You Are Everything

This is your brain. It is an inanimate object. 

This, however, is what your brain looks like when it is synapses are firing, communicating from neuron-to-neuron to create what we call consciousness:

Without electrical interaction, the brain of a dead person is no different from a thinking, breathing, living person, so this is what the consciousness that is you, a thinking, breathing, living person looks like.

This is the known universe.

The known universe is everything. Only it isn’t. What we think of as the entire universe is actually less than 5% of everything. All those stars, all those galaxies, all those atoms, all those particles make up only 4.9% of what is really out there.

            The rest of everything is dark matter (27%) and dark energy (68%). Dark matter consists of particles even smaller than subatomic particles. So small that they can actually pass through atoms. In fact, there’s some passing through you right now. Dark energy is the energy necessary to explain why in the heck the universe is still accelerating in its expansion 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang. It would have started slowing down loooooooooooooooooooooooooong ago were the known universe actually the whole universe.

            This is what the universe looks like when you map it out to include dark matter and dark energy:

Look familiar? It should. It’s the exact same image as consciousness. This was done for two reasons. 1. This is actually what it looks like when you map out the way dark matter and dark energy interact in that picture of the universe. 2. The usage rights for one of those illustrations were challenging to figure out (for blogging purposes). Here’s a link to that other illustration, though, if you want to see how phenomenally similar it is: the Actual Universe from this article.

            It would seem your consciousness is a scale image of the entire universe. How can this possibly be? Simple. 

You and the universe are part of the same hologram.

Wait, what?

            Let me introduce David Bohm and Karl Pribram. David Bohm was a quantum physicist and Karl Pribram was a psychologist. Both scientists discovered separately, through their respective fields of expertise, that the universe functions just like a hologram.

This is how a hologram functions:

A laser is split in two. Half of the laser travels to a piece of holographic film, while the other half bounces off an object before being directed to the same piece of film. Once that film is developed, if you shine a laser of the same wavelength at it, the piece of film will show a three dimensional image of the object.

            Here is where it gets interesting: If you were to take that piece of holographic film and cut it in half and then shine the laser at half the piece of film, it would not show half the object. It would show the entire object. In fact, no matter how many pieces you cut that piece of film into, each tiny fragment would still show the entire object. A bit smaller, of course and a bit fainter, but the entirety nonetheless. Note: you need an actual piece of holographic film to do this. It will not work with the hologram on your credit card. Please do not cut up your credit card on account of reading this.

            So what does all this mean to you? Think about it like this:

You are a creature of time.

Time is the dimension of all action. It is the dimension required to get from point A to point B, meaning that time is the dimension required for an electrical signal to travel from one neuron to the next in order to create the electrical pattern that we call thought. Put enough of those together, all firing signals to each other over the course of time and you have consciousness.

            The universe is also a function of time. It is the time it took for the nothingness of reality before the Big Bang to become the everything of reality afterwards, 13.8 billion years of matter, dark matter and dark energy projecting outward, every moment a function of the time it took for every bit of that matter to get from every single point A to every single point B. Whether that motion was an electron vibrating around the nucleus of an atom or a cluster of galaxies accelerating away from another cluster of galaxies.

            When you map out the neural interactions that occur over time to create a consciousness, you get the same image as a mapping of the cosmic interactions that occur over time to create the universe. In fact, if you shrunk this waaaaaaaaaay down to map out the quantum interactions of subatomic particles, you would still get the same image. 

All of existence, you see, is a function of actions occurring over time.

Without time, nothing that we consider life could actually occur. Without time, the actions of the big bang could never have added up to the universe that we know today. When you map out either one of these, they end up looking the same.

            So, if the universe is a hologram that contains all of everything, then you are a small piece of that hologram, still containing all of everything. 

            You exist in the universe, yet the entirety of the universe exists within you.

            You are everything.  

Two excellent books and a movie that inspired this post:
The 4% Universe by Richard Panek, The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot, The Dark Universe Space Show hosted by Neil degrasse Tyson (playing here as of the writing of this post).