Thanks to gravity, humans need to feel the ground beneath their feet. Similarly, above us, and in the horizontal plane, we’re surrounded by structures that we want to feel are strong and secure to keep the elements out and protect our earthly belongings. Often, when we wish for something good to occur, we might “knock on wood” in hopes of obtaining a fortunate outcome. No doubt that solid feeling provides some reassurance.
Our unstated need for solidity is understandable. After all, if there was nothing firm there’d be nothing to stand on. The problem with all this is that solidity as such doesn’t exist. Solidity is a sensation that is in our heads. Most of the universe, including everything we take to be “solid,” is void, empty. What’s swirling around in that space that we take to be solid are various fields and waves that generate forces which both propel and sustain the tiny constituents of matter which are always in motion. There is nothing actually solid. And that is old news, to be sure. Physicists have known this for at least a century.
So my question is, why do we still walk the earth, and more specifically, why do actors still strut the stage, as if solidity existed? Apparently, in this instance, familiarity has not bred contempt. But I for one am contemptuous of the same old truths we are exposed to. When Hamlet in his profound grief declares, “O that this too too solid flesh should melt” — metaphorical license aside, we can forgive Shakespeare for his characterization of Hamlet’s integument, given that he was writing 300 years or so before the startling revelations of quantum physics. Today’s writers should know better!
Okay then, if nothing is actually solid, what does that ultimately mean? That everything is a dream, illusory, a cosmic joke? How far can we trust our own judgment when what is perhaps one of our most fundamental assumptions about the universe has been proven wrong?
Your guess is as good as mine. But we can certainly begin to address these questions with the understanding that there are no solid “things” at all. It is simply how things appear to us. And I’ll just add that, arguably, it is humanity’s deep preoccupation with having “things” that contributes to misery and disappointment.
So maybe, just maybe, it’s time for a new kind of hero? What do you think? Not someone who simply struts upon the stage as if it were a solid firmament and they were king — but someone who gracefully rides the waves of life and uncertainty. Someone who sees how truth is obscured by our own pre-conceptions. Someone who has found greater happiness in abandoning their own self-interest for a greater good. A new kind of hero who stands for “nothing” rather than anything we may deem “solid,” and who desires most of all that you experience the joy and potential of emptiness, and the greater light into which it shines.
There is such a hero. His name is Jack Bigabee, the hero of The Further Shores or Knowing.
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