A unified theory of love

On quantum physics-poetry-philosophy + a playlist

Cat’s Eye Nebula from NASA Hubble

“I sing the body electric;
The armies of those I love engirth me, and I engirth them;
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
and discorrupt them,
and charge them full with the charge of the soul.”
– Walt Whitman

Love is electric. The body is electric. Life itself is expressed through electricity.

The heart beats by producing an electrical pulse in its upper chamber. Cells shuffle ions back and forth across their membranes speaking the language of electrical circuitry. Our cells are conductors: moving energy and channeling song. Our sense organs - ears, eyes, nose, tongue, skin – are meeting points with the outside world, surfaces of exchange, where chemical conversion transmutes the uncharged world into electrical current that skips through the brain and births thoughts and feelings, like "yum" and "ouch".

The universe is a heartbeat, a frequency, a pulse, a rhythm, a vibration. The Earth's heartbeat is 7.83 Hz, the Schumann Resonance, created through thunderstorms and lightning. At 7.83 Hz, the brain registers this as an alpha/theta frequency: relaxed, dreamy. The state we seek and sometimes reach in meditation. The state when cell regeneration and healing happens, where we can meet ourselves as spirits and remember our sacred.

The Earth's heartbeat is a storm. The storm is a lullaby. The Earth's heartbeat is a deep breath. Can you feel it?  Can you hear it? Can you taste it? It's all electric. At some point today, turn off your cell phone for a while, and unplug your wifi. Go out and place your bare feet on the Earth, maybe in a spot the sun has warmed for you, feel the tingle, sense the buzz grounding down as the circuit closes and flows in and out, in and out, as your surface meets the Earth's surface, recharging the soul. Breathe with the Earth. Life, love, and the universe are verbs. Everything is always in motion, even ancient and timeless mountains. Dynamic and fluid and ever-changing. We are all interconnected and co-creating a cosmic circuitry.

Quantum physicist David Bohm theorized that all parts of the universe form “an unbroken flowing whole." The space we place between ourselves and others is artificial. There is no separation. In "Wholeness and the Implicate Order", published in 1980, Bohm described the totality of existence as enfolding and unfolding, constantly in emergence (unfolding) and constantly contained (enfolding) within a whole. Wholeness permeates all.

We can look at the dark night like a vacuum, we can look at the unknown like a void, or we can flip our perspective,  and instead see that what we can't see, see what we don't yet know, is overwhelmingly, abundantly full, awaiting our discovery, waiting to be observed. There is no emptiness. Even the explosions we call stars we think are bursting forth from emptiness are actually blasts of gas that tear through the fabric, bubbles that create visible light from within the infinite super-organism surrounding us always and everywhere.

“Space is not empty. It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves. The universe is not separate from this cosmic sea of energy.”

― David Bohm

David Bohm was ostracized from the field of quantum physics because his theories were so controversial, so threatening to the dominant world order, challenging Einstein, Niels Bohr, and countless others. For example, he negated Einstein's belief that a particle cannot influence another particle instantaneously across vast distances. When this was observed, Einstein brushed it off as "spooky action" and, in more serious contemplation, said it threatened the entire field of quantum physics. Bohm proved him wrong through his theories on "implicate order" - the invisible web connecting all things that make it possible for the exact action to occur simultaneously, instantaneously, at massive distances. In other words, two particles that we would normally think of as distinct entities lose their independence. In other words, nothing is truly independent. This was a watershed discovery. While his peers were making bombs, his work undermined the very premise of war through his findings on undivided wholeness, on non-separation (non-duality, non-polarity), on the underlying aspect of reality not visible to us, which accounts both for our everyday observations and interactions in the quantum world from which even space and time might emerge.

Luckily this exile meant convergence with J. Krishnamurti (among countless other non-scientists), and the pinnacle of his teaching, "the observer is the observed" which has been described as the path to instant enlightenment if you could actually understand what he meant, not just cognitively, but deep in your bones, in the very vibration of your cells. Effectively, Krishnamurti and Bohm aimed to disintegrate all illusion of separation through their work. Existence is only possible because it is observed, therefore I only exist because you observe me, and vice versa. Ubuntu, a Bantu cosmology, speaks of the same notion. "I am because you are." The "I am" is not rigid, but a dynamic self-constitution dependent on the other. These cosmologies of non-dualism enfold and unfold across culture, across lineage, across spiritual tradition, across discipline.

