(A meditation.)

In my essay An Alternative Cosmology, I wrote about virtual fermions, such as electrons, positrons, and quarks, which may be responsible for the accelerated expansion of the universe which has been observed.

What about virtual photons and other bosons? These too are popping in and out of the “vacuum”, like transient sparks. According to A.G. Cairns-smith (“Secrets of the Mind”), consciousness may be due to a cloud of virtual photons surrounding the discharges of some communicating neurons in the brain. It’s only a guess, of course, but an inspired and inspiring one. Photons, like other bosons, are particles of force (in the case of photons, of electromagnetic force), not particles of matter. “May the Force be with us…” (Star Wars.) “Let there be light…” God’s Word (Logos) in creation.

Virtual photons, representing thought, feeling, and freewill, are short-lived; photons of (physical) light are “real”, which means long-lived. These represent the mental and the material world, respectively – mind and matter.

But mind may be short-lived (some psychologists think that conscious experience is “spotty”, not continuous, like the saccades of the eye) only in the material-biological world, where time flows regardless of anything we may do. According to the theory of special relativity, time is a dimension of the space-time continuum, but different from the three dimensions of space, because it is imaginary (expressed as ict, where i is the imaginary unit, the square root of minus one). In space-like time (eternity, or ct), this is reversed: the mind is long-lived (real) and matter is short-lived (virtual).

The long-lived eternal Mind is God (En Sof). But It manifests also in the material realm, where It is immanent, while in the eternal realm It is transcendent. (I say “It”, because the Godhead has no gender, En Sof is pure spirit.) En Sof manifests in the material world through the Parzufs or Emanations.

We are sparks (virtual light particles) of the divine essence (Ousis). (Sparks as virtual photons, Ousis as real photons – genuine Light.) Ousis may be the actual genuine quint-essence, the fifth force of nature proposed for the new cosmological theories of the material universe, and the fifth “essence” assumed in my scheme (see the essay “The Three Essences”): matter, energy, information, and meaning.

El Kether (the top Parzuf, a symbolic hair from En Sof’s symbolic forehead) is the mediator between the eternal world of Mind (Spirit) and the temporal world of (physical) Matter. There may be multiple EI Kethers, one for each of the multiple universes. En Sof certainly has enough hairs on Its (symbolic) (God)head to supply all the universes.

The two worlds (eternal/spiritual and temporal/material) interpenetrate, like Avalon and Glastonbury in the legends of King Arthur. (See “The Mists of Avalon” by Marion Zimmer Bradley). We reach through the worlds for the Holy Grail of Eternity like Galahad, in the process dying in the physical world. Galahad the pure one was the son of a virgin (Elaine) (but not a virgin birth) and the super-knight Lancelot, the son of Viviane, the Lady of Avalon. (“Lady” as the female synonym of “Lord”, a semi-goddess.)

Lancelot loved Guinevere, a creature of Glastonbury. He SHOULD have loved Morgan, the intended successor of Viviane, but also the Great Whore and a Witch, the originator of Evil – mother of Mordred, who destroyed Camelot, and was born of an incestuous union of Morgan with her half-brother King Arthur. (But Viviane had arranged it, in a clairvoyant vision of the future.)

I want to fuse Avalon Druidism with Kabbalah Judaism, with elements of Hinduism (especially the Dance of Shiva and the Evil-for-the-greater-Good of Kali) , Taoism (the eternal flow of Nature from Ousis to Gaia), and Christianity (with its message of divine and human nonviolence). The confluence of the world religions (and of religion and science) is more than the peaceful coexistence of two or more incompatible solitudes, but an interpenetration of worlds, like the superposition of quantum states, of particles and waves, of Bohm’s enfoldment and unfoldment. It is what bosons do. It is like Buddha’s Enlightenment, in which the virtual photons of consciousness turned into the steady Light of Eternity.