Welcome back, you wonderful people who matter so very, very much.
I don't know if you ever wondered how I settled on saying welcome back, you wonderful people
who matter so very, very much.
Well, I said it as my last words, and it could help video once.
And it struck me as something that I wanted to remind you of.
Every single time I greet you wonderful people who matter so very, very much.
So it migrated over.
And I'm glad it did.
And the welcome back part is because I'm just over the moon that you picked up my book slash
the podcast and decided to come back for more.
I'm giddy thrilled.
There aren't words for working on something this important for this long.
And to finally see it going out and reaching others to be able to facilitate that.
There are not words.
But I can say that you are very, very dear to me.
And thank you.
Chapter eight, y'all, you made it through.
Feel free to take all the time you need to digest that.
If you need to step away from the podcast for a while, just make sure that you come
back because there are some really important things still coming.
And then the big answer.
Oh, and by the way, there's only 11 chapters in this book, and it's about to get even
more mind blowing.
So without further ado, Chapter nine, not allowed.
Today we're going to begin with the rods and the cones.
These are the photoreceptors of the eye, and they're primarily split into two groups, the
rods of which there's only one type and the cones of which there's three types.
And each group capture a different wavelength.
By far, the cones outnumber the rods.
Cones capture light wavelengths that are within the range of the visible spectrum.
In fact, these receptors are the benchmarks by which bookends of the visible light spectrum
were set.
AKA, if we can't see it, it's not on the visible light spectrum.
So the cones are L cones, which see the color red, which is 64% of the visible light spectrum
and the longest wavelengths.
M cones, which see green, 32%, and S cones, which see blue, 2 to 7% and the shortest wavelengths.
And on the outer edge of this cluster of cones are the rods.
Now they're responsible for peripheral vision, the corner of your eye.
Now these rods pick up a wavelength just below the visible light spectrum by only about 40
nanometers infrared light.
Infrared light doesn't appear as a color and the rods are effectively blind to bright
daylight.
And because there's so much fewer rods than there are cones and because visible light
is so much brighter and more varied and more energetic, the visual cortex is typically
lit up with the input from the cones, which drowns out the input of the rods.
With one major exception, when it gets pitch black out, you know how you can still kind
of see?
Once your eyes adjust to the light, AKA your visual cortex quietens down, you can still
sort of make out objects and obstacles, but notice how they aren't any particular color.
Because the visual cortex is quiet, you're able to see what your rods are picking up.
Much like only being able to see the smudges on your cell phone screen when the screen's
turned off.
At that point, you're seeing almost exclusively with your rods and viewing a part of the spectrum
as clearly as you'll ever see it.
So why do I bring this up?
Well, most people have experienced a weird phenomenon casually referred to seeing something
out of the corner of their eye.
It's typically blobby, out of focus, and it lacks color.
And when that happens, what does it we do to confirm or refute the existence of whatever
it was we saw?
We look directly at the spot where it was, absolutely flooding our visual cortex with
the information from the visible light we are capturing, and then immediately shoving
our visual cortex into processing what we're looking directly at with the attention and
priority level of what in the hell was that?
If there is something there that only the rods are capable of seeing, we definitely
aren't going to see it now.
Most of our information that we gather is through capturing visible light.
It is easily our primary source of information intake about the world around us.
Yes, the other senses are very important, but for those who have the ability to see,
we have tied an enormous amount of our trust in what we see with our own two eyes.
Hence the phrase, I'll believe it when I see it with my own two eyes.
Now, I understand that line of thinking, but we see less than 10 billionth of what is going
on and seeing is believing is somehow a belief held by an alarming number of people.
I believe this to be a major factor of why so few physicists are atheist, because they
have a much better understanding than most of how little we're able to detect.
There are so many of us out there that walk around on the shoulders of this science and
physics community acting like we've gotten at least most of this all figured out and
no, not really at all.
We know what we know and we've figured out some of what we can detect, but even then,
there's a vast drop off.
Far past the line of subatomic particles, our logic starts coming apart in ways that
we have no frame of reference for.
As Richard Feynman so simply put it, if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you
don't understand quantum mechanics.
He also notably stated, there's no shame in not knowing things.
The only shame is to pretend that we know everything.
Okay, so there's this one really fascinating section of physics that professors seem to
universally look forward to lecturing about.
The Copenhagen Interpretation.
Now I'll give a simplified summary to save myself having to add in another few chapters
because that is a topic that I can happily speak on at great length.
So though the journey begins a bit earlier with Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, and Werner
Heisenberg, we'll begin at the double slit experiment.
