Sunday, January 01, 2006

What The Bleep Do We Know

http://www.whatthebleep.com/synopsis

My favorite movie has now become a book! (Ain't THAT a Twist)

Here is a short excerpt that I hope will motivate you to run out and experience either the book or the movie:

Back to the laboratory!

Having not come up with the answer to "What is reality?"-
which turned out to be way too big a question-humanity turned to the lab and tackled a simpler aspect: Take all the "stuff" around us, which we all pretty well agree is "real", and see what that's made of. That's much simpler than dreams or ideas or emotions or any of that inner stuff.

It was the Greek philosopher Democritus of Abdera who first had the idea of an atom: "nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion." And that was a great place for us to start. So out came the electron microscopes and the atom smashers and cloud chambers, and we big people peered into the world of little things.

Now when you went to school, you probably were shown a model of an atom, with its solid nucleus and orbiting electrons, and you were probably told, "Atoms are the building blocks of nature." Nice Try! It's a neat concept and diagrams quite nicely, but it just ain't so.

It turned out that those solid little atoms, in their neat little orbits, were really just energy packets. Then it was discovered that they're not really energy packets either, but momentary condensations of a field of energy...Of course, as you know, every "atom" consists almost entirely of "empty space", so much so that its a kind of miracle that we don't hit the floor every time we try to sit down on a chair. And since the floor is also mostly empty, where would we find something solid enough to hold us? The kicker here is that "we" - at least our bodies - are made up of atoms too!

And now leading-edge research is suggesting that the so called "empty space" within and between atoms is not empty at all; it's so lively with energy that one cubic centimeter - about a thimbleful or an area the size of a marble - contains more energy than all the solid matter in the entire known universe!

So what did you say Reality was?

4 comments:

Justin Kreutzmann said...

My Dad and his wife Linda LOVE, LOVE this movie. Took me to see it twice. God knows how many times they went. I'll let 'em know it's a book now.

Kel-Bell said...

Sounds like the perfect gift.

There is also a meditation CD that goes with it called "I create my day."

Deffinatly a good way to beat the blues.

Cheryl said...

Will look out for the book!

Agnes said...

Terribly interesting! I think I will seek out the book.
I also recommend "The View From Eternity" by Vaughn Shelton - no longer in print but occasionally available on e-bay and worth the $6.50 it will probably cost.
And, for the meaning of life, one must read (read, do not watch) The Hitchiker's Guide to The Galaxy.
The meaning of life is clearly explained. ;)