Wave-Particle Duality

The promised land may be more than a geographic place. Perhaps land, earth and soil refer to the substance of our survival, the materiality of our world, the concrete condition of our existence. After all, we don’t think of a promised ocean. Of all promising things, land, earth, soil (and let’s add dust) hold the key to understanding the redemption of matter itself. If we consider the optimality of matter to be its (‘her’ in the gender mapping of kabbalistic discourse) consent to assume the form impressed upon it from its creator (or on the meta-level from the Creator at large), then this matter would submit to continual reprogramming. Yet, this is the old model. New feminisms together with new materialisms are arising and reconfiguring this relationship which we hope to demonstrate and shed light on from the perspective of Chassidic thought.

The accustomed arrangement mentioned above places the Creator/creator in a transcendent position whereby ‘He/he’ (again in a relative sense of masculine fertilization of a reproductive process–a role-play that can be carried out by both biological males and females in the figurative sense that the mystics employ it) comes at the material world from above or outside. This could be likened to the waters that surround the land giving it shape. The spermatic potential would be comparable to the waves of the sea whose congress with the land is captured vividly in the breaking of waves whose collapse transitions us onto dry land (particle nature).

Water shapes the earth. Wellsprings to raindrops, ground waters to pounding surf, the sculpting of land as metaphor for materiality resides in the receptive mode. The courtship between water (wave mechanics) and dry land (particles) may be one of particles arising out of collapsed waves just like the basic description of the ‘receding’ waters. The prime mover in the relationship would be the water whose ‘gift’ is received and celebrated by the dry land.

Linking back to the Tzemach Tzedek once more (Or HaTorah Bereishis Volume 7 p.1158 a-b), the natural order of things consists of the water influencing the dry land to produce growth. We need to irrigate our soil or the parched earth becomes desolate. If we are the earth, then our perception is one of God as the outside embrace, the external ring around our reality, acting upon us from the perceived exterior with the furnishing of a fuel injection so that we might live and grow.

Rethinking the possibilities of the earth has become one of the new horizons for philosophic and technological inquiry today. New materialisms include a sense of autopoiesis. However, the idea of thinking of oneself (or any created entity) as being self-made (like the expression ‘I’m a self-made man’ which is notably attributed in paraphrase to Pharaoh in Yechezkel/Ezekiel 29:3 “‘Mine is my river, and I have made myself’”) is highly problematic. In fact, it is the exact spiritual obstacle (kelipah in Kabbalah) that has to be rectified. The renegotiation of autopoiesis, whereby one avoids the pitfalls of Spinoza and others (perhaps Darwin could be included) who eliminated the transcendent dimension of Divinity all together by reducing everything to a question of immanence–to the self-forming of the natural world order–is front and center to the messianic turn in our comprehension of reality.

What if the earth could give birth all by itself? Properly recognized, the nature of nature and the substrate of all physical reality is but the immanent or indwelling face of Divinity called the Divine presence or Shekhinah in Hebrew. The feminine side of Divine self-expression (the essence of Divinity of course has no gender or corporal qualities) receives from the expression of the masculine, transcendent aspect. All of the infinition and growth production of the earth is thus also the Divine emanating from within rather than coming from without. Practically this means that there is also Divinity expressed within me, with each of us, and with Creation as a whole.

If we are speaking of wave-particle duality then we should come to see the qualities of the wave (transcendent reality) within the particle (immanent reality). And we now do! In the strangeness of the quantum universe, even single atoms can now be demonstrated to be entangled within themselves. Single particles even can ‘interfere with themselves.’ We can find the ‘outside’ starting from the ‘inside.’ We can have the dry land (particles) define water (waves).

Highlighting one of the most salient verses in Yirmeyahu/Jeremiah (31:21)“…for God has created something new in the earth: a woman will court [literally ‘surround’] a man,” the Tzemach Tzedek binds together the remaining pieces of this puzzle and points the way to the most radical feminism in the sense of new materialism (remember: matter/mother both come from mater in Latin). The complete critique of the old ‘classical’ view of materiality is accomplished with the advent of quantum physics. The mysteries unveiled by this most perplexing set of scientific descriptions, theories and formula wrestle what used to matter about matter to the ground (literally). The infinite carries over into the finite with the de-solidification and dematerialization of matter itself.  No more billiard ball particles with precise orbits and fixed qualities. The earth, as we stated earlier in our series, is suspended on the water (the material on the immaterial, the physical on a plane of information). It from Bit.

