We can only locate or pinpoint an event that falls one way or another into the range of our perception.
We cannot really locate or pinpoint microscopic or macroscopic events with any precision. And cannot pinpoint invisible events, for even as our sophisticated instruments perceive them, they have not met them in the same time scheme. I want to deal briefly with such ideas, so that in later blogs we can discuss the location of the universe.
Any events that we perceive is only a portion of the true dimensionality of that event. The observer and the object perceived are a part of the same event, each changing the other. This interrelationship always exists in any system of reality and at any level of activity. In certain terms, for example, even an electron “knows” it is being observed through our instrument. The electrons within the instrument itself have a relationship with the electron that scientists may be trying to “isolate” for examination.
Quite apart from that, however, there is what we will call for now the collective unconscious of all of the electrons that compose the entire seemingly separate event of the scientists observing the electron. In our range of activity we can adequately identify events, project them in time and space, only by isolating certain portions of much larger and much smaller events, and recognizing a highly specific order of events as real.
Light can be defined as a wave or as a particle, and the same is true in many other instances. Consciousness, for example, can be defined as a wave or as a particle, for it can operate as either, and appear as either, even though its true definition would have to include the creative capacity to shape itself into such forms.
We cannot pinpoint the beginning of the universe — for that beginning is simultaneously too vast and too small to be contained in any of our specifications. While everything seems neat and tidy within those specifications, and whole, we operate with brilliant nonchalance in the theater of time and space. Time and space are each the result of psychological properties. When we ask how old is the universe, or how old is the world, then we are taking it for granted that time and space are somehow or other almost absolute qualities. We are asking for answers that can only be found by going outside of the context of usual experience — for within that experience we are always led back to beginnings and endings, consecutive moments, and a world that seems to have within it no evidences of any other source.
The physical world as we know it is unique, vital to the importance of the universe itself. It is an integral part of the universe, and yet it is also quite its own reality. That reality is dependent upon the perceptions of each kind of life that composes it. It is a creation of consciousness, rising into one unique kind of expression from that divine gestalt of being — and the divine gestalt of being is of such unimaginable dimensions that its entire reality cannot appear within any one of its own realities, its own worlds.
Space, again, is a psychological property. So is time. The universe did not, then, begin at some specified point in time, or at any particular location in space — for it is true to say that all of space and all of time appeared simultaneously, and appear simultaneously.
We cannot pinpoint the location of consciousness.
When we are dreaming we cannot pinpoint our dream location in the same way that we can determine, say, the chair of the bureau that may sit on the floor by the bed in which we dream. That inner location is real, however, and meaningful activity can take place within it. Physical space exists in the same manner, except that it is a mass psychologically share property — but at one “time” in the beginning this was not so.
In the beginning, physical space had the qualities that dream space has to us now. It seemed to have a more private nature, and only gradually, in those terms, did it become publicly shared.
What was such a world like, and how can we possibly relate it to the world we know?