Today I woke up sick with a cold. It is as if my body, upon hearing me think about starting back to work today, had other, more realistic ideas.
I am watching comfort DVDs and eating the chocolate which came courtesy of Julie Lovell. It feels surreal, using the old tricks of the trade to ease my way through depression for this particular affliction.
I have been resisting thinking of my sister as a phenomenon of the past, the way I spent years not thinking of her as disabled, but simply as an individual of different characteristics to most. That was until she herself described herself as disabled but not in a defeated way, simply as a matter of fact, an aspect of her reality to deal with. But she is not here to tell me, in her straightforward way, ‘Well, being dead….’
I can’t feel her any more.
Those first few days, as I wrote in my previous post, I could feel her confused soul, seeking its way forward. But after that, I have felt not so much nothing as very distinctly that she is not part of the world I inhabit any more. There is a coldness to it, and maybe this is an artefact of numbing myself to the reality, or maybe it is because she has passed into a different realm of unknowability, or maybe it is because, as I am starting to believe, she no longer exists as Allison but as a set of frequencies unattached and unaware of itself.
After my last post, I googled ‘quantum physics and the soul’ and discovered that I am not the first person to theorise the soul as a set of coded frequencies. Several physicists – one at Cambridge University, one at Princeton, and one at the Max Planck Institute – have theorised similarly that this is possible. (This one is the most similar to my thinking about wave-particle duality and the potential for the soul to continue as a set of frequencies).
I wonder if the soul has no mass, in which case, it could theoretically continue forever unless interrupted. But I also think that such a post-death collection of frequencies would be unlikely to be self-aware without the physicality of a body / matter, and therefore would not be capable of directing itself into another existence, unless it is the soul of a great meditative practitioner whose brain frequencies have been altered through years of practice to actually incorporate some sort of directive awareness. If the soul has mass, then it exists in space-time like the rest of us and cannot continue indefinitely, except perhaps in its wave-aspect. Hmm.
I have started reading Tibetan Buddhist texts on what happens at and after death, and the theories are similar to mine and those of the quantum physicists, except that they are far more detailed. The Buddhists theorise that the ‘soul’ is shaped by the life of the person (which makes sense – the brain is elastic and shapes itself according to genetics, environment and experience). They believe that good karmic works during life set the soul up for a positive rebirth. In quantum physics, you could describe this as the soul’s set of frequencies having a predisposition to connection (in life, known as ‘compassion’), which means that the soul is drawn to similar frequencies or quantum states. Potentially, this could be a new life. The soul blueprint is absorbed and imprinted in that of the physical being it has joined, so you would have no idea of it but in this way, knowledge is imprinted and continued and evolves with each physical iteration.
OK now I can see I am sounding crazy. But the fact is, if there is a soul, there must be a material explanation for it. Otherwise it is just crazy talk. We should never rule out anything that might be possible simply because of the prejudices of the times we live in. We would still think the earth is flat and the centre of the universe if we did that.
The Buddhists talk about different realms which the soul enters after physical death, and possible ‘reincarnations.’ These depend on how well the soul can direct itself after death, and how trained for connection it is. In gross material terms, I can imagine a swirling soup of soul space, except I know this isn’t what it would look like because that would have been detectable. In quantum physics terms, I think it more likely that the soul (perhaps I should call it a quantum blueprint? There must be a less loaded term…), if eternal in its wave aspect, writes itself into the quantum layer and yet can interact with matter, and possibly is attracted to matter, and so may at times iterate in the physical world.
Where is this leading me? To other worlds? To other universes? If the soul can exist, does exist, at a wave level, then it could feasibly exist everywhere, at all times, massless, echoing throughout the vacuum, a potentiality encapsulated in the DNA of the sub-atomic multiverse. What then makes it a physical reality? Does it have an inherent attraction to physical form? To – life? I don’t want to ask the question,’ why’? because this goes in the wrong direction – it starts to assume without proof that there is a choice behind all of this. Better to ask, ‘what’ and ‘how,’ at this point.
Do we encapsulate all possible selves within us? Is this what it means that we are all interconnected, that we are everyone’s mother? Outside of spacetime and inside spacetime simultaneously? I used to hypothesise as a child, that Jesus taught us how to access eternity right now, in a moment. Perhaps this is what I meant? That eternity is living within us?
This is contingent on the soul having no mass. If it does have a mass then that could explain why it is attracted to matter at some point, rather than continuing indefinitely. Perhaps it does both? Perhaps it has Higgs bosons and wave aspects simultaneously?
Perhaps I am just looking for an explanation for what is really just a projection of my own mind, desperate for a way to sublimate its loss?
Here I am stuck. Any ideas, any other amateur quantum physicists out there?