Now the purpose of the double slit experiment was to basically determine once and for all
the correct side of an argument that was raging in the world of physics.
There's a very heated debate centered on the behavior of photons of light.
Did they act as particles?
Or did they act as waves?
A photon emitter was placed at one end of a pitch black chamber with no other light
source, and then at the other end, a negative plate, much like photo film.
A photon of light hitting it would make a small mark on the plate.
In between these two ends, a parallel thin metal sheet was placed so that it blocked
the path of the photons, with the exception of two small slits that were cut out of it.
So if light acts as particles after running the experiment for a while, you would expect
to see two distinct groupings of individual little markings on the negative plate, right?
One for the left slit, and one for the ones that travel through the right slit.
Instead, what they saw was a pattern of interference, as if a wavelength of light had split into
two at the slits, and they had traveled side by side to the plate.
Instead, what they saw was a pattern of interference.
It was as if a wavelength of light had split into two at the slits, and they had traveled
side by side to the plate, creating interference.
Now that would make the experiment seem, at first, to support the wavelength theory, right?
But upon closer inspection of the plate, there were individual dots where the particles had
hit.
Somehow, these photons were simultaneously showing traits of acting as both a particle
and a wave.
It wasn't a case of, sometimes it does this and sometimes it does that.
Sometimes it's both.
So then they tried the process with a detector, so that they could see in real time what was
actually occurring in the chamber.
But whenever they observed the experiment in this way, the photons of light would simply
go through one slit or another, forming two distinct blobs.
Now there were some very interesting ideas bandied about on why this was happening and
why it would act differently when observed, but eventually the Copenhagen interpretation
was proposed by Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein.
This quickly became one of the most taught theories in physics.
Now there was no way for them to know this at the time, but they had just proposed one
of physicists' favorite things to teach.
The theory was that the particle of light, unobserved, existed in both of the states
that it could have possibly existed, until it was observed.
It could have gone left, it could have gone right.
You see, this interference pattern could occur on the plate if there were two photon particles
of light traveling side by side.
It would produce the same interference pattern and the same individual dots on the negative
plate.
Now an Australian physicist named Erwin Schrödinger took some real issues with this interpretation.
He took so much issue with this that he developed a thought experiment that would become famous,
known to most as Schrödinger's cat.
He did this to illustrate just how wrong their interpretation had been.
Again this is an oversimplification and it's leaving out a lot that isn't strictly required
for this discussion so that a wider audience might understand what I'm talking about here,
so forgive me that.
But Schrödinger's cat experiment was essentially having a cat in a non-see-through box with
a random chance of an airborne poison being released inside the box, killing the cat.
He rigged it up with a perfect 50-50 chance scenario.
He proposed that if the scientist had no way of knowing if the poison was released or not,
and if the Copenhagen interpretation is accurate, then it stands to reason that until the box
is opened and the scene within it is observed, the cat would be simultaneously alive and
dead, a dual state of both at the same time.
Erwin brought this up and pointed out as evidence that this clearly cannot be the case.
That was 1935, what Schrödinger had unwittingly done was give the physics community a very
simple way of communicating the concept of superposition.
The current theory in modern physics is that all things exist in all possible states until
measured or observed.
This means that until someone pays specific attention to something, that something exists
in all the possible ways it could exist in.
So just a pro tip here, this is much easier to wrap your head around if you try to remember
that all forms of matter are just energy in a different state.
One of the coolest aspects, in my opinion, is that in each of these positions that it's
possible for it to exist in, the amount of energy that something has is the same as the
percentage of probability or likelihood of existing in that particular position.
So 5% chance that it's over here, 5% of it is over here.
I know this can be confusing, so picture a leather bag that has 10 marbles in it.
This bag has a long neck, and it's a drawstring pouch, and inside there are 9 green marbles
and 1 blue marble.
The bag's neck makes it impossible to peer in and see which marbles are which.
So let's say that I asked you to reach in and pull out 5 marbles, but don't open your
hand.
Let's also assume that you're holding the bag by its bottom, in your other hand, so
that between both of your hands you can feel the exact positions of all 10 marbles.
So within this setup, we now have 10 positions locked in place.
We know exactly where all 10 of these marbles are, but we don't know which marble is which.
Now let's discuss wave function collapse.
This occurs when the state of something is observed.
While your hand is open, the blue marble has 10% of its energy in each known marble position.
The other 90% of each marble is the other 9 marbles.
Imagine that you open your hand and you look.
