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The Dance of Shiva and
the Birth of Realistic Illusion, Maya by the Druid Finn Human
beings have always sensed that the world is not as solid as it looks. Long
before particle accelerators and quantum field equations, the ancient Indian
seers intuited that what we call reality arises from motion, rhythm, and play
(as confined random interaction). They named it the Dance of Shiva: an
endless cosmic choreography of energy quanta, giving rise to Maya’s Lila
— the grand highly realistic illusion in which fleeting patterns appear as
identifiable realities, such stones, rivers, stars, and bodies. Modern
physics, stripped of its jargon, tells a story remarkably similar. Let us
explore this correspondence. 1. Energy as Quanta of Strike At the
foundation are not objects (meaning complex logic sets) but (random) acts
— tiny jolts of momentum, flashes of contact. A photon, the minimum
energy quantum, is such a jolt. It carries no colour, no shape, no substance
— just a packet of action prior to identity and realness (Sanskrit: nirguna) the latter being imposed during
observation. On its own it comes and goes like a firefly. The
ancients might have said: a single beat of Shiva’s drum. 2. The Meeting of Two: Rhythm Emerges One beat
is nothing unless it meets another. When two excited photons or quanta
interact, they can lock and dance together, as in a tango. Modern
physics calls this entanglement. Instead of two solitary beats, there
is a combined rhythm, a complex pattern: a joint act. The
ancients Indians saw this as the first steps of the cosmic dance: Shiva’s
feet striking in rhythm, generating form (i.e. identity) from formless
(i.e. without attributes) motion (meaning chaos). Example: In the
lab, two photons born (@c) together in a crystal (mass of quanta) are
entangled — their energies and directions are linked. Neither exists as a
lone dancer (@c) anymore; they move as one, albeit slower (due to mutual
inertia). 3. Clustering: From Rhythm to Structure More
beats (quanta) join the (square) dance. Then three, four, hundreds, billions
join the dance, alone and in groups. As the troupe grows, the dance slows,
becomes more stable, less fleeting, random. The rhythm is no longer pure
(imagined by an observer) light = energy quanta; it condenses into clusters
of energy packets excitations. The base
everyday level of observation these clusters are what we call particles.
They are not tiny pebbles of matter, but stable dances of many simple and
complex quanta locked, vibrating together. Example: Protons
and neutrons are made of quarks, which themselves are energy quanta
excitations bound (confined) in such tight rhythms that they never appear
alone. An atom of hydrogen is a dance between one proton and one electron,
circling each other in measured steps, idem the constituent aggregates of the
proton and the electron. In the
Indian image, this is the circle of Shiva’s dance, not a chaos but a
choreography that repeats, creating emergence, identifiability, realness AND
continuance (meaning survival). 4. Hardware Emerges: The Lila of Maya As these
stable dances grow, they intertwin, assemble into more complex effects.
Hydrogen becomes water; water becomes clouds and oceans; matter forms
mountains and bodies. What began as an initiating quantum strike, meaning a contact, now, repeated zillions of times per
second, appears to us as solid cognizable, albeit transient hardware. Yet this
solidity is only apparent. Each stone or hand is nothing but a lattice of
bound energy quanta, a quantum of mass-become matter, vibrating in the
overall unison of individual nested excitation emergents.
What we call real is simply what impacts strongest and continuously
to be useful in the play of life, meaning survival. This is
precisely Maya’s Lila — the cosmic play of realistic illusion. Not
illusion in the sense of falsehood, but in the sense that what appears solid
is actually rhythmic energy excitations. Example: A chair
looks firm. But probe deeper: it is atoms. Probe atoms: they are clusters of
quanta. Probe quanta: they are discrete acts of energy. The chair is Shiva’s
dance frozen just long enough to sit upon. 5. Why the Dance Never seems to End, but eventually
does At every
level, the same story repeats. Random (unidentifiable) quanta →
entangled pairs → clusters → stable matter → (identifiable)
living beings → random (unidentifiable) quanta. Each stage is nothing
more than a transient dance upon transient dance, momentary rhythm upon
momentary rhythm repeated to give the illusion of continuance. The
ancient vision was uncannily accurate. Shiva’s dance is the ongoing
play of energy quanta. Maya’s Lila is the world as we experience it:
fleeting patterns (represented in personal analogue) mistaken for lasting
things. Modern
physics gives the same account in different terms. Where the seers spoke of
gods, today’s physicists speak of fields and quanta. But the story is the
same: what we touch as “real” is a temporary choreography in the vast
ballroom of the vacuum, possibly an energy quantum condensate at rest. Conclusion So how
does the identifiable real
(meaning hardware) world
arise? Not from bricks of substance, but from entangled dances
(excitations) of colliding energy quanta. A photon is a beat;
entanglement is a step; clustering is a choreography; matter is the grand
performance stilled (meaning reified) by the observer as seemingly lasting
(denied by the Buddha) identifiable reality. The
ancients called it Shiva’s
Dance and Maya’s
Lila. We call it physics (indeed, nature). Both descriptions remind
us: what appears solid is, at its heart, random quanta interaction (i.e.
play) confined within rules. You are not
experiencing reality – you are running it Consciousness as simulation (1) Consciousness as
simulation (2) |