Quantum physics had its 100th anniversary -- and do we know what it actually means any more than 100 years ago? Open question for sure. But part of this exploration is actually inquiring into the effects that a scientific story, scientific knowledge, scientific models have on us. Master Park, who is a physicist as well as a Tai Chi master, always says physics is a story. And so this is not to be dismissive at all of physics to say that. But sometimes physics tends to have this -- and we've kind of danced around this -- a kind of authority that people either buy into or push against. Like there's this sense that physics has it, it is it, right? That physics gives us some way of saying: this, objectively, is what is real. And Master Park talks about how 'objective' really just means it's easier for us to agree. But we're still not touching in on the terrain. Still not.

This session uses the classic double slit experiment -- one of those things about quantum that blows people's minds, progressing through the strangeness of what this fundamental layer might be like. A beam of electrons through two slits creates not the pattern you'd expect from billiard balls -- two clusters right opposite each slit -- but the diffraction interference pattern you'd expect from a wave. And yet each electron arrives as a single ping of detection. One of the ways we torture ourselves is: well, how does it know about the other slit? How does it know?

One possibility we can play with is that quantum -- the 'it's not a particle, not a wave' stuff -- kind of gives us a map in a way. And the map itself is saying: this is not it. It's almost like a transparent map. Where it's like, oh, there's something here, and you kind of see through it to something else, where you know there's something else. Physics is giving us permission, in a way. We don't have to use our imagination. It's an experiment that can be replicated. But the map itself can't say what that layer underneath is...

What is it about quantum that lets us feel like physics gives us permission to view stuff as not just plain old mechanical stuff? One of the limitations that comes up in a body-centered practice is that we can have associations with the body as, you know, "it's just the body" -- and that blocks our fuller feeling of the magic of being a human being. As physicist and tai chi master Wonchull Park says, the map is not the terrain -- but we can use our maps to open more to the terrain as it actually is.

We move from the playfully imaginative through to some genuinely strange territory in physics, and arrive somewhere more ordinary and more immediate. But there's a question underneath it all that's worth sitting with: what is it that's actually shifting when we try on a new story about what we're made of? Is it the physics picture? Or is it a letting go of what we usually tell ourselves? Or some of both?

These six sessions explore that question from the inside out -- using maps, yes, and also learning to see through them, fall through them, and arrive at something that doesn't need a story to justify it. The mystery, it turns out, was never in danger. It's always untouched.

In these six explorations, each with an hour-long guided body-centered practice at its heart, we'll see what it might be like to peel back some of that "oh, I know my physical body, it's just stuff" -- to open to a richness that's already there, beneath what we think we know. No stamp of approval needed from any authority. Permission inherently granted.

Thank you for Being with Being.

beingwithbeing.org