November 26, 2014
By Mandolin Dutkiewicz
Theosophy is a Greek-derived word literally meaning “God’s wisdom”. This study concerns itself with the nature of godhood and humanity. How humanity came about and where it is to go has been the subject of civil discussion and damning bloodshed that might even be all for nought if the universe functions in the way quantum mechanics describes it.
Quantum mechanics is the study of the functions of atomic and subatomic systems that have different frames of movement, reaction, or action itself when observed and unobserved. Within the span of a quantum experiment, there is no need for there to be a human observer in order to provide accuracy of hypothesis. Frankly, having a conscious observer changes the outcome of the experiment overall. To elaborate: the method of observing, cataloguing, or measuring of the experiment alters the final product because of the invasiveness of the measurement process itself. Once a “state” of an unstable quantum system is known, one could theoretically keep watching the system forever without decay—but the moment the system goes unwatched, it, shall we say, “should or should not break apart.” The degree to which one observes their experiment can change the degree to which it can decay, either more rapidly, or slowing down the decay until an almost reset on that “death clock”: the expedition of decay being named the Anti-Zeno Effect.
Zeno of Elea—from Greece around 490-430 BCE, and from whence derives the name for the Quantum Zeno Effect—came up with a paradox, the Arrow Paradox, that can be used to illustrate the Anti-Zeno Effect. In the paradox, I have an arrow, which has been shot into the air. According to Zeno, in any timelessness of a moment, this arrow is not transitioning from where it currently is to where it is not. Keep in mind that this arrow is in a state lacking time duration, so no time exists in which it could travel. At the same time it cannot move to where it is—for it already occupies that space. Zeno finalized his paradox with this notion: if everything at each individual timeless moment has no motion, and passage of time is measured in these instances, no motion can occur. His paradox bestows the idea of plurality for our situation when it comes to quantum mechanics. It’s almost like the famed example of Schrödinger’s cat, but the event can happen whether we observe the situation or not.
Theosophy is the “godly knowledge” of the world, an esoteric way of understanding the relationship between humanity and divinity. The Judaic Kabbalah is an example of Theosophy which can be used to transition smoothly into what Theosophy is and explain it to the layman. The Kabbalah is a scientific understanding of the Bible, humanity, and divinity. It’s a sort of mathematics of the “other world” besides our physically manifested one. This mathematics is not so much a solely numeric one as a holistic conceptual framework in which one observes the sefirot (sacred spheres said to comprise reality)—and it’s not an orthodox mathematical system in terms of random or unknown variables. It’s a systematic step-by-step construction or deconstruction of existence and divinity. If one reaches a bit into the more westernized Kabbalistic (Qabalistic) tradition that came to fuse during the Renaissance with Hermeticism, one can delve into Thaumaturgy or “miracle working”—which takes the form of working to have an effect on the divine world in order to produce a physical result in our world.
Theosophy can come in the form of divine intervention or messages from God(s) in order to influence the physical or metaphysical domain. The sefirot are crucial to this process, and are key to the manipulation of seen and unseen worlds.
The connection between Theosophy and the Quantum Zeno Effect is the consciousness that surrounds both ideas and the similarity in how both are acted upon (or not acted upon) by either divinity or humanity in some shape or form. With Zeno’s Arrow Paradox the arrow is not moving at any time except during the transition of instances, which elicits the question of whether or not humanity causes the movement by observation or is it divine plurality? Could it be that there is a consciousness behind the decay rate? Schrödinger’s cat would be damned and damned not to know whether he may live or die, but that seems to mirror the mystery of the nature of divinity.
How God(s) work(s) may be something that we can scrape around to understand through quantum mechanics—or vice versa. Or maybe not! Maybe we as humans feed into the idea of the all-abiding parental figure that explains to us how reality works when we cannot understand what we wish to as children, or at best, a still-young species. Quantum Zeno Effect is just one of a slew of understandings of the unseen and seen universe along with a more ancient system like Theosophy. Depending on where you stand, both may or not be occult-like when juxtaposed against the modern beliefs of today. One really does not know until one delves deeper into any formidable subject as these two seemingly minor aspects of humanity.
Ten Sephirot photo copyright © 2011 by Roy Lindman [public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
댓글