Traveling Light

No, those aren’t sperm. That’s a NASA graphic illustrating two photons traveling through the froth of spacetime. It’s a science fantasy.

Light doesn’t actually travel. The motion of light is a deep illusion for us. We exist in the phenomenal world of time. But light has no rest mass – and no time.

From the pov of a photon, neither time nor distance exist. Strange as it sounds, a photon arrives instantaneously at its destination.

Photons reaching Earth tonight from galaxies 10 billion light years away departed before our planet and sun had formed – and yet arrive instantly!

You can see in this video clip how photons behave very differently from particles of matter.

We are made of matter. We see light but only by destroying it. Photons absorbed by our retinas initiate a cascade of chemical reactions we call seeing.

The strange reality of light surrounds and touches us, but we never enter it. We exist exclusively in the unknown dream of our physical bodies.

The distance to which light moves away from us is the space of our human identity. We measure time and distance by the timeless action of light.

The act of seeing, which we so routinely take for granted, brings us into contact with a reality that transcends us. Right before our eyes is the luminous mystery of our being human.

At the instant of creation, in the first moment of the Big Bang, everything was light. Why did all this energy rush out into the cold and profound darkness of space?

Why did light cool to matter – and become us?

Wigner’s Friend is silent. No comments about the origin of the Big Bang. Whatever core elements in the psyche script our dreams has nothing to say here about our origin as light.

The distance to which WF moves away from us is the space of our human dream.