The Subtle Relationship Between the Mind and the Physical World

Matter and energy move through space and time in a straight line, always departing and arriving from one place to another. This places a limitation on them; energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only pushed around. The mind, on the other hand, is recursive-- it draws from itself.

A physical object can only be the sum of its parts. If I cut down ten trees to build a cabin, the cabin I build will contain those ten trees, and therefore be equal to the sum of them-- in terms of physical mass. I didn’t make the trees disappear, I transformed them in to a cabin. A thought, on the other hand, can be built on itself.

I can look at a letter on a page and in that moment the experience of it’s shape and appearance will happen in my mind. This is an experience generated by the limited physical world. I can then go further and think of the name of the letter, or the the sound it makes. These ideas did come from the physical world in the form of sounds that other people made, but those sound waves aren’t currently traveling through the air-- that energy is being used for something else right now. The thought simply appears-- as if from a limitless supply. The mind is not conserved the same way energy is.

This limitless potential, which manifests in the mind, could be called the spirit. The limitless potential is the reason that there is something here, rather than nothing. This is the nature of the world in which the smaller (i.e. limited) physical world occurs.

Think of spirit like a river flowing from an infinite spring, and the physical world like its inert rocky bed. The shape on the surface of the water with its waves, swirling vortexes, and eddies, is formed by the shape of the rocks beneath it. At the same time those rocks are being washed away and reshaped by the same river they are helping to shape.

Now consider that the river, which is infinite, is constantly wearing away at the rocky bed. In a way the rocks are like a river themselves, always flowing, because of the energy imbued to them by the water. In this way it could be said that the rocks are limitless, because the source of their movement is infinite.

The river and its bed are utterly dependent on each other for their shape, and the potential of each to flow is limitless. The difference between the river and its bed is not a difference of type but a difference of degree.