“When we see others as the enemy, we risk becoming what we hate. When we oppress others, we end up oppressing ourselves. All of our humanity is dependent upon recognising the humanity in others. A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished when others are tortured or oppressed, or treated as if they were less than who they are.”

“My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.”

― Desmond Tutu

In fact, Krishnamurti makes a remarkably exquisite case for "no time" - which I described in this piece - as the "space" that allows us to dissolve separation through what he called "urgent presence" which allows for deep listening.

“So, is it possible for the division between the thinker and the thought, the observer and the observed, to come to an end? No time must be involved. If I do certain practices in order to break down this division, time is involved and therefore I perpetuate the division as the thinker and the thought. So, what is one to do? ... Do you know what it is to listen, to listen to that breeze among the leaves without resistance, interpretation or distraction? There is no such thing as distraction when you are listening. When you listen to that breeze among the leaves, you listen with complete attention, and therefore there is no time involved at all. You are listening, not translating, not interpreting, not agreeing or disagreeing... So you give your whole mind, your whole body, your whole nerves, everything you have, to listen.”

―J. Krishnamurti

This is just a glimmer into how we might reach that divine place where the division between the observer and the observed is non-existent. You can drop into the immensity of this man's mind a bit more here, but now we know how to get enlightened!

“When I understand myself, I understand you, and out of that understanding comes love. Love is the missing factor; there is a lack of affection, of warmth in relationship; and because we lack that love, that tenderness, that generosity, that mercy in relationship, we escape into mass action which produces further confusion, further misery. We fill our hearts with blueprints for world reform and do not look to that one resolving factor which is love.”

― J. Krishnamurti

Some of the greatest heartminds across spacetime are unified by shared explorations into the nature of reality: David Bohm, the Dalai Lama, Blackfoot elder Dr. Leroy Little Bear, James Baldwin, bell hooks, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Thich Nhat Hanh, Desmond Tutu, Arundhati Roy, Rilke, Audre Lorde, J. Krishnamurti... are all filed for me under the category “quantum physicists-poets-philosophers” because though they wielded different tools – formulas, words, prayers, sermons, speeches, silence – their aims were to disrupt duality, to challenge our insistence upon predicting, controlling, and explaining everything, to find ourselves held within not above or outside all of life. As their work informed and influenced each other across space time, they struck fear in all that sought to reduce, narrow, categorize, quantify, polarize, and fragment, and many were exiled, attacked, marginalized, or murdered for it. If they were accepted, their teachings were often de-legitimized or diminished, seen as fringe, not a mainstream way of life but a reality reserved for monks and saints.

“Some might say: ‘Fragmentation of cities, religions, political systems, conflict in the form of wars, general violence, fratricide, etc., are the reality. Wholeness is only an ideal, toward which we should perhaps strive.’ Rather, what should be said is that wholeness is what is real. ... Indeed, the attempt to live according to the notion that the fragments are really separate is, in essence, what has led to the growing series of extremely urgent crises that is confronting us today. Thus, as is now well known, this way of life has brought about pollution, destruction of the balance of nature, world-wide economic and political disorder, and the creation of an overall environment that is neither physically nor mentally healthy for most of the people who have to live in it. The notion that all these fragments are separately existent is evidently an illusion, and this illusion cannot do other than lead to endless conflict and confusion. Science itself is demanding a new, non-fragmentary world view.”

– David Bohm

What they each lived in devotion to, often saying it very directly, making a case for it over and over, applying every modality in the cosmos to help us collectively understand and live through its vital importance, is love. Love, the unifying force and the source of the universe. Love as electricity, love as verb, love as science, love as poetry. Moving energy and channeling song, all of us part of one cosmic orchestra. Technologies are emerging to help us hear the songs of plants by translating plant biorhythms into music through electrodes placed on their leaves graphed as waves.

