energy and matter

offering to the fire

this conversation began over my son’s first greek dinner. we’d been talking about a trip – the idea of circling the meditteranean, from greece, turkey, syria, lebanon, israel, egypt, libya, tunisia, algeria, and finally back to morocco..  it’s a journey i’ve imagined for a long time, and been looking for the time that this journey would take – months, at least, if not more. 

ben youssef medersa marrakech morocco

having touched the beginning and end of this route, in turkey and morocco, i’ve been dreaming of the rest.  my experiences there were so rich – the layered architecture of incredible beauty and detail, the culture of craft, food, music, and vibrant energy of the people, the landscape that feels so ancient – and so different from my native green forests.

harem window istanbul

back to greek food – and the connection to turkish food, and the cultural mixing of the two.  our discussion then wandered to a a brief outline of the history of greece and turkey, and the mixing of the cultures, then in more recent political terms to the secular leadership of modern turkey - and the impact of secular leadership of nations. having just watched religulous by bill maher. my son recalled a scene where one of maher’s subjects suggests that rain was proof of his faith.

lantau island buddha in deluge

this was the turning point in our conversation – where we ended up with only energy and matter. here is the thread of logic that took us there.  our tendancy to attach meaning to when it rains relates to how our brains work as survival mechanisms – we are not wired for perception of reality. most of what we percieve is filtered and processed to aid us in our quest for survival, reality is not critical for survival.

our perceptive abilities to even sense most of what we know exists is minimal, and our ability to filter and fill in realities to make sense of what we don’t comprehend is vast. from john medina’s  developmental molecular biology brain research to the physicist patricia burchat’s explorations of the 96% of the universe that we cannot see or measure, we have been presented with enough science to consider this possibility – that everything we percieve is processed through the limitations of both our limited sensory capabilities and further distorted by our brain’s survival construct.

man mo temple offering hong kong

then, is all meaning simply a survival construct? is why we are here also a survival construct? is good and evil a survival construct? is time and space a survival construct? if all there is, is energy and matter – in all of it’s beautiful and random manifestations – us, our planet, our universe – and our gift as human beings  is to sense and feel and revel in the wonderful chaos and coincidence of it all – how fortunate we are.

morning meditation - home

as my son says – the smallest amount of energy that we exert ripples throughout the entire universe, changing everything with one small act.