My Quantum Mechanics “So What”

I spent the summer of 2015 “playing with creation” as I called it. It was one of the lightest, freest summers of my life. 

Let’s back up a decade from there – I was just starting college. A goofy, free spirit determined to have fun despite the mountain of challenges ahead of me. I wanted to get it all right and meet everyone’s expectations, especially my own. I met and exceeded most of them. That felt great.

Military training taught me how to control my impulse to laugh, how to conform but think critically, how to lead by the book and be a team member. College taught me how to fail, get back up, and try again. That memory of my first “D” on a math exam is still seared in my soul – but with determination (and a lot of studying!), I ended up with an A- in the class. It was all incredible life training. 

I entered the workplace. I learned how to balance my fun and serious sides. I learned how to run a meeting, deal with difficult people, and accept given standards of behavior. I got insight into how the world works, how we all play a role, and that each of us is an essential contributor to life here on Earth.

Sounds great, right. So what was missing?

I lost me.

Somewhere in my drive to meet the world’s expectations, I lost a part of myself. I lost the fun and play of life. Life had become a prescribed charade of doing everything I was supposed to do. It had lost its magic.

This is where our journey here officially begins. 

It begins in 2015 on the day I woke up and said, no more. Today is the day we get back to us. This marked the terrifying day that I decided to apply my own beliefs about the world and creation to my own life. It was seriously terrifying. 

I had established a system that worked for me. I had gotten really good at meeting others’ expectations – it had produced many of the results I wanted in my professional and personal life. The only problem… it was predictable, and it was boring. So not me.

Enter summer of 2015. I started applying the principles that I’m sharing with you here at Let’s Think Free to my own life. With pretty amazing results. Here’s the foundation.

Thoughts and Feelings

Anyone out there reading this have control over all their thoughts? Please let me know how you do it. I certainly don’t. But, oh by the way, our thoughts ultimately shape our reality. So they’re really really important. They’re the building blocks, if you will, of our entire lives. No big deal.

You’ll learn that I’m a huge fan of definitions. It’s super important that we’re all talking about the same thing. Let’s get after some of the basics.

Thoughts

I define a thought as mental activity that carries physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual meaning to the individual having the thought.

This can be an idea or impulse that pops into your head, this can be the language you use to describe the idea, or it can be a mental image. It can also be the subconscious processes of your brain that run in the background – like breathing and blinking. 

You might be like – wait – if it’s subconscious, it’s not a thought. Let’s take a look at breathing – one of our subconscious processes that we can actually call back to the conscious mind. Most of the time you’re not thinking about breathing. But think about it, at any moment you can take control and breathe in a deliberate manner – like when you’re trying to calm yourself down or catch your breath. Otherwise, your brain delegates this task to the subconscious mind so you can use your conscious brainpower on other tasks. But it’s still a thought.

Feelings

I define a feeling as a physical sensation or vibration in the body.

Feelings are the direct result of our thoughts, or mental activity, about something. I see them as tools that give us indications of what our thoughts are (so we can do something about it – or not!). How our brains interpret sensory input – whether it be physical, verbal, visual, or otherwise – ultimately determines how we experience that mental activity as vibrations in our bodies. 

Let’s stop here for a second. For some of you, this might make total sense. For others, you may have already decided that I’m nuts. Let’s do a quick example.

Examples

Like stubbing your toe. When you stub your toe, the nerves in your toe send a message to your brain letting it know that your toe just came in contact with something solid. Your brain processes that input (mental activity) and interprets it as pain. That’s one kind of feeling.

Then there are the more complex cognitive-based feelings. What if what you stubbed your toe on was a snow globe and it broke all over the floor. If you like snow globes and that was your favorite snow globe, you may think, “[Expletive of choice]! That’s my favorite snow globe and now it’s broken!” This will cause you additional pain – again, felt as a sensation in the body.

On the other hand, if you could care less about snow globes, or better yet, it was your partner’s snow globe that you’d been secretly trying to trash for years, this may be a moment of great joy for you. Your thought may be something like, “Finally!”

In either case, your feeling was based on your thoughts about the snow globe breaking.

Our Programming

As humans, we’re pre-programmed with a lot of great life-saving and gene-perpetuating instincts from our ancestors. For more details, check out Brain Basics. We’re also programmed with a lot of great (and not so great) thoughts from the world around us (for more on that, check out Freedom of Thought). This programming materializes as thoughts and feelings.

Ever driven to work and not remembered a single part of your drive? That’s because you’ve driven that route so many times, you don’t need to consciously think about it anymore.

When we go on auto-pilot, we’re allowing our current programming to run the show – from past or pre-programmed thoughts. This can work out great. But what about when it doesn’t… Consider this scenario. You get to work and a coworker wrongly accuses you of stealing something. Indignant anger boils up and the initial automatic reaction may be to go on the defensive.

At this moment in time, we have a choice. We have an opportunity to intercept that thought-feeling reaction and choose a new thought. 

This, I believe, is where consciousness really changes the game.

Consciousness and the Mind

More definitions for you! 

Consciousness is the state of being aware. It’s not the same thing as your mind. Related, but not the same.

The mind is what makes up the collective processes that think, perceive, interpret, reason, will, and judge our material world.

