The Particle and the Wave

“Mystery is not something that you cannot understand—it is something you can endlessly understand. — Richard Rohr

Our lives are suffused with duality.

Black and white. Mind and body. Ones and zeroes. Knowing and feeling.

Our brains seem wired to make sense of the world through contrast. But modern science and ancient spiritual traditions agree on something deeper: that what looks like duality is, in fact, unity.

In quantum physics, the famous double-slit experiment revealed that light behaves both as a wave and as a particle. What we observe becomes what is. But before that moment of observation, everything exists as possibility—a wave of potential.

I think of the point as the ego and the wave as the soul. 

This is the paradox of life. We live in the point—the tangible, observable, measurable reality of our everyday lives.

But beneath that surface is the wave—a field of connection, energy, and limitless potential. The part of life we feel, but cannot grasp.

Our modern culture, especially in the West, has trained us to live entirely in the ego. To achieve. To do. To control. To know. 

The wave is “woo woo.” It’s mysterious. There’s no place for it in science, business, academia. So it’s brushed aside and dismissed. 

But forgetting comes at a cost.

We feel the cost in the anxiety of constant achievement. In the suffering of disconnection.

In the ache of a life that is full on the outside but hollow within.

The Culture of Achievement

Lisa Miller PhD, author of the The Awakened Brain, calls this state "achieving awareness"—a mental mode in which we believe our purpose is to control, win, and secure.

It uses one part of the brain. And when overused, it leads to burnout, anxiety, depression, and craving.

It is how we have been trained to live.

And yet, as Miller's research shows, we are built for more.

When people tap into spirituality—whether through nature, music, meditation, or prayer—different brain networks light up. We enter an "awakened awareness" in which we feel connected, held, and alive.

Achievement is not the enemy. But when it crowds out awareness, we suffer.

Reconnecting the Pathways of Mystery

There is a kind of intelligence far older than ours, present in every tree, in every tide, in every breath. Our ancestors honored this wisdom. 

We’ve all felt it. A glimpse behind the curtain. When we “escape” everyday. When we look at the stars. When we see the sunrise.

We feel an expansiveness, a lightness, a blurring of the lines that separate us. 

Stop for a moment reading this and remember that experience. Close your eyes and reconnect to that feeling. 

Dr. Miller conducted an experiment of people doing that. And she saw, for the first time ever in science, the same neural networks lighting up across all the subjects.  

She writes “The ventral attention network is where we see that the world is alive and talking to us. The frontal temporal network is where we feel the warm, loving embrace of others and life itself, and the parietal lobe is where we know that we matter, we belong and are never alone.”

This is the network that is offline when chasing achievement and control. When our focus is exclusively “How can I get and keep what I want?”  

In re-discovering her work this week, I couldn’t help but think of my kids.

Their generation is growing up inside an experiment we don’t fully understand. Screens, engineered to capture attention and deliver reward, are hijacking their still-developing neural circuits.

The very networks that Miller shows are cultivated by spiritual experience—connection, belonging, awe—are instead being rewired for achievement, comparison, and craving.

I’m used to trying to limit their screen time through control. But now, I see my role as something deeper: to reintroduce mystery. To ask questions that plant seeds of wonder.

I can’t force those seeds to grow. But I can nurture the soil.

The Obstacle is the Way

Suffering is not a detour from life. It is a portal into it.

We all want to protect ourselves and our children from it but it’s inevitable. And necessary. 

Miller's work was so resonant because she described deeply personal bouts of her own suffering. Periods of winter depression in adolescence and a harrowing journey through infertility.

Her spiritual experiences in the midst of these hardships led to, and are infused, in her scientific work. 

That work has now been validated with neuroscience that spirituality can act as a shield to the inevitable suffering in life.

As my own kids enter adolescence, a period of heightened vulnerability to depression,  especially in this digital age, I am buoyed by my own experience. 

I came to a sense of deeper connection through meditation.

I started meditating as a practical matter because it was supposed to be good for stress, which was a potential cause of the autoimmune condition, psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis,  I experienced for the first time in my 30’s. 

Then my son had his first seizure as a baby, and my world fell apart. 

But over time, that rupture opened me. It awakened me. 

Interestingly, up until he had seizures I was just looking for a non-pharmaceutical antidote to this stupid red skin on my elbow and pain in my finger joint.

I had been trying to meditate. An it was hard!

Then I learned Transcendental Meditation (TM) and realized that you don’t have to try. You just breathe and observe your thoughts. Over and over. That’s why they call it a practice. 

And literally overnight, I began to access something deeper inside of me. A seed of calm was planted in my mind that continues to expand through daily practice 13 years later. 

Suffering reminds us we are not in control. And when I accepted that and let go of the constant need to try, I was able to reconnect.  

I discovered what is true for all of us.

That we are capable of incredible resilience. That love, not knowledge, is what carries us through.

The Invitation to Remember

Our minds are like a filter or valve. Most days we receive a trickle of cosmic consciousness. Just enough not to overwhelm us.

But once in a while, that filter opens a bit wider. The wave rushes in.

And for a moment, we remember.

This is the paradox of life: we are both the point and the wave.

We are here to do. And we are here to be.

We are here to grow. And we are here to remember.

In a world obsessed with the material, the measurable, the certain—we need to reclaim our connection to the mystery. To the infinite field of potential within us and around us.

You don’t have to know how. You don’t have to earn it. You only have to become aware of it.

Close your eyes. Listen to your breath. Feel the hum of life inside you.

This is the wave. This is the connection to the field of energy coursing beyond our awareness at all times.

We are never alone even in our darkest moments. 

Remember that spark is always lit inside you. This is our shield to use when suffering visits us. 

This is our gift to offer others when they are in need. Each in our own unique way. 

We’re here to spread that light. 

-CoachKris

P.S. In both a sign of synchronicity, and that I buy too many books, i rediscovered Lisa Miller’s The Awakened Brain this week.

I bought her book in February of this year and threw it my bag Friday as I took my youngest daughter to a gymnastics meet a few hours away.

A few chapters in (gymnastics meets are looong), i kept thinking I had heard the stories before. I had. When I bough the book on audible two years ago.

This time the subject matter dovetailed perfectly into where my head has been lately, specifically in the connection of the quantum world, potential and spirituality. I laughed out loud as I listened to the audio version on the way back and she went into detail on the basics of quantum science that helped inspire this week’s column.

I’d highly reccomened the book but this is a solid cliffnotes of the key takeaways.