The ‘woman’ of the above verse joins a long list of supplemental signifiers: dry land (physical macroscopic), particles (microscopic), atoms, molecules and cells (mesoscopic), created beings (universal), the Jewish people (particular), the dimension of the plain meaning or pshat of the Torah (hermeneutic) and on and on. When the verse states that God (Havayah which means God as Being or Reality) will innovate within the earth, within materiality, it is suggesting that we will gain a new material ontology.

Normally the earth needs the water supply to come to it. The stability of the earth, the fixture of matter, seems to remain motionless until the water activates it. This would be like God (the proverbial ‘Husband’ in Song of Songs) trying to interest the people, or created beings in a relationship (we might even think of it as a relationship between Being and beings or the Ontological [Onto-theological] and the ontic).

Chronicling socio-cultural old school courtship, we see that the man would ask the woman for a date, for her hand in marriage etc…She could either accept or refuse. On the meta-historical level, this parallels God trying to get us to notice Him and to be interested in dating and marriage (i.e. a intimate relationship and co-creative partnership). Despite all of the gifts and advances, we still sometimes scorn His love. Deep down however, Kabbalah maintains it is the greatest wish of the Creator that we should come to the point of seeking to pursue Him. This would be like a proactive woman asking a man out or making the marriage proposal (which thankfully are becoming acceptable social trends today which should spill over into becoming amplified spiritual trends as well).

The ascendancy of the feminine (and the supplemental chain of signifiers that go with it such as: the Divine presence, or the inner resources within the earth, the particle, the plain meaning of the text) can in and of themselves generate limitless growth. The new materiality that we are starting to bear witness to already proves this. Besides the general question of autopoiesis, the ‘woman who courts the man’ or who ‘surrounds’ the man, is the elevation of the place of Divine immanence or the raising up of the ‘Shekhinah from the dust’ (the wave reality from the ‘dust’ as particle reality). This phenomenon repeats itself across multiple scales as well.

Biologically autopoiesis takes place in living systems such as biological cells. Of these, we have found recently that embryonic stem cells have the capacity to form into sperm or eggs. Consequently a research team at Kyoto University was able to create mice from sperm that were for the most part formed from these stem cells in a petri dish. Imagine the implication for infertile couples: have no viable eggs or sperm? No problem. We may be able to make some from your stem cells. The pluripotent stem cell would then resemble the probability wave in the quantum system, while the tissue specific cells would correspond to the particle. That the tissue specific cell (particle, dry land, etc.) can now be turned into virtually any cell type in the body suggests that the feminine (earth) can surround, in the sense of being the overarching cause (seba or ‘cause’ in Hebrew stems from sovev ‘to surround’) of the water, which brings about the growth of all of the difference cell types and perhaps the entire creature.

In agriculture, this would be like a self-fertilizing, self-seeding crop. The natural world already does this. As a bio system, the ecology of plants and trees has its own means of circulating its seeds and finding sources of nourishment without our direct involvement or interference. All of our technology strives to mimic this.

In business, the watering could be likened to the outside investor who is transcendent in the sense that this person has the means of funding what I, as an enterprising entrepreneur, cannot fund. So waiting for the courtship of the ‘masculine’ role player in the entertainment industry would be like a musician or filmmaker who is stuck, unable to record an album or shoot a film without a major studio backing them. Now in the dematerialized digital age, these tools have been handed over to the people of earth.

For almost nothing, a person can for the first time be a DIY (Do it yourself) builder or creator in a myriad of ways. We can self publish rather that hoping for that big break from a major publisher. We can record and sell of music on iTunes for what amounts to pennies on the dollar compared with just a few years ago. Filmmakers can appeal to micro financing sits like Indiegogo to realize projects that would have never gotten off the ground before. Innovation is now increasingly being driven from the bottom up, from the grass roots, from the earth herself. Even the reprogramming of matter is transforming matter (the earth) into smart matter, giving birth to a host of novel materials with properties of self-assembly and self-healing (just check out the news in the nanotechnology sphere!).

The new and boundless creatively that reality has shown us from within the earth–within the inspiration that resides in each and everyone of us–is just now starting to sprout to the surface. Matter matters more than ever…even if it will never be the same.

 http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/new-earth-gathered-waters-physics-and-kabbalah-part-4/ 

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/new-earth-gathered-waters-physics-and-kabbalah-part-1/

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