Coherence

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Did you know that atoms are 99.9% empty space? According to an article in the Elephant Journal, if you took away all the empty space between atoms and pressed them together, the whole human race would fit inside a sugar cube. This ties in with what I watched in an episode of The Universe in History Channel, where one scientist said that if all the atoms of the Empire State Building were stripped of their empty space, the building would only be the size of a grain of sand or something close to it (it would still weigh 370,000 tons though, so that grain of sand would still crush your hand instantly).

One would then ask that if everything was mostly empty space, why don't we pass through stuff? This is because of the electrostatic field caused by the electrons of different atoms pushing against each other.

On a deeper level, what makes all these atoms what they are? Why do certain atoms bind themselves the way they do? What makes them keep the form they were shaped into? Something keeps them together, otherwise a tea cup would just dissolve into its constituent elements instead of retaining the form that it was shaped into. Even beyond electrostatic forces, something gives coherence to these atoms.

In Franz Bardon's system of hermetics (composed of ten steps), there is a mental exercise on the fifth step where one is supposed to imagine one's consciousness to be as small as an atom and place that consciousness into the "depth point" of any chosen object. The smaller one's consciousness becomes, the larger and larger the constituent parts of the object also become. Molecules start to become as big as houses, and space expands further and further until one can imagine oneself surrounded by pure atoms, each atom like a small solar system with revolving electrons and protons with a nucleus for the star, and in between, endless empty space. One can imagine that one is in the center of a vast universe.

However, despite the seemingly infinite size of this imaginary universe, one remains aware of the overall form that these giant (to one's miniscule point of view) atoms conform themselves to. So one begins to wonder, what is the force that keeps them together in that form, and not in another?

So one tries to go even deeper, until one imagines that one has penetrated into the quantum realm of quarks and other things that are smaller than atoms. According to quantum theory, consciousness has an effect on the behavior of quantum particles. Ah. Then a little nudge here and a little nudge there and theoretically, one can influence how certain atoms behave toward each other.

At the very depths of this infinite space, the power of thought seems to provide the underlying mold or design that keeps these atoms to a certain form in relation to each other (e.g. the form of a tea cup). And so, ancient maxims start to make more sense, because it is said that everything starts from a thought. Even the grandest building starts as an idea in the mind of the architect and everything that follows afterward until the building is constructed is held together by the force of this singular idea.

However, not all thought is created equal. Otherwise, we could all create things out of thin air, by sheer thought power alone. So it seems to me that there is an even greater force of thought, call it a Divine Thought, that keeps things the way they are. The formation of atoms that make up granite is held together by the thought design of granite. Same thing with the formation of atoms that make up gold, and so on. Sorts of boggles the mind, doesn't it? It seems to be such a complicated template tree, if you bother to think about it.

But again, it's really amazing how everything remains so coherent throughout it all. Everything is held in place, for all intents and purposes by a powerful Thought, so it seems to support the statements that the universe is one big mind. Hindu sacred texts do say that when Brahma goes to sleep, the whole universe dissolves into Nothingness, presumably because the conscious thought that holds everything together is withdrawn.

The Bardon exercise is a really interesting (if taxing) meditation that really helps give insight on a couple of Hermetic maxims. Other points for meditation would be, if one can imagine any object as a big universe when seen from the point of view of the atom while still being aware of the overall coherent form, what form does our own universe conform to, if any? Going by scale, our Sun would be like a nucleus and the planets as the protons and electrons. If we shrink our consciousness further, would we find small beings living in these "planetary" electrons of each atom, just as we live on this Earth?

I may as well end this here before I give people migraines with all the infinite possibilities such thoughts can bring us to. But it does show that we are truly specks in this big, big place and all the knowledge in the world does not even begin to encompass the enormity of what is out there (or "in here").