philosophy

Why I’m Pretty Sure I Don’t Exist

or several different which-ways at once

Photo by Wisnu Amaludin on Unsplash

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The more I study word origins, and the more I find out about physics, and the more I learn about spirituality, the more I question my very own existence. You may think I’m kidding or exaggerating, but I’m not. Or, more accurately, I am and I’m not, both at the same time. (You’ll see what I mean by that last when we get to the physics part.)

There are many different things about reality that convince me of this, but since space and time are limited (‘haha’ to you, Mr. Einstein), at least in this instance, I’ll confine myself to three. The three I already mentioned: semantics, physical sciences, and spiritual belief systems.

We’ll start with the easy one first. Spirituality.

I am not a particularly religious person. I have no animosity toward the need that some people feel for religion. I just don’t feel it myself. At least, not most of the time.

Don’t get me wrong. I love religious ritual. I was at one time the Senior Warden for an American Episcopal congregation that no longer exists. (And the fact that it no longer exists has nothing to do with my having been a Senior Warden there!) But ritual is mostly just ‘pleasant’ for me, not actually in any deep sense spiritual. In other words, it’s fun. And as an OCD person, I ritualize everything I do anyway.

But I’ve always had a sort of vague yearning to find a belief system that I could subscribe to. I knew it wasn’t Christianity or Judaism. I’d tried both, and found them wanting. Or, rather, found myself wanting something more than they offered.

Buddhism came closer. Something about the way it shied away from deity worship felt right. And the rituals were appealing. But, again, there was something not there that I needed. Or at least thought I did.

So I kept looking. At one time, when I was in my mid-thirties, I thought for a time I had found the answer. It wasn’t religious at all! Nor even in any conventional sense spiritual. It was the concept of ‘Quality,’ as outlined in the writings of Robert Pirsig, especially in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I knew he was ‘onto’ something, and that it was both true and profound.

And yet.

And yet, it was too facile. Too easy. So I kept on.

And then I found it. For me, the famous Dao De Jing, by Lao Tsu (or Laotse, if you prefer) offered everything I needed, especially in the translation (actually more a re-telling) by Ursula LeGuin. Not that I could tell you what it says, or even truly understand it myself, but, to the extent I do understand it, the messages it contains say what I need to hear. And I fully believe that the vast portions I have not come yet to comprehend are just as essential to me as the parts I more or less ‘get.’

In other words, it just feels right.

But one of the things it says, over and over again, is that I am merely one tiny component in a universe of basically incomprehensible ideas that govern the way things work but which are so far beyond our capability to understand as to make the idea laughable.

In other words, in any sense of the word ‘existence’ that I am capable of using or thinking about, I don’t.

Which brings us to the second aspect. Semantics.

I am really hooked on what words mean. I love words. (Almost as much as I love music.) Most of all, I love finding out where they came from. And the farther back I go in searching their origins, the better I like what I find out.

The word ‘exist’ came to us by way of Latin, as so many words have done. And the Latin, as almost always, came from Indo-Proto-European. If you dig far enough, you learn that there’s one letter missing in the way we currently spell it. It’s really ‘ex-sist.’ But that’s too hard to say, so we have shortened both the pronunciation and the spelling.

To ‘sist’ means to ‘stand.’

When I ‘insist’ on something, it means that I am standing up for what I believe in.

To ‘desist’ is to quit doing something. That is, to refuse to remain standing.

And ‘ex’ means ‘out.’

In other words, to ‘exist’ (or ex-sist), I must stand out, or be ‘outstanding.’

And I’m simply not. I don’t.

I’m sure you’ve heard the joke about the stationary farmer: Why did he win the award? Because he was out standing in his field.

I’ve told elsewhere about being at a pseudo-military medical training camp for two weeks at age 16, where, when we were arranged by height, I was number 51 out of a group of 101 ‘cadets.’ Exactly fifty guys to my left in the line, and exactly fifty to my right. Which is where I have always been. Right in the middle.

While I have always gotten above average grades in school, and received below average wages no matter where I worked, and been considerably less than average in popularity, the fact is that I never stand out, not to one extreme, nor to another. In any roomful of people, I am the least noticeable. In a lineup of public speakers, I am the one whose words the fewest listeners can remember afterwards.

I have never truly failed at anything, and I have never truly excelled at anything. If the word ‘exist’ means to be outstanding, then I don’t exist.

Which brings us to the hard one: the science of existence.

Back in 1926, a man named Paul Dirac came up with the notion of discrete packets of everything in the universe. He also invented the word ‘quantum’ to describe the concept. As I’m sure you know, that idea has since swept through physics to the point where it is now the basis of our understanding of everything. A ‘quantum’ is the smallest subdivision of any substance or force that still retains the characteristics of that substance or force. If you get any smaller, you lose the characteristics.

An electron is the smallest ‘particle’ that contains the properties of being a particle and which also carries a particular electrical ‘charge.’

A photon is the smallest massless particle of what we call ‘light.’

A gluon is the smallest unit of force that is capable of helping to hold an atom together. (Without gluons, the nucleus of any atom other than hydrogen would fly apart, because it consists of particles which repel each other. And the reason that’s not true of hydrogen is that a hydrogen nucleus has only one particle.)

But there’s a catch. (There’s always a catch.) Electrons and photons are not actually particles. And gluons are not actually waves. (A wave is a transmission of energy or force.) They’re all three both. Both at the same time. Or, rather (and this one is a bit mind-boggling), they’re things that have the capability of being either one or the other but haven’t decided which yet. Physicists have invented a word for this. The word is ‘potentialities.’ A photon is a ‘potentiality’ which can behave as either a particle or as a wave, but doesn’t decide which one it’s going to be till you observe it. If you observe it by trying to figure out where it is, it becomes a particle. If you observe it by trying to figure out what it’s doing, it becomes a wave. It’s no longer both. In fact, it never was. It was a ‘potentiality’ capable of being one or the other (not both at the same time), and your looking at it made it decide which to be.

There’s a once-famous (but no longer well-known at all) motion picture called Every Which Way but Loose, starring Clint Eastwood and an orangutan named Clyde. (I have a special affection for Clyde. His first name is the same as my middle one.)

The title combines two American idioms. ‘Every Which Way’ means in every possible way. ‘But loose’ means ‘refusing to give up.’

An electron is willing to become just about anything you want it to be, but it won’t give up being a potentiality either. It only becomes something that you can define as a ‘thing’ when you force it to. In fact, the true situation is this: There’s really no such thing as either a particle or a wave of energy. Those are just words we’ve invented to describe things as we think we see them. The potentiality doesn’t actually become anything. What happens is we change the way we look at things, and that change is reflected in what we think we see. If we invent a nice easy word for ‘potentiality,’ maybe Potly, it might make things easier.

We go looking for ‘things,’ because we think we see things. And we go looking for energy, because we see things happening and want to know why. But there are no things, and there are no energies, and, most of all, there is no ‘happening.’ There is just Potlies.

I’m made of matter. Matter is made of molecules. Molecules are made of atoms. Atoms are made of potentialities. Potlies. And they don’t exist either. We’ve only imagined them.

Reality is not a thing. Reality is a set of possibilities. As a few eastern religions have said, reality is an illusion. Reality does not exist.

I do not exist.