Three in a Row
In college, I studied engineering and physics. The coursework took us far enough into quantum physics to give us a picture of the real spookiness of the physical world when looked at very closely. We learned that physicists can determine the probability that a particle will be in a certain place or at a certain energy level, but cannot know for sure both at the same time. Exact measurements gave way to probabilities.
The most bizarre was the idea that light behaves as either a particle or a wave, depending on how one observes the experiment. We learned that a particle could be in multiple energy states simultaneously until an observation was made, at which point “collapse of the wave function” occurs and just one of the possibilities is observed. You’ve probably heard of the “Schrödinger’s Cat” thought experiment where the cat in the box is both alive and dead until the experimenter opens the box to look. How weird is that?
While immersed in all this left-brain activity in school, I had the insight that math and science could only deal with maybe half of what I felt was real in my life. The part that couldn’t be subjected to a repeatable experiment that would prove or disprove any hypothesis was the domain of thought, consciousness, feelings, intuition, and love. Those, to me, were just as valid and worth study and attention. And where is the Creator of all of this?
Einstein had said “God does not play dice with the universe,” which got me to thinking. Sitting in a parked car one day near the university, a thought came to mind like a bolt of lightning: if God (or a higher power) were to have influence on my personal life, he/she could do that by arranging for “meaningful coincidences.” Maybe the random events that occurred in my life weren’t random at all. And if this hunch is right, I can toss this quarter three times right now and get three “heads.” Knowing that by random chance, I’d get three “heads” one time out of eight, the main thing was that if that happened now, the universe will be telling me I’m on the right track, and that consciousness somehow plays directly into the events of my life. I threw the quarter three times. Three “heads.” That was a goosebumps moment.
An amazing consequence of this possibility is that Creator can never be “caught” meddling with my life, because one can always say, well, that could have happened by chance! Science, for example developing a hypothesis and then designing a double-blind experiment to validate or disprove it, can’t deal with this either. There is no way for the scientist who conceived of the experiment not to play a part in the discovery of the results of the investigation, just as when the experimenter opens the box to see if Schrodinger’s cat is alive or dead. If the results one way or the other are meaningful to the experimenter, it will influence what has apparently happened.
Beyond Death
At about the same time, I’m thinking about my life in broader terms, and the thought arose: what if “I” don’t cease to exist at the moment of my death? I guess I’d never considered that before, because it struck me so deeply that to this day I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when the thought occurred. It was a full-body reaction, like some kind of charged energy flowing through. I realized that a response arising in the autonomic nervous system comes from some source that isn’t of the mind. Those are the kinds of things to really pay attention to, because ego hasn’t had a chance to interfere.