintain these structures—by feeding them, as it were. We devised ways by which they would reproduce. This, of course, is my (let’s call it sci-fi) notion of Chemical Civilization.

We are accustomed to thinking of the realms beyond (heaven, hell, etc.) as different in kind, not merely in degree. But what if they are not? What if Reality has many, many regions with many different kinds of…let me simply call it density. What if matter is always and everywhere present within it, but differences in its structural arrangements make it more or less manipulable by agents. What if there are also agents everywhere, and, like us, have the same characteristics we have. And what if the real difference in kind is that between agents and matter. Arguably that is certainly the case in this here and now. The radical difference we observe in ordinary known reality is between life and matter. Some of us, e.g. Mortimer Adler (see his The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes) would restrict that crucial difference to man, but I apply it to all of life. Agency is present in it everywhere.

Supposing that is true. Supposing, further, that on death, having accumulated subtle energies enough to escape this pocket of coarse density, we find ourselves once more back in a realm much better suited to our “natural” powers. Yes, it has matter, but it is of a much more subtle kind very easily formed by us for self-display and communications. No, we don’t have to eat it in order to “live.” What if our sustenance in those regions is energetic? What if the reason why we were captured in this “pocket” in the first place was because insufficient quantities of those energies reached us here? (Something analogous to that is suggested in Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos series.) Would everything then suddenly turn heavenly?

Interesting question. A good answer to that might run as follows. No. Nothing’s really changed except the density—but that does make a difference. Agents there, as here, are free. And they’re either drawn to ever greater unity or ever greater denial of the same. Good guys, bad guys. Still all there. But in realms of lighter density—where we do not need machines by means of which to see and “live”—where space is not, therefore, as demanding a container as it is here, the good guys will congregate with the good, the bad will cling to their like. And some will still vacillate between two minds. Heaven, hell, and purgatory. Your choice. Strong hints like that come to us from the writings of Swedenborg—difficult of access although these are because the old Swede would try to be a prophet and explain every the and and in Genesis in endless volumes of erudition.

Well, my walk is over. The falling leaves are wonderfully bright, so yellow. Sun shines in this lovely pocket of deep density.