blog two

"Stones do not fall from the sky because there are no stones in the sky" (72). This quote from chapter 4 actually inspired a dream of mine the other night. I saw in the dream the sun being broken into little bits by meteorites and when I woke up, it made sense to me that meteorites come from the sky, but it was only in my dreaming mind that they could destroy the sun (as we see it here on earth). But the quote must have stuck with me because of its stark observation that if I were to draw a picture of "the sky," I would draw, of course, a vast blue plane filled with fluffy, white clouds and a burning ball for the sun. The sky is, in our minds, the opposite of earth (ground). But Benveniste recalled this quote because for the dilution principle of homeopathy to be accepted, we have to take into consideration that out of something that we think we so concretely understand and define, comes its apparent opposite.

In chapter 5, though the Fourier principle still escapes me (I am no mathematician), the idea of holographs was facinating. I never knew that a hologram is nothing more than a whole unit made up of identical, smaller particles. And to apply holographic technology to the brain and memory makes sense even with our traditional "understanding" of memory. Science has always suggested that our memories are a collection; they just didn't know how the collection was organized. And the symbolic resemblance of the synapses (spaces between) in our brains and the vast "vacuum" of the ZPF is starting to make more sense to me now that I understand that holograms are 1/2 light and 1/2 wavelength (both notions that have already been suggested in previous chapters to exist in the body). Additionally, I've begun to associate the term "consciousness" with focus and the idea of coherence. If consciousness is nothing more than coherence (which is just another word for organization), then couldn't what we perceive to be consciousness actually be just a particular organization of wavelengths (a frequency)?

Chapter 6 called to mind Plato's Republic (I believe, and someone please correct me if I am wrong), in which he expresses thoughts on reality through a sort of parable about light and shadow. (We may have already talked about this "cave" story of his in class.) The passage that reminded me of this idea reads, "According to the mathematics, the quantum world was a perfect hermetic world of pure potential, only made real--and, in a sense, less perfect--when interrupted by an intruder" (103). It's the whole "if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound at all?" kind of idea. "Concrete" things exist because we freeze them with our visual interpretations of them. Also in chapter 6, was the example of the butterfly, which made me think about the grander scheme of things: fate. If we are all connected through this ZPF, aren't we all at all times (consciously or unconsciously) leaving an imprint, getting imprints left upon us, and guiding or outright directing the fates of everything around us? Jahn and Dunne's experiments support the notion that we can will matter, just as some schools of thought believe we can will our own biological processes (such as getting through a physically painful experience or beating an illness with strength of mind and determination). This chapter shines a whole new light on "mind over matter."