By whatever factors that made it more likely to be in the bag, there are only green marbles
in your hand.
In an instant, wave function collapse occurs and all 5 of those marbles' quantum super
positions snap into one single position for each, their scattered energy rushing into
a single position instantaneously.
And in that same instant, 50% of one blue marble's energy rushed into the bag, distributing
itself amongst the other 5 remaining unknown marble positions, making each marble still
in the bag 20% blue marble.
The point is that once a marble is observed, all the possible positions it could have been
in and technically was in, collapse into one singular position where the marble definitively
is.
Most believe that all of the other positions' energies rush into the position with the highest
probability slash most energy.
I know, this sounds hinky, it sounds wonky and implausible.
It pushes the boundaries of what makes sense and for first timers to the world of modern
physics, it seems completely unreal.
However, this is the prevailing theory today.
The math adds up.
And most physicists would tell you that this is just a drop in the bucket to our bizarre
reality.
There is a point that past it, logic just seems to fall apart.
A place that I lovingly refer to as the subatomic shoreline, where that logic gets dashed against
the rocks of reality.
Particles for the most part are one of two types.
You have composite particles, atoms, hadrons and molecules, meaning they are composed of
smaller subatomic particles, and you have elementary particles like leptons, quarks
and bosons, meaning that we can't determine if they are made up of subatomic particles
or not.
And for the physicists and scientists in the crowd, here's a little joke that I wrote
years and years ago that I doubt anybody but you will get.
What is the atomic weight of a lepton found in ice cream?
Depends on the flavor.
Trust me, if you tell that to a physicist that knows they are subatomic particles, they
are going to laugh.
So anyways, it's around the subatomic level that we see serious mind-bending craziness.
Einstein's own spooky action at a distance theory, for example, was discovered in the
behavior of subatomic particles.
When two particles are created in the same instant and point in space, they become what
we refer to as quantumly entangled.
This means that they've become connected in a way that seems to have no regard for distance.
For instance, if you have two quantumly entangled particles that are taken to opposite sides
of your city or your country or your planet and you change the polarity of one of those
particles, instantaneously the polarity of the other particle would flip.
Doesn't matter how far away.
It could theoretically be across the galaxy or the universe.
There's so much about elementary particles that not only do we not understand, but that
seem to fly in the face of and break the laws that govern everything else.
Some particles seem to exist in two places simultaneously.
And the theory that the Higgs boson particles have the ability to reverse their own position
in time to prevent being discovered has actually gained a surprising amount of traction amongst
the physics community, particularly among the physicists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider.
Particles are constantly passing through us and cannot physically be contained, lest they
form a superfluid, forcing their way out of the container no matter what the container's
strength or density.
It's even been theorized that there's only one electron in our universe that travels
backwards and forwards in time, eventually holding the position of every single electron
in existence.
David Lindley, an accomplished physicist, author, and a man who spent much of his career
pondering the very fringes of human understanding said,
The bottom line is this.
The quantum world just doesn't work the way that the world around us works.
We don't really have the concepts to deal with it.
My point in bringing up the subatomic shoreline is that there seems to be a very steep drop
off past that line.
And we can reach out, like we always do, extending ourselves with our cleverness and mathematics
and hypothesize what's going on beyond it.
But we can only detect so much, and we only have frame of reference for so much.
The human mind, amazing as it is, is limited.
And the further out that reach and our understanding goes, the less solid of a grasp a person can
have on each of the rungs that they climb to reach that point.
We have a limited lifespan, and every single thing that's learned takes time to learn and
understand.
Every single connection mentally made takes time and attention.
And one can only learn so much.
And quite a lot of the human race really isn't that interested in reaching out over that
line enough to learn everything that's needed to be learned in order to extend said reach
further.
Now bring up one more study before I finally cut to the chase here.
In 2013, I reached out to a large group of people and asked them to submit to me a detailed
account of a very specific phenomenon that I myself had personally experienced, one that
several people I had known in my life had experienced.
The experience in question for me was a powerful and moving moment, and due to hearing my little
brother explain his own encounter with it, I had come to believe that a pattern was emerging,
one that I had seen elsewhere.
My own personal experience had been, when I was 16 years old, my father died rather
suddenly.
I would love to spend the next 20 to 80 pages gushing over the kind and brilliant person
my father spent his life being, but we need to keep moving.
His death devastated me completely.
It came suddenly, and I still have a hard time thinking about that moment and just how
much we lost in our family and how it was suddenly gone.
nominee snake once wrote that losing someone you love unexpectedly is like climbing stairs
in the dark and thinking that there's one more step, only there isn't.
