The Zero State
And why you have to unsee it to believe it
We ought to let go of this annoyingly limiting, empirically-grounded idea that whatever we see doesn’t exist.
While we acknowledge that we only see a sliver of world that’s actually around us, we often attribute this to contexts beyond our understanding — say, cosmology or quantum physics. In so doing, we tend to write the bigger picture off as something we can’t know, so we shouldn’t necessarily bother to try in the first place.
But, like it or not, incorporating a casual fixation on such mind-boggling ideas could stand to benefit us in ways we’d never otherwise imagine.
Maybe it’s not that we should know but that we should try to know.
When electromagnetism was first discovered, paradigms melted away in terms of how we really interact with out world.
Forget about the practical uses that sparked inventions like the light bulb or radio technology and consider, instead, the way that we redefined our own place in the universe in the midst of uncovering this strange new force of nature.
New ideations spiraled out from the center of this discovery — abstract notions of attraction and repulsion, of what energizes the human body and how it exists amidst the other forces around it, of how matter…
