The great philosophers of all times have always contemplated about life. Some believed that everything in life is predefined; everything happens for a reason. Yet some made us believe that it’s entirely in our making, what we do with our life. My take is : life is neither. In fact, it’s constantly oscillating between the two.
“It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.”
~ William Shakespeare“I trust that everything happens for a reason, even if we are not wise enough to see it.”
~ Oprah Winfrey
As a human, I’ve always wondered how I perceive the world just through my senses. Of course there is a limit to them. My senses can not witness the world as a whole, the world beyond our planet, nor the world at a microscopic level. We are just limited to the simple world with simple Newtonian laws. If you dig deeper then you would find that the physical laws that govern our existence, are in fact, not the ones that we can witness on a day to day life. For instance, if a bus hits me, I will instantly get the tangible results. I can actually see the direct result of the momentum of the running bus transferring to my body, as it causes severe damage to my body. But have we ever witnessed something like the dual nature of light at this fundamental level? Have we ever witnessed Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in action? Answer’s no. Not unless we conduct very intensive experiments to prove the same. So, it would be very wrong to say that quantum theories don’t apply at the world at our scale. May be we are just not able to witness it yet, let alone comprehending it.
Significance of Light
Coming back to life, what is the most fundamental factor for the existence of life on our planet?
It’s not air, not water, but sunlight. Yes, light is the fundamental source of our existence. Other factors just support the life. It is a known fact that if there was no sun, there were no life on Earth. All the organisms in the planet are consuming the sunlight either directly or indirectly. So, to understand life, we need to understand its source : light. So, I wouldn’t be wrong in saying that studying the properties of light, will help me understand the properties of life better. By life’s properties, I mean things like : what we do, why we do, how we react and everything else. Everything can actually be governed by the same laws that applies for light to exist. So, the more we understand light, the more we understand life.
The Choice Factor
Now, if we try to understand light, it really doesn’t make sense until it does. Light is thought to consist of tiny bits of energy that behave like particles called photons, which explains how light travels in straight lines. At the same time, light is also an electromagnetic wave. EM energy travels in waves. It must be sounding crazy but both these states co-exist. And that’s the reason light exists. In a similar manner, we have to understand that our lives also exist in two self contradictory states. We can change states depending on the medium that we put it through. A part of our life is pretty straight, we can’t change that, like photons. We couldn’t have controlled when and where we were born. We can’t control our genes, how we look. But the other part is oscillating. This part, the wave part, gives us the luxury of consent. We can control how we think. We can modulate the frequency, we can modulate the amplitude. Depending on that, the impact we can have on a situations can vary drastically. Every passing second in our life we have this choice: What we do with all that we have in this very moment?
“Choices are the hinges of destiny.”
- Edwin Markham
Can you directly see light? Yes and No.
No, because what we can really see is not light itself but either the source of light or materials that reflect it. A black snake slithering in a field absorbs all the light, while the white sand in a beach reflects it all. So, we observe things as black, white or whatever color we perceive. Yes, because for an average human, over 90% of the world he perceives comes from what he sees. What we see is just an image our brain creates using the light reflected from an object. Without light, the perception of our current world would be a lot different. Similarly, can we see life at the fundamental level : like an energy? We just detect life through its properties. By most estimates, it can be found out that of the entire EM spectrum, the visible spectrum (light) is lesser than an drop in the ocean. That tells us the fact that there exists an infinite universe that we, humans, can’t detect. Exactly the same way, we only sense a infinitesimally small part of the universe as life. There must be things beyond that. Lives that we can’t understand. There can be an infinite versions of you and me, and at the same time no version of us at all. What we are experiencing here in this reality might just be a small speck of the world that actually exists. Or may be that part is not even real, considering the vastness of possible realities. If it’s just a relative perception. What we perceive is just the reflected, refracted or polarized part of life.
Life as an Energy
Fundamentally, anything in the world that exists, exists in a form of energy only. There is no other way. When we call something as matter, when broken down to the smallest level is nothing but energy oscillating at a certain frequency. We are no exceptions. We all have our own set of numbers. A certain amount of energy vibrating at a certain frequency. Of course, this keeps on changing dynamically. So, even when we don’t see it, our lives are fundamentally governed by the same rules by which the sun, the moon, an atom, and a subatomic particle exist. We are just a medium for life to flourish. Our states continually changing. We start small, gradually gain more energy, reach a resonant optimum frequency, then we start decaying. And when decay is at its best, we call it as death. But death is not the end of us, just a transition. We transition from one form of energy to another. Constant electrical energy in our nervous system to chemical energy when the body starts decomposing. The dead are considered dead because they don’t abide by the properties of life defined by the living. We can’t know for sure if there isn’t a state of consciousness after death itself. Exactly the same way a photograph is created inside a darkroom. Simply a photo-chemical reaction. Light gets printed on a paper and stays there forever. Isn’t the case same with us? People come and go, but their memories stay here forever. Their energy remain within us, in the forms of memories, stories, values. And when we remember them, that’s them reliving in us again.
That’s the beauty of life. That’s the dual nature. And who knows what all it has that we are yet to discover.