That sickening moment that your entire world gets completely turned upside down and you
lose your orientation and your certainty, only not just for a moment, stretched out
over months and months.
One week after the aneurysm took him, I had a dream.
I had just exited the previous dream and found myself in a white room.
My family all stood side by side in a line in front of me, left to right.
My little sister, my three younger brothers, my mother, and my dad.
They all stood there, not moving a muscle, looking off at some distant point behind me
like they were on display.
I looked at my father again.
I felt it creeping up to my throat.
In a dream, I'm not great at actively pulling knowledge from my awake life, but even in
a dream, I knew that he wasn't supposed to be there.
I wasn't supposed to be able to see him anymore.
I didn't understand in the dream that he had died.
I only knew that I was in a great deal of pain over not being able to see him anymore.
As it overtook my throat and the pressure pushed the tears forth, I saw his face soften
and his eyes turned to me.
You know when you start to cry in that dream and you can feel your awake self starting
to cry.
He had that expression one would wear if they wanted to surprise someone they love and then
that person unexpectedly starts sobbing uncontrollably.
He shed the statue-like facade and rushed in and picked me up and hugged me.
I remember him squeezing me so tightly and me hugging him fiercely and just being buried
in that smell that was so distinctly him, being surrounded by his warmth and the slightly
muffled and rumbly sound of his voice trying to soothe me.
Hey, no, no, no, no, no, no.
I know that he said something to me right before the dream ended, but I was so far gone
down the freefall of fresh grief sobbing I couldn't be sure of what it was.
I have since become convinced that he had offered the same goodbye slash advice that
he would when my siblings and I left for school in the mornings.
Alright boys, be sweet.
The fatal moment to any dream when there's nothing you can do to hold onto the dream
and you slide against your will back to the waking world.
I clutched my pillow, practically trying to squeeze my way back into the dream through
it, sobbing loudly and feeling the pressure of his arms and his chest disappearing.
I sobbed for a few minutes straight, once again dealing with relearning that he wasn't
by some miraculous stroke of luck here again, but had died and was still gone and that wasn't
something that was ever going to change.
But in the middle of my heaving sobs, I sucked in a deep breath and stopped.
My pillow smelled exactly like my father's flannel shirt.
I had just had my face buried in moments before.
He, like most of us, had a very distinctive scent.
There's an aspect of a visit dream that no one can convey to someone who's never had
one.
There's something about that visitor, something that you can feel.
They feel like the person themselves and not some generated version of themselves in the
dream.
Something deep within you recognizes that it is actually them.
In 2013, I collected the written descriptions of close to 50 submitters' visit dreams to
check for a pattern that had begun to emerge after hearing about my brother's visit dream
from his best friend shortly after he had been murdered.
In the dream, they had been hanging out at our family home and then headed over to a
fort slash hangout that they had built together, one of many.
Clayton had come to realize that Frank was dead, but refused to show it and played it
casual.
They got to the fort and hung out a bit longer, laughing and reminiscing and just being in
each other's company.
After a time, Clayton looked up and said,
Frank, how is it where you are?
Frank just smiled at the question.
I'm good.
With that, the dream left Clayton awake.
Clayton confided in me about this while we stood outside the building at Frank's funeral,
talking and sharing a smoke.
Once I looked over the many stories I'd been sent, the pattern became evident.
You see, once the dreamer lets on that they know the departed loved one is gone, or lets
on that they are not supposed to be able to be in their company again, a very interesting
thing seems to happen.
There are precious few seconds left after that moment, and then you begin to wait.
Sometimes the dreamer asks them a question, or the departed says something to the dreamer,
but in all 48 cases I read, not one of the question askers got a definitive answer, and
the dreams ended directly after that.
I'm okay, it's okay, was one of them.
Often they just smile, or tell you they love you, or hug you extra tight, and then the
dream is done.
They don't seem to be allowed to tell us anything definitive, no answers that tell us if there
is or isn't an afterlife.
No, the good news is, yes, there is a heaven and we play baseball all the time.
The bad news is, you're scheduled to pitch next week.
No answers that tell us if there is or isn't an afterlife.
Only sweet, if sometimes cryptic, communications of love or peace.
With the subatomic shoreline, the tiny range of human detection, the rods and cones and
rules of the visitor's dreams, we finally arrive at the point of this chapter.
I'm pretty sure that we are not allowed to prove or know with any degree of certainty
that there is a god and that there is an afterlife.
It seems to be a very important rule in the design of our universe that we don't get
to know for certain.
We are not allowed to know for good reason.
From what I've seen, it is important that we choose to care about each other, to be
kind to each other as a decision, and that we make those choices without ever being given
a definitive proof of that creative force.
There are so many people out there that only really pursue being kind to one another because
their religious text says that if they're kind to others, they'll get riches in heaven,
and that if they're bad to others, they'll burn in hell.
Hopefully have been able to offer a better understanding of the logical side of why we
should be kind to each other.
Not because you'll get treasures, but because you have brought yourself to love these other
people.
The treasure should be considered as the reward for doing the right thing, not the motivation.
The design of our very existence seems to have a focus on two primary targets.
We're supposed to love each other, and be good to each other, and care about each other.
And the other is to find your faith.
After all, by the core definition of the phrase, it's not a leap of faith if you can see where
you're going to land.
So we find ourselves stuck in a point that steadily progresses through time, with only
our predictions to guide the way.
This is so terrifying that it literally is every single form of fear that you've ever
felt just in different flavors.
And there is only one thing that seems to deflate the core fear of the unknown.
It's faith.
Being stuck in our own current state and time, we can't see the whole picture of what might
happen and what that might lead to.
However, a creator would exist outside of those rules and constraints that it created.
It would view time like a sculpture that's ever shifting with probable outcomes and probable
choices.
Not only that, but that sculpture is literally made of God, so it knows every molecule, photon,
and wavelength in the universe.
We are blind pilots, and we have the option of trusting the voice on the other end of
the headset.
The one that knows every single possible path that can be taken safely, and how happy each
destination will make us in the future.
Sure, God's guidance isn't always as simple as a voice on the other end of the radio giving
us answers and directions right after we ask the questions.
We are so fixated in our position and time that it conditions us to expect results right
away.
Even the wisest of the human race sometimes get frustrated with this and just wish whatever
it is that they were waiting for would hurry it up already.
But God does things in the time in which they are best to happen, and not every time is
right now.
In the meanwhile, faith.
Faith that God will do what is necessary when it is best to do so.
This means trusting God, which is a critical component to the joy and peace that I felt
in so much abundance during my journey.
A lot of the time though, you won't get that confirmation.
When most refer to making leaps of faith, they're talking about the big jumps, but it
doesn't mean that there aren't small jumps as well.
I get confirmation when I actually need confirmation.
And more and more often, I find that I don't need confirmation to figure out if it's the
right thing to do or not.
Potential good when you're not afraid to do it.
Pretty easy to spot.
And there will be some unpleasant things that you'll need to wade through in this life.
And sometimes you have to survive through it and emerge on the other side in order for
something truly wonderful to happen.
And often those truly wonderful things happen for someone else.
Sometimes you may be a big part in helping someone else's prayer or need or reward.
Not every story being told is about you after all.
But no matter what may happen, those that keep faith and care about and do for others
will wind up exactly where it is best for them to be in this life.
Where in others' lives it is best for them to be as well.
Complete faith defeats all fear completely.
It's the only effective anecdote that I've ever found.
I think the struggle of loving and trusting God and man, and the struggle of coming to
faith in a God you cannot prove, are two of the most important struggles of human existence.
So much so that our reality has been carefully constructed to support the struggle for and
against both.
And that is it for me today.
Thank you for coming to the reading.
We touched on the Copenhagen Interpretation Day, which I want to stress to those of you
that don't know.
This is physics' most generally accepted theory on how things behave when unobserved and then
observed, and I want to take a second to connect the first string before we launch into the
episode in which we connect all of this together.
That's right.
That is the next episode.
The Copenhagen Interpretation, the understanding that all things exist in all possible positions
and states until observed, is extremely supportive of the idea that A. God aids us through the
skin of the world, and B. It gives a very interesting method that God might corral the
many optional paths they design that we choose our way through toward things that need to
happen.
Think about it.
If all things that are unobserved fluctuate how they wind up once wave function collapse
occurs, it gives an incredible amount of leeway for God to steer events through manipulation
of chance, which, as we just covered, allows there to always be plausible deniability when
it comes to proving God as fact.
It makes it so that God can still intervene, assist, and protect without ever risking being
definitively provable.
So have faith, you can't ever know for certain, but you can choose to believe it, and let
go of the fear that follows the uncertainty, especially the fear that precedes loving openly
and caring about the rest of them.
He's got you covered.
Choose to believe.
Choose to be good to them.
To be good for them.
And you're gonna be great.
Be sweet.
Bye everybody.
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