What If It’s All Charged Particles?

All we can know for sure is our perception and awareness. That’s it. We are thinking entities, as far as we know, and we are being fed with inputs that, we have been led to believe, come from our sense organs. Our eyes, our ears, our sense of touch, our proprioception, taste, smell – all just signals feeding our awareness.

Solipsists would says that we could, for all intents and purposes, simply be brains in jars, with no physical body at all, connected up to a computer perhaps. Or maybe there isn’t even a brain, just a floating consciousness, in a sea of energy, electrical pulses and electromagnetic differentials, interpreting them as the world we think we are seeing, tasting, touching. The world we live in, the things we experience, just a sort of dream. All we know for sure is that we are aware of our awareness.

We think, therefore we are.

If this is true – and when you boil it all down, it’s actually the only thing that we know for sure – then all the places we go, all the things we do, and all the people we know, they only exist in our perception. They could well be a creation of our own awareness, presented to us like a movie projected on a screen.

That means that I exist only in your perception. That the people you see in magazines, the people you spend your day with, those you love, those you hate, those you pass on the street without a nod or a word, they only exist in your perception. They are extras in the movie of your awareness, projected onto the screen of your perception.

And if this is the case, it presents a curious question. Where do these images – these people, these things in our lives – go, when we are not directly experiencing them? Where do they go when they leave the room? Where do they go when they die? Where do we go when they die?

Is it like Schrödinger’s cat? Are they both real and unreal at the same time? Do they cease to exist until they choose to walk back in the door? And do we cease to exist to them when we are no longer in their direct line of sight?

Or is it that they do continue to exist, but it’s only their physical presence is no longer real? That they become the concept of themselves, the idea of their existence? That they continue to exist, only that their physical representation is gone, but they live on in us, as a memory of the perception of them?

Just like a room with the walls taken away, the room still exists, but the boundaries that define it are gone. When our body dies, when the things that we can see, feel, interact with are gone, does that mean that we are gone too? Or does it mean that we are still there, and it’s just the physical aspects of us have expired? We are, after all, spiritual beings having a physical experience.

And if, when we leave the room, we live on in the perception of those whose realities we inhabit when we die, does this mean that there are two of us? That there is the version that exists in the perception, the idealised or demonised or stylised version, and the other version that has stepped out of the room? And if one person’s experience of you is different to another person’s experience of you, does that mean that there are two version of you? Can there be three? Four? And infinite number of different versions of you?

Or maybe it’s a moot point. If we are simply an energy field, floating somewhere in some parallel dimension, and if this is all just sparks firing between clouds of ionised particles, and we are the consciousness of every sentient being that has ever been and ever will be, and that reality as we know it is simply a lightning strike that lasts less than a millisecond and the whole universe and all of time is just a momentary flash of perception, why are we so busy being miserable?

None of this is real, we have just milliseconds before our light fades, so why do we waste it arguing over imaginary borders? Why do we waste it tapping away at keyboards and filling out reports? Why do we waste it feel depressed and angry and bitter?

We are imaginary sparks of light an an imaginary energy field, that may or may not exist, so lets start making art, writing poetry, singing, dancing and exploring this fascinating mirage that surrounds us, and enjoy this illusion of life, and all it has to offer. Let’s become angels and fly to the heavens, lets spread our wings and wrap them around all the other imaginary beings in our perception, and lets make this imaginary moment of existence a positive one.

Because in a moment it will all be over in a flash of light. And reality will begin again.