Consciousness is the awareness of those processes. They’re different, really. 

I like the example of thought awareness. Let’s go back to the infuriating coworker. Maybe your impulsive reaction was to say, “No, you’re wrong!” In the split second before that sentence leaves your mouth, you get to ask yourself, Is this the response I want to have in this situation? You have suddenly become aware, or conscious, of your thoughts.

This is where quantum mechanics enters the game. Quantum mechanics offers insight into what that consciousness is and how it interacts with the world around us. Like Star Wars and the force. But real life.

Quantum Mechanics, In Short

So, what is quantum mechanics? It sounds intimidating, but don’t worry, it’s not. And if you think you’re not a “technical person” (whatever that means), you don’t have to be. I’m passionate about – and getting better at! – making science relevant to our everyday lives. All you need is a little imagination and an open mind.

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.

Albert Einstein

The word “quantum” is latin and means “amount.” The idea behind quantum mechanics is that matter and energy behave as both a particle and a wave. 

Alright, there are a few technical terms in there. Let’s make them mean something.

Matter and Energy

Matter is the stuff that physical objects are made of.

Your body and brain are made of matter. Most of us can agree on that.

Energy is the capacity to do work, or move against a force.

There are many types of forces; gravity is one. To walk up a hill, you need energy to move against the force of gravity. Your mind and thoughts are also made of energy. Cells in your brain use glucose, a sugar the body gets from food, to produce your thoughts. Your brain actually consumes about 20% of your body’s total energy.

There’s a law in physics that says that energy can’t be destroyed or created, it can only be transformed. Let’s follow the energy trail – food energy transforms to glucose energy, which transforms to thought energy, which goes out into the world as, you got it, energy! Pretty cool, right! (maybe it’s just me…)

One more fun thing. You’ve probably heard about Albert Einstein’s famous equation, E (energy) equals m (mass) c (speed of light) squared. This is so famous and important because it shows how energy and mass are interchangeable; that they’re different forms of the same thing.

Guys, this is big. Like, atomic bomb big (nerd joke). Moving on…

Particles and Waves

The next big breakthrough in physics was to tie in particles and waves to the matter-energy mess.

A particle is a tiny piece of matter. Think really tiny – subatomic tiny. Like an electron.

Waves are a little trickier.

A wave is a disturbance that travels through a medium (like air or water) from one place to another. 

Think of a flat pond. When you throw a stone into the pond, it creates a disturbance, which travels from the place where your stone hit the water outwards as ripples. The water, or matter, isn’t moving away from where the stone hit. The water’s moving up and down in place as the energy of the stone hitting the water travels outward and away from the impact site. It’s the energy that’s traveling as a wave, not the matter.  

Ever heard of brain waves? Your brain produces an electric field that can be measured by modern instruments. Thoughts are created in this electric field.

But we normally think of waves and particles as separate and different. The bold breakthrough of quantum mechanics is that all matter and energy are both a particle and a wave. 

What?

Let’s pick another example, light. When you see a rainbow, that’s light acting like a wave – it splits into its various colors. Each color is a different wave. But light is also made up of particles, or photons. Photons are tiny pieces of light. The more photons, the brighter the light. Think of that same rainbow. Now take a picture of it with your phone. Your camera’s phone uses the photons from the rainbow, or brightness, to convert the light from the rainbow into a digital picture.

The light has both wave properties and particle properties. Another discovery of Einstein.

So What?

I always like a “so what” section. Anyone can spew a lot of information; the hard part is making it mean something that we actually care about.

Since your thoughts are energy, they are subject to the same profound findings of quantum mechanics as any other energy, like light. But what separates you from a photon is your consciousness. Your awareness. Your ability to choose from the randomness. What is a random range of probabilities for the photon becomes a conscious choice for the human. And it’s all connected.

Let’s go back to 2015. 

This was a breakthrough year for me. The best words I can find to describe it is it felt like I woke up. Woke up from a dream where I was living the life I “should” opposed to the life I “could.” Should, defined by others’ expectations that I adopted as my own. Could, defined by my wildest imagination (it gets pretty wild up there). 

I started changing my thoughts and watched the world change around me.

Classical physics, founded on material realism, says no way, you can’t create your reality. In fact, your imagination is just a product of your brain, predetermined by the conditions of the big bang. For a whole article on this, check out the Five Flaws of Classical Physics. 

This means no imagination, no creativity, no free will, no altering the course of your life by choosing a different thought. It’s all predetermined. By a tiny dense ball that exploded billions of years ago.

Quantum mechanics offers a different story. A story filled with opportunity, choice, and creation. A world where each moment is creative and new and determined by our awareness of it. It’s crazy. It’s cool. Yes, it can be hard to wrap your head around. But it’s exciting. And it’s game-changing. And it’s real. There are real scientific experiments that back up the theory.

I no longer see science as absolute truth. I see it as another tool to finding the truth. Science gives us better insight into the world around us. It’s another way to refine our understanding and use that new understanding to create a better world. 

This is my work here on this planet.

To take the ancient wisdom from the world’s spiritual teachers and more clearly understand it through modern science – so that we can live our truth and create with intention. This is my passion. This is where we’re going. I would love for you to join me.