Brilliant composers like Alexander Liebermann are transcribing animal song into sheet music.

We can even hear the Cat’s Eye Nebula singing! Please give yourself the treat of watching (listening) to this:

And in these gestures I don’t feel an anthropomorphizing happening, but an interspecies communication network being constructed through art and through science, something David Bohm argued for the merger of with tremendous passion. Perhaps in this holy union we will find both the evidence and the impulse to nurture interspecies solidarity, to fall into the embrace of infinite unfolding and enfolding within which there is no separation, no division, surrendering to the truth of undivided wholeness. Toward the end of his life David Bohm spent time learning from Blackfoot elder Dr. Leroy Little Bear, and shifted his focus to Indigenous languages as verb based languages, which he wrote about as:

"In turn, their world view was that of eternal flux and change. Thus a person’s name may change during their lifetime depending on their deeds. Likewise these languages did not lead to the formation of fixed categories. In English for example we put trout, salmon, pike etc into the category of “fish” but exclude eels and frogs. But for the Blackfoot they would refer to “processes in water” and rather than a category of “trees” there would be "the sound the wind makes in the leaves."

More on this later.

I want to share two more wisdoms: one, an excerpt from James Baldwin's Nothing Personal, one of my greatest muses who spoke of cosmic love and the implicate order and enfolding and unfolding in his own way, in so many places, including in the conclusion to this stunning essay (email me if you want a copy!):

What a journey this life is! dependent, entirely, on things unseen. If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earthquake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win. I know we often lose, and that the death or destruction of another is infinitely more real and unbearable than one's own. I think I know how many times one has to start again, and how often one feels that one cannot start again. And yet, on pain of death, one can never remain where one is. The light. The light. One will perish without the light.

But, my God, in that darkness, which was the lot of my ancestors and my own state, what a mighty fire burned! In that darkness of rape and degradation, that fine flying froth and mist of blood, through all that terror and in all that helplessness, a living soul moved and refused to die. We really emptied oceans with a home-made spoon and tore down mountains with our hands. And if love was in Hong Kong, we learned how to swim. It is a mighty heritage, it is the human heritage, and it is all there is to trust.

And I learned this through descending, as it were, into the eyes of my father and my mother. I wondered, when I was little, how they bore it-for I knew that they had much to bear. It had not yet occurred to me that I also would have much to bear; but they knew it, and the unimaginable rigors of their journey helped them to prepare me for mine. This is why one must say Yes to life and embrace it wherever it is found-and it is found in terrible places; nevertheless, there it is; and if the father can say, Yes. Lord. the child can learn that most difficult of words, Amen.

For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

Oof, let's say it again, y’all. “We really emptied oceans with a home-made spoon and tore down mountains with our hands. And if love was in Hong Kong, we learned how to swim.” Love, the one force that can collapse space-time and power an entire universe.

And two, the words of beloved Thích Nhất Hạnh, who speaks here of "no time" and of death and life itself as unfolding and enfolding. May his memory be a revolution:

“This body is not me; I am not caught in this body, I am life without boundaries, I have never been born and I have never died. Over there the wide ocean and the sky with many galaxies All manifests from the basis of consciousness. Since beginningless time I have always been free. Birth and death are only a door through which we go in and out. Birth and death are only a game of hide-and-seek. So smile to me and take my hand and wave good-bye. Tomorrow we shall meet again or even before. We shall always be meeting again at the true source, Always meeting again on the myriad paths of life.”

Ok now to really close, as if anything could follow James Baldwin nor Thích Nhất Hạnh with any legitimacy, I have something for you. Call me old fashioned but I still think curating playlists is a cool thing to do. Also, in the days of algorithms calculating every minute of ourselves into determinism, that act of curating a playlist instead of a machine serving one feels like a vestige of humanity in the digital realm. Anyway, this playlist is something you could take a bath to, play low in the background as you wash the dishes or fold laundry, float on a long drive awash in the glow of a fading sun... you get the idea. Below (I think?) and linked here if not.

Til next time, with a home-made spoon in hand.